Composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Josué Parrilla’s music always has a vividly visual, imaginative character. It tells stories and takes you places.
Introduced to music at a very young age by his father, a classical guitarist, he started to play percussion at 7 years old, focusing later on saxophone, flutes, and then keyboards; performing, recording, and touring professionally, as well as working as a producer.
He was the producer of the EP “Calendario de la Espera”(artist Beca Perfecto), where he was also co-writer and arranger of all songs. As a performer, during more than 10 years Josué was the keyboardist for prolific Reggae/World fusion band from Puerto Rico, Millo Torres y el Tercer Planeta, touring with the band and recording keyboards, melodica, and flute in acclaimed albums “Masa con Masa”and “Sol”.
Nowadays, Josué Parrilla focuses on his own music as as solo artist as well as on composing and producing music for film and interactive media, and he has received awards at various international songwriting and film scoring competitions (Montreal International Film Scoring Competition, Oticons Faculty International Film Scoring Competition, International Songwriting Competition, and John Lennon Songwriting Competition). Josué was one of the composers for “Lifetime: A PAC-MAN Story”, a short film commissioned by NAMCO in commemoration of PAC-MAN’s 38th anniversary. Today he works on a diverse array of music creation and production projects as a composer, orchestrator, and producer, in collaboration with creators from around the world. Some clients have included BANDAI NAMCO and Netflix.
He studied both jazz performance and classical composition at the University of North Texas, where as a composer he worked mainly on experimental electro acoustic music. Coming from a background of mainly tonal, traditional classical music, as well as pop and rock, the radical musical environment and the ideas about music and the meaning of sound that he was exposed to at UNT forever changed his perspective and approach to composing. An interest on the nature of sound and working with timbral elements as an essential tool to tell stories was forged in him. He started to conceive his music from a perspective that he refers to as “sound stories”. At the University of North Texas Josué was the recipient of the UNT Excel Scholarship, as well as the Outstanding Undergraduate in Composition Award. More recently, Josué obtained a Master’s Degree in Scoring for Film, TV, and Video Games from Berklee College of Music, where he was also selected to realize a one-year Fellowship, working on his own creative project entailing ethnomusicological research and the development of a documentary and its music score.
As music educator, Josué has devoted several years to teaching and music curriculum development. He is a founding member of Conservatorio de Artes del Caribe, a Berklee Global Partners School, where he has been a professor for many years, as well as the International Programs Director, creating and coordinating educational programs between various international schools.
Josué was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, later lived in Denton, Texas, and today is based in Valencia, Spain, his hub for collaborating with artists from all over the World.
