I am fascinated with the role of the voice in music, and so my experience has been always related to work with it in all fields. The work I do ranges from composing and arranging to producing a landmark recording; from creating compelling compositions to brainstorming new ways to perform vocal jazz; from choral and vocal concerts of highest quality to world-class lecturing and workshops;  from sonic art creation to album production. Welcome to this digital corner to get to know more about how my music world is like.

23JUL25 What a season we had!

As a composer and as a conductor, this season was a blast! After a glowing 2024-2025 season, I’m now uploading my batteries with a well-deserved vacation time, preparing myself for new music and ventures to grab throughout the season 2025-2026: rehearsals will begin shortly after the summer holidays, and all choirs will be  getting ready for their upcoming concerts, which you will take a look in the agenda.

31MAY25 A new take on an old theme, finalist of a composition competition

Inside the small, beautiful Out Katholieke Kerk, in the centre of Delft, the final concert and workshop of the First Composition Competition of the Koorschool Delft took place. That afternoon my G P P Revisited was premiered by the talented young voices of Vox Populist Singers, from Newcastle, UK. G P P Revisited, the latest on my current Revisited series, is a deconstruction and reposition of the first musical sentence of the first part of the Sicut Cervus composed 5 centuries ago by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, hence the acronym in the name of the work.

25APR25 Have you heard my last single yet?

I’ve dropped a new single wherever you stream or download music: a revised version of my own arrangement written for Sies Seis in 2009 for a well-known tune of late Venezuelan composer and arranger Aldemaro Romero, co-founder of the Onda Nueva, a music genre which fuses jazz and Venezuelan folk elements to create a sound full of flavour and color!

The Onda Nueva Project, 1: Carretera. Composed by Aldemaro Romero. Arranged, performed, recorded & mixed by 

Miguel Ángel Santaella. Mastered by Bill Hare.

New music has been published!

I´m happy to announce that Edition Ferrimontana has augmented my available published choral catalog on their brand to 18 works, ranging from avantgarde (and now well-known) arrangements of Venezuelan popular music to wonderful, complex vocal explorations. You can take a look to the overview at the publishers website, and listen to demo renderings of some of them in my works page. 

Across is now available on all streaming platforms!

Across, the latest Jazz venture as a composer, resulting from a composition commission awarded by the Dutch Improvisator's Organisation's 50th anniversary celebrations, is now available as a digital EP with only new jazz music composed for the concerts given in Haarlem and Rotterdam for that occasion. The album captured the virtuosity of the performers gathered for that project, and was recorded live at the LantarenVenster Great Hall on the 30th October 2022.
Five new tunes reflecting on melodic interventions, rhythmical intricacies and a conscious interplay between carefully composed material and improvisatorial efforts are here depicted by what we called the Miguel Ángel Santaella Jazz Ensemble.

Across, a Miguel Ángel Santaella production released by Donemus Records

Miguel is out now!

An amazing sonic trip to a new kind of vocal jazz compositions and performing begins now with this album, a totally solo project where vocal sounds are used on every track not just for creating harmonies or singing melodies, but also to create innovative sound beds and effects, blurring boundaries of what has been done and will be done after this production. This is truly a work of love and craftsmanship. A secret kept hidden from the public until now for your listening pleasure. But be aware! this is not something you're totally familiar with, so don´t get me wrong.  It is vocal jazz, but not the usual way. It is electronic music, but not as you've used to listen to. It is improvised and composed, but not as you might imagine.
The inspiration for the original tracks came mostly from my personal experiences, so you can listen to my expectations when I moved from Venezuela (Simón Díaz' Tonada de Luna Llena) to the Netherlands (Un Caraqueño en Rotterdam), the hype of walking thru the jazziest street of the city (Oude Binnenweg), the short but lasting peace felt when a Buddhist monk opened the door of the Gakwonsa Temple just for me to see the altar (He Opened The Temple For Me), or my synaesthetic experiences while listening to music (Cromofonía 3), and the remembrance of the Aula Magna of the University City in Caracas, my dearest concert hall back there -Las Nubes (de Calder)-. Also, my love for the moving images is present as well with two tracks, L'Arrivée, based on the silent film with the same title created by Peter Tscherkassky, and Cinematicals, based on a short animation film about quest and fantastic worlds yet to be real. There is also an Homage to the classic vocal jazz singing with a slightly asymmetrical arrangement of the quintessential Route 66, the only track of the album with non-vocal sounds applied.

Miguel, available worldwide for streaming and downloading on your preferred platform