Musicatlas
Music
Life
Superior Course in Composition (Conservatório Nacional de Lisboa), in 1986, under supervision of composer Constança Capdeville; PhD in Musicology under the supervision of Horacio Vaggione in Paris VIII, (research subject: “L’Objet Sonore: Situation, Évaluation et Potentialités. Un paradigme pour la création d’outils de composition musicale”), with a scolarship from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia/MCES.
Musical studies started with Albertina Saguer. He followed a degree in Electronics and Telecomunications at Instituto Superior Técnico (1977–1979), the School of Jazz of the Hot Club de Portugal (1979–1980 and 1983–1984), the Musicology degree in the U.N.L. (1984–1985), and has a degree in Computer Programming from Instituto Nacional de Administração (1985–1986). He has also attended seminars and workshops in the branch of computer aided analysis and composition.
Deputy-director of Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa (from 1995 to 2001) he taught there Composition and Electroacoustics (since 1987); Analysis and Techniques in Composition at Escola Profissional de Música de Almada (1991–1995) and at Escola de Música do Conservatório Nacional (1985–1987); Counterpoint in Musicology (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), and presented papers in seminars and congresses (JIM, IPs-Lisbon – 1997, Cuenca — 1991, Essone — 1992, among others). He also taught in some classes and master classes under the subject "New Technologies and Music" (Musicians Union, Projecto Minerva, Diacoma, ESML) since 1988, and also with Escola Superior de Música e das Artes do Espectáculo (ESMAE – IPP) in 1991, 1997 and in 2002.
He was a member of ColecViva, group directed by Constança Capdeville, as direction assistant, sound synthesis and percussion, since 1985. Together with Capdeville he established the group OPUS SIC (Obras Produzidas Utilizando Sons: Sintetizados Instrumentais e Computorizados). Since 1992, he has been collaborating with Grupo Música Nova (dir. Cândido Lima).
The composition of music for cinema and television has a particular relevance in his musical production. The recording studio practice along with significant performance work as a performer, producer and musical director, influenced his compositional path. Another major influence lies in his experience as Sound Assistent in cinema (from recording to foley post production).
His increasing interest in a systematic thoughtful about sound, its correlated strategies of perception, means of production and associated problematics, as well as the reflection on the impact of the new technologies in the musical creation, led him to the conception of a music that can be defined as snapshots taken from a "planet" which corresponds to the totality of the works; thus, in a relationship closer to a systemic approach, a particular work can present materials which may have appeared in other works, or have only a local existence.
This way of looking to the musical material — as snapshots, films, pieces of situations, states of a system — where there is no need to stand upon ideias as the ones of language, narrativity, and others alike, but rather as states of presentification, or even musical contemplations, allowing the coexistence of heterogeneous (and even heterostatics) materials and situations, not only drift of the influence of the cinema and its techniques, but also from electroacoustic music.
Lately, this metaphor becomes more and more formalised appealing to the concept of a work as an interface for a database, and his recent works represents the current state of research on the formulation and application of this concept.