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Isabel Soveral studied at the National Conservatory with the composers Jorge Peixinho and Joly Braga Santos with a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. In 1988, she attended the State Faculty of New York, in Stony Brook, where she studied under Daria Semegen and Bulent Arel, with support from the Gulbenkian, Luso-American and Fullbright Foundations in order to complete the University’s master’s and doctoral programmes. During her studies in Stony Brook, she began working with electronic material in her cycle Morphoses, which includes the work Quadramorphosis, for four percussionists and electronics, and the series Anamorphoses, which include a number of pieces with electronics. Her music has been performed in Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Hong Kong, Macao, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and the United States of America. Isabel Soveral currently teaches composition and musical analysis in the Department of Communication and Art at the University of Aveiro.
“(…) I celebrate this year twenty years of career, which is a lot — this makes me think that we really grow very slowly. This cycle of tewnty years has made me think a great deal, has made me think about my first work and analyse what I brought, what it is that is in that first work and is still present in these recent ones. And of course this exercise makes me aware of an evolution, principally technically, intellectually, in that which would influence formal schools, formal work… But in fact this is what I concluded, that we grow very slowly — because writing is a little like learning to know ourselves. And it’s a slow process, a very slow process. And we discover ourselves in our works…”