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Born in Badim (Monção) on 7 March, 1945. Studied piano (diploma 1974) and composition at the Music Conservatories of Oporto and Braga. In Holland, where he lived from 1974 to 1988, he took the higher composition course (instrumental and electoacoustic) at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. He followed courses in electroacoustic music at the Computer Music Centre of the University of Columbia (NY). He has attended courses and workshops with Emmanuel Nunes, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis. He is currently Professor of Composition in the Department of Arts of the University of Évora. In S. Miguel de Machede (Alentejo), where he lives in isolation, in communion with nature, he spoke of his artistic activity in the following terms:
“My way of playing piano, of composing, has to do with a particular attitude which is no longer a “classical” attitude, but a mixture of different attitudes which relate to different musical genres. (…) But the root — the strength of the contours of plainchant, of simplicity, of austerity, of the unison, of the non-polyphonic — is always there. The romantic component of my sensibility, inheritance from another system of learning, strongly harmonic — of a full, rich harmony — became gradually increasingly rarefied. (…) The total silence of the place where I lived contributed to this, the nakedness, the spareness of the landscape… a certain way, imbued with silence, of understanding things. (…) I have a filmic way of composing. When composing, I work with images; normally, intuitively, instinctively.”
[Amílcar Vasques Dias, July 2003]