top of page
COMPOSERS
Arthur Barbosa
Arthur Barbosa
Composer, violinist, and arranger, he was born in Fortaleza, Ceará, and began his musical studies at age 12 with Alberto Jaffé. As a violinist, he performed with several orchestras in Brazil and abroad. Currently, he is concertmaster with the Camerata Acadêmica do Mercosul, principal violinist with the Orquestra de Câmara da Universidade Luterana do Brasil, and a member of the Orquestra Sinfônica de Porto Alegre. As a composer, he received instruction from Elieri Moura and Dario Ntaca, but considers himself to be primarily an autodidact. He has a vast experience as an arranger, with several of his works being performed by some of the most important orchestras and chamber ensembles in Brazil, including the Orquestra de Câmara da Paraíba, the Quinteto da Paraíba, the Orquestra de Câmara Sesi-Fundarte, and the Orquestra de Câmara do Teatro São Pedro. His work Caribea for trumpet and string orchestra, premiered in 1999, was hailed by the celebrated French trumpetist André Henry as “a magnificent work, written with a great stylistic refinement of phrases and rhythms, and whose technical brilliance makes it a welcome addition to the trumpet’s repertoire.
Guilherme Bauer
Violinist and composer, he was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1940, where he studied violin with Iolanda Peixoto and Oscar Borgeth. He participated in several chamber ensembles, and was member of the Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra. In 1971 he founded the group Ars Contemporanea which, for seven years, greatly contributed to the dissemination of Brazilian music.
As a composer, Mr. Bauer studied with Claudio Santoro (composition and counterpoint), Esther Scliar (musical analysis) and Guerra Peixe (from 1974 onwards, harmony, counterpoint, fugue, composition and orchestration). He delivered lectures on Brazilian music at the universities of Florida, Miami, and Houston, and was the musical director of two important projects aimed at promoting Brazilian music: the recording of works by more than 50 Brazilian composers on the label Rio Arte Digital, in Rio de Janeiro, and the Série Estréias Brasileiras sponsored by the Centro Cultural do Banco Central, during which, in 1997, 33 works by Brazilian composers were commissioned and performed.
Mr. Bauer teaches composition and orchestration at the Estácio de Sá University (Rio de Janeiro) and organized, in 1998, the Sheet Music Editing Center at the Villa-Lobos Music School in Rio de Janeiro. In the early phase of his compositional career, he adopted the atonal idiom and other styles current at the time, but later he opted for a free style influenced by popular traditions (such as in the String Quartet No. 2). He won eight composition prizes, including the Esso Prize for concert music, an award in the Latin American Competition sponsored by the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), and the Cultura Artística Prize, in São Paulo.
Harry Crowl Jr.
Born in Belo Horizonte in 1958. He studied violin with José de Mattos and musical theory at the Fundação Clóvis Salgado in Belo Horizonte. In 1977 he traveled to the United States, where he studied viola at Westport School of Music and composition with Charles Jones at Juilliard School of Music in New York.
Returning to Brazil in 1980, he performed in the experimental orchestra established by the Funcação Clóvis Salgado, and continued his studies in composition with Rufo Herrera and Willy Correia de Oliveira. Between 1984 and 1994 he resided in Ouro Preto, where he researched the music of the local composers from colonial Brazil. He eventually edited 20 works, foremost among them the discovery of the Overture in D major by Padre João de Deus de Castro Lobo.
He participated of conferences on Brazilian music at the University of Texas (Austin), the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and the Early Music Festival in Utrecht. In 1993 he was awarded a scholarship from the British Council, which allowed him to study composition with the Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe in Dartington. Mr. Crowl’s output comprises more than 60 works, many of which have been performed in several Latin American and European countries.
He teaches Brazilian music, 20th century music, orchestration and composition at the School of Music and Fine Arts of Paraná (EMBAP). He won the Saul Trumpet Award in 1997 for the program “20 Century Music”, as the best radio program in Paraná.
Eduardo Escalante
Composer, conductor, pedagogue, and folklorist. Born in Argentina, he relocated to Brazil in 1949. After graduating in composition and conducting from the Faculdade Santa Marcelina in São Paulo, he continued his musical studies with Emmerich Csammer (orchestral conducting), Diogo Pacheco (choral conducting), Osvaldo Lacerda (harmony, analysis and counterpoint), and Souza Lima and Camargo Guarnieri (composition).
He founded and directed several choral and orchestral groups in Brazil, as well as the Associação de Músicos e Compositores do Estado de São Paulo. In 1973-74, at the request of the Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS), he conducted a thorough investigation of the folk traditions of the Paraíba river region in São Paulo, a work that laid the foundations for important developments in his career as a professor of folklore in many schools and conservatories.
He established a column for classical music at the daily newspaper Folha da Tarde (São Paulo), to which he contributed approximately 250 articles. Escalante has received several composition awards, including the João de Barro trophy as composer of the year (1969), and the São Paulo Association of Art Critics (APCA) award for his Symphony No. 1 as the best symphonic work of 1990. He has published extensively on Brazilian folklore and continues to play an important role in the musical life of Brazil, in his triple capacity as composer, teacher, and conductor.
Camargo Guarnieri
Composer, conductor, and pedagogue. Camargo Guarnieri occupies a central position in the context of Brazilian music. His influence on several generations of nationalist composers is widely acknowledged and can hardly be overestimated.
The universal appeal of his style, which can be felt immediately upon contact with his works, results primarily from his highly personal blending of melodies and rhythms influenced by Brazilian traditions with a musical language of a more cosmopolitan scope. His interest in Brazilian folklore was stirred by Mário de Andrade, the great Brazilian scholar and critic who revitalized the Brazilian traditions through his tireless research around the country. Andrade continued to nurture a particular interest in the career of Guarnieri, a composer whom he saw as a bastion against the diluting influence of European academicism. Even though he remained a devoted nationalist throughout his career, Guarnieri also absorbed European elements during his period of studies in Paris, where he worked with Koechlin. He returned to Brazil at the outbreak of World War II, and shortly thereafter went to the United States on an invitation from the Pan American Union.
Several of his works were performed in New York, and he was awarded a number of prizes, including the first prize of the Philadelphia Free Library Fleischer Music Collection for his Violin Concerto, and a prize from the Chamber Music Guild of Washington, D.C., in 1944, for his second String Quartet. In addition to his importance as a composer, he also had a profound impact on musical education in Brazil, particularly after his return from Europe. He was made a life member on the foundation of the Academia Brasileira de Música in 1945, and in 1960 was appointed director of the Conservatório Dramático e Musical in São Paulo.
As a conductor, he appeared with most of the leading European and American orchestras, and continued to play a leading role in orchestral and choral organizations in Brazil until his death.
Edino Krieger
Born in Brusque, Santa Catarina, in 1928. He began to study violin with his father and was granted a scholarship at age fifteen to study violin at the Conservatório Brasileiro de Música in Rio de Janeiro, where he also initiated his composition studies with Hans-Joachim Koellreutter.
In 1948 he won a contest to study with Aaron Copland at the Berkshire Music Center, and afterward with Peter Mennin at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. In 1952 he had the opportunity to study with Ernst Krenek at the International Summer Course in Teresópolis, Brazil, and in 1955 he received a grant from the British Council that allowed him to study with Lennox Berkeley in London.
Over the years, Krieger has received several prizes, including first prize in the I Concurso Nacional de Composição sponsored by the Ministry of Culture in 1959, the Prêmio “Golfinho de Ouro” for composition in 1969 and 1988, and the 1994 Prêmio Nacional de Música awarded by the Ministry of Culture of Brazil. His works have been performed regularly in Brazil and abroad, including performances by the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Radiodiffusion Télévision Belge, and the Bayerischen Rundfunk in Munich, among others.
In addition to his career as a composer, Krieger has been active as a conductor, music critic, and music administrator. He is the president of the Academia Brasileira de Música, and the organizer and director of the Bienal de Música Contemporânea Brasileira, a festival that has been in existence since 1975.
Osvaldo Lacerda
Composer and pedagogue. Born in Sāo Paulo, he began his piano studies at age nine, with Ana Veloso de Rezende, and later with Maria dos Anjos Oliveira Rocha and José Kliass. From 1952 to 1962 he studied composition with Camargo Guarnieri, a composer who was instrumental in the development of his compositional style.
His aesthetic ideal is that of a refined nationalism, resulting from his extensive knowledge of the characteristics of Brazilian music, combined with a solid comand of modern compositional techniques. In 1963, he spent a year in the United States under the auspices of the Guggenheim Foundation, the first time that such a distinguished fellowship was awarded to a Brazilian composer. While in the U.S., he took classes in composition with Vittorio Giannini in New York, and Aaron Copland in Tanglewood.
He received several national prizes for composition, and his varied output has often been performed in Brazil and abroad. He founded and directed four musical societies in São Paulo, among them the Sociedade Pró Música Brasileira (1961-66), and the Centro de Música Brasileira (since 1984) of which he was the president.
Lacerda was an active pedagogue and taught in several music schools in São Paulo, in addition to conducting courses and master classes in several cities in Brazil.
Ronaldo Miranda
Born in 1948 in Rio de Janeiro, where he studied piano and composition at the music school of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).
He began his musical career as a critic for the Jornal do Brasil (1974-81), but after winning the first prize at the II Bienal da Música Contemporânea Brasileira in 1977, he turned increasingly towards composition.
In the early 1980s, he won several prizes in competitions in Brazil, including the prestigious Troféu Golfinho de Ouro in 1981 awarded by the government of Rio de Janeiro. His Variações Sinfônicas, commissioned by the Orquestra Sinfônica de São Paulo, earned him the prize of best composer of the year in 1982, awarded by the Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte (APCA).
In 1984, the French Ministry of Culture made him a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Letres. A grant from the Fundação Vitae of São Paulo allowed him to write his opera Dom Casmurro, first produced in May 1992 at the Teatro Municipal in São Paulo.
In the past few years, his works have been performed at many contemporary music festivals in Brazil, Spain, Austria, Germany, and Hungary. In addition to teaching at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Ronaldo Miranda is currently the Director of the Sala Cecília Meireles, a major concert hall in Rio de Janeiro.
Júlio Medaglia
Composer, arranger, conductor. Born in São Paulo in 1938, he studied theory and conducting with Hans-Joachim Koellreutter. He continued his studies at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg, Germany, and privately with Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Sir John Barbirolli, with whom he worked as assistant conductor.
After his return to Brazil in 1966, he established a solid reputation as a conductor, eventually working with all the major orchestras in the country, in addition to launching his career as arranger and composer of music for film and theater.
In 1970, he worked with conductor Günther Schuller in the U.S., and returned for another period of study in Germany, during which he produced several arrangements of Brazilian popular music and composed more than 100 scores for German television movies.
Returning to Brazil in 1974, since then he has worked with several musical and cultural institutions in the country, in addition to contributing the soundtrack for hundreds of Brazilian movies, plays, and television programs. Among the institutions that he has directed are the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro, the Orquestra Sinfônica do Teatro Municipal in Brasília, and the Festival de Inverno de Campos do Jordão in São Paulo.
He was the artistic adviser for the Rede Globo, the largest TV network in Brasil, and is the founder and director of the Amazonas Filarmônica, the resident orchestra at the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus.
Paulo Moura
Instrumentalist, composer, arranger, and conductor (1932-2010). Born in São José do Rio Preto, São Paulo, he was considered one of the most versatile and influential jazz musicians in Brazil. Although he always revealed a great facility for improvisation, his mastery of the jazz and popular repertoires was supported by a solid classical background. He studied piano, harmony, counterpoint, composition, and orchestration with several renowned musicians and composers in Brazil, a training that is reflected in the imagination and formal complexity of his many arrangements and original compositions. In the late 1950s he worked as the official orchestrator and arranger of the Rádio Nacional, traveling with several of its musicians throughout Brazil and abroad. He performed as a clarinetist with several orchestras in Brazil, and as a saxophonist with renowned jazz ensembles throughout Brazil and Latin America. He was one of the participants in the historical Bossa Nova Festival at the Carnegie Hall in New York, and received the Prêmio Sharp as the best popular music instrumentalist of 1992, among several other awards throughout his career. He founded and directed a great variety of chamber and orchestral ensembles, to many of which he contributed with original compositions. He taught at the Instituto Villa-Lobos in Rio de Janeiro.
Alberto Nepomuceno
Composer, pianist, conductor, and organist, he was born in Fortaleza but moved to Rio de Janeiro with his family when he was eight years old. In 1886 he left for Europe with the help of the Bernardelli family, and subsequently studied in Rome and Berlin. In 1893 he traveled to Norway with his Norwegian wife, the pianist Walborg Bang, and the couple stayed with Grieg, a composer whose nationalism was influential in Nepomuceno’s later works. His first compositions, however, displayed an unmistakable European flavor, and it was only after his return to Brazil that he began to forge a more personal style based on Brazilian musical roots, but his notion that the Portuguese language was not altogether suitable for singing brought him into a bitter conflict with the critic Oscar Guanabarino. He is considered the most important precursor of the Brazilian nationalist school, and was one of the first composers to recognize the great talent of the young Heitor Villa-Lobos, using his own prestige to help Villa-Lobos publish his first works. He was also extremely influential as a pedagogue, primarily through his work as director of the Instituto Nacional de Música, a position for which he was nominated twice in his lifetime. As the conductor of the orchestra of the Sociedade de Concertos Populares in Rio de Janeiro he introduced several European avant-garde works to the Brazilian audience. He was instrumental in promoting the use of the Portuguese language in art song, and was responsible for one of the most extensive collections of Brazilian traditional songs in the history of Brazilian music. His output covers a wide variety of genres in many media, such as symphonic, chamber, and operatic works.
Alberto Rosenblit
Alberto Rosenblit is a Brazilian pianist, composer, arranger and music producer. He began his piano studies at the age of six and was a student of masters such as Odette Ernest Dias, Esther Scliar and Ian Guest.
In 1970, he began his career playing in various bands and chamber ensembles. In 1980, he released his first LP, in partnership with guitarist and arranger Mario Adnet. Still in the 1980s, he participated in works by great Brazilian artists such as Nara Leão, Simone, Francis Hime and Zé Renato, and began working on creating soundtracks for TV Globo.
In 2004, he signed the musical production of the soap opera Cabocla (Globo). Experienced in soap operas and miniseries, he also worked in Agosto, Presença de Anita, Por Amor, Mulheres Apaixonadas, Laços de Família, Páginas da Vida, Coração de Estudante, A Favorita, among other productions. He was also one of the responsible for the arrangements of the reality-show, Fama in 2002 and between 2004 and 2005.
Sérgio Vasconcellos-Corrêa
Born in São Paulo in 1934, where he began his music studies with the pianist Ilíria Serato. He graduated from the Conservatório Dramático e Musical de São Paulo in 1953, and in 1955 began studying harmony with Martin Braunwiser. He studied harmony and composition with Camargo Guarnieri from 1956 to 1968. Soon he acquired great recognition as a composer in Brazil and abroad, having received more than a dozen prizes in composition, including the prestigious “Prêmio Governador do Estado de São Paulo” for his Concertino for trumpet and orchestra. As a pedagogue, he has been a pioneer in using mass media as a vehicle for music education in Brazil, and has contributed regular critical essays for major periodicals such as Folha de São Paulo and O Estado de São Paulo. He idealized and founded the Academia Paulista de Música, of which he is president, and he is a member of the Academia Brasileira de Música. Currently, he teaches harmony, counterpoint, and composition at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP).
Amaral Vieira
Composer, pianist, pedagogue, and musicologist. Born in São Paulo in 1952, Vieira is one of the most influential figures in the musical life of Brazil. A child prodigy, he has been performing in solo recitals since the age of eight, and has steadily built a concert career marked by large-scale and highly successful projects. From 1965 to 1976, he studied abroad with many renowned musicians and composers, as a result of several grants awarded by the governments of France, Germany, and England, which brought him to institutions such as the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied with Lucette Descaves (piano) and Olivier Messiaen (composition), and the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg im Breisgau, where he studied with Carl Seeman (piano), Konrad Lechner (composition), Ramón Walter (chamber music), and Peter Förtig (contemporary music). In 1977 he returned to Brazil, where since then he has continued to play a major role in all areas of musical activity. His importance in the musical life of the country can be inferred from the organization of a festival devoted entirely to his work, which took place In 1984 in São Paulo, involving 196 performers who presented 157 of his compositions. He has received several prizes and awards, both as a composer and performer, including the international prize for composition awarded by the Fondation de France for his triptych for piano, Elegia, Noturno e Toccata, and several awards from the Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte (APCA). Vieira’s vast output is extremely diverse, encompassing works in virtually every genre and for a great variety of performing ensembles. In his piano works, he embraced large-scale forms as well as collections of short compositions with a highly distinctive character, in the best tradition of the Romantic and post-Romantic piano miniatures, while his large vocal and orchestral works show a distinct blend of late-Romantic and contemporary techniques.
Bauer
Crowl Jr.
Escalante
Guarnieri
Krieger
Lacerda
Miranda
Medaglia
Moura
Nepomuceno
Rosenblit
Vasconcellos-Corrêa
Vieira
bottom of page