Born in Lisbon, Portugal, 1965, studied piano with private teachers since the age of 12. When he was 19, he abandoned his second year in Economics in favor of the Instituto Gregoriano de Lisboa, where he completed his first studies in music with high grades. Then he went to the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa, where he studied under Christopher Bochmann and António Pinho Vargas and finished his Bachelor in Composition in 1992. In the following year he studied Choral Conducting at the same school but interrupted this program as he successfully applied for a grant sponsored by the Portuguese-American Cultural Commission (Fulbright Program). He started his Master’s in Composition in 1994 at the College-Conservatory of Music – University of Cincinnati (Ohio, USA), where he studied, among others, with Samuel Adler. He graduated two years later, having presented a thesis called Relatives, which is a set of seven pieces (each for a different instrument or group) that can be played either separately or simultaneously. Still in 1996, he started his Doctorate in Composition at the same school, having earned his diploma in 2001 with the completion of another score-dissertation entitled 2001: A World Symphony, under the supervision of Mara Helmuth. This work is an allegory on civilizational rationality, consisting on a journey through history, geography, and musical styles during the course of its five movements, each named after one of the continents. Since 2003, he has been working on a post-Doctoral project, a multimedia opera with a science fiction subject supervised by João Pedro Oliveira at Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal, and Mara Helmuth at Cincinnati. Besides the Fulbright grant mentioned above, he has had, throughout these programs, support from Centro Nacional de Cultura and Secretaria de Estado da Cultura (Master’s), Portuguese-American Foundation for Development (Doctorate), and Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Doctorate and post-Doctorate). As a professor, he has taught several courses in the field of Composition, from Musical Analysis to Electronic Music. In this quality, he started in the Academia de Amadores de Música and the Fundação Musical dos Amigos das Crianças in Lisbon, served as a teaching assistant at the University of Cincinnati and, since 1998, is assistant professor at the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa. He attended seminars in Composition with Emmanuel Nunes at Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon during several years, and in Electronic Music at IRCAM, Paris (1996) and at the International Computer Music Conference in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1997. The time he has devoted to his own education and to his teaching have somewhat prevented him from having a more active career as a composer. Still, some of his works, namely for electronics, have been publicly presented at the Música Viva Festival, among others.
Source: Centro de Investigação & Informação da Música Portuguesa
