Sílvio Ferraz

Silvio Ferraz (1959) is a Full Professor of Composition at the University of São Paulo (USP). Between 1998 and 2013, he was a professor at the University of Campinas and the Catholic University of São Paulo. He was the artistic and pedagogical director of the Campos do Jordão Festival (2009-2010), pedagogical director of the School of Music of the State of São Paulo (2010), founder and artistic director of the Camerata Aberta (2010). With a PhD in Communication and Semiotics, he is the author of the books “Music and Repetition: Aspects of the Difference Issue in Contemporary Music” (Educ, 1997), “Book of Sonorities” (7Letras, 2004), and “Time-Music: the Collisions of Chronos-Chaos” (Móbile, 2023). He studied composition with Willy Correa de Oliveira, Gilberto Mendes, Brian Ferneyhough, and Gérard Grisey. Since 1985, he has participated as a composer in exhibitions and festivals of contemporary music, with works performed in Brazil and abroad by ensembles such as Grupo Novo Horizonte, Camerata Aberta, and Abstrai Ensemble (Brazil), Arditti String Quartet, and The Nash Ensemble (England), Ensemble Contrechamps (Switzerland), Ictus, and Het Spectra (Belgium), New York New Music Ensemble (USA). As a researcher of CNPQ, he develops projects in the field of contemporary musical composition, with emphasis on the study of the implications of the concepts of time and energy in late 20th and 21st-century music. With award-winning work and production, including the Vitae Prize (2003) and the Zeferino Vaz Prize (Unicamp, 2011), he is currently a visiting researcher at CESEM and the University of Évora with support from the São Paulo Research Foundation (Fapesp), CNPQ, and the University of São Paulo.