Ângela Lopes 

Ângela Lopes (1972) is one of the most active and prolific voices in musical composition in Portugal, with a significant role in teaching composition, particularly in specialised artistic teaching in the north of Portugal. She has made her name as a composer through a career marked by her work in electroacoustic and instrumental music, frequently based on concepts exogenous to the musical material, such as elements derived from literature, or associated with sustainability or feminism.

Cândido Lima

Cândido Lima (1939) was the founder of the Grupo Música Nova, a reformer of the system of music teaching in Portugal and the first Portuguese composer to approach musical computing at the Universities of Paris 2 and Paris 7, as well as using computers for musical composition. He studied with Iannis Xenakis in private classes and at the Institute of Aesthetics and Sciences of Art, at the Sorbonne, becoming one of his most renowned academic pupils. Among the many events at which Lima has promoted contemporary erudite music, including numerous television programmes, it is worth highlighting his role with Xenakis in June 1973, for the memorable ‘Encontro com Xenakis’ (Meeting with Xenakis) at Cinema Trindade.

Diogo Alvim

Diogo Alvim (1979) is a composer of instrumental and electroacoustic music. He studied architecture and composition in Lisbon, completing his doctorate in composition and sound arts at SARC, Queen’s University Belfast, in 2016, with a thesis entitled ‘Music Through Architecture – Contributions to an Expanded Practice in Composition.’ In his work Posição Relativa, commissioned by the DME project, Diogo Alvim composes not just pitches, rhythms, timbres and dynamics, but also the space.

Iannis Xenakis

Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) was a Greek architect, mathematician, engineer and composer, and a pioneer of electronic music. He studied engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, which is where he was at the outbreak of the Second World War, when he joined the Resistance. In 1944, during street fighting against British tanks, he was seriously wounded and finally forced into exile. He fled to Paris, where he worked with Le Corbusier on the Convent of Sainte-Marie de la Tourette and the Philips Pavilion. In the field of music, he followed the teachings of Olivier Messiaen and the maestro Hermann Scherchen. During the 1970s, he created his famous polytopes, grandiose spectacles of sound and light, that brought him fame among a wide audience. In the following decade, he developed the GENDY computer programme, which allowed sounds to be produced through a computer. He died on 4 February 2001, leaving a catalogue of more than 150 works, eleven of which were commissioned directly to the composer by the Gulbenkian Foundation.