Amílcar
Vasques-Dias
Amílcar Vasques-Dias was born in Badim, Monção, Portugal. He studied Piano and Composition at the Music Conservatories of Porto and Braga. He was a Fellow of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and of the Secretariat of State for Culture for the Master Degree in Instrumental and Electroacoustic Composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in Holland, where Louis Andriessen, Peter Schat, Jan van Vlijmen and Dick Raaijmakers were his teachers. His work with Karlheinz Stockhausen, in Holland, with Iannis Xenakis, in Aix-en-Provence, France, and with Cândido Lima, in Portugal, was so relevant that it has led him to consider those composers-teachers as the most influential in his formation as a musician and composer. In 1989, he met Fernando Lopes-Graça, to whom he presented the compositions he created in Holland. It is from this interaction that he has begun to give more attention to traditional Portuguese music, manifesting its influence in some of his pieces.
