Artur
Santos

Artur Santos (1914-1987) was a student at Lisbon’s Conservatory, where he studied Piano with Marcos Garin, Harmony with Wenceslau Pinto and Counterpoint and Fugue with Costa Ferreira. He was a brilliant piano and composition student and also studied with Luiz de Freitas Branco. In the 1930s he won two composition prizes awarded by the Music Conservatory. In 1941-42 that same institution would welcome him as a Composition, Harmony and Fugue teacher. In 1937 he married pianist Túlia Santos, who from then on helped him in his research. He was invited to be a programme assistant at the National Radio Broadcast Company but his effective participation would be as a composer, a field in which in 1943 he won the Rey Colaço Composition Award. Although he started a promising career as a composer, Artur Santos dedicated himself mostly to Ethnomusicology. He taught at the Taylor Institution of Oxford University, at the English Dance and Sony Society, at the Anglo-Portuguese Society and at the International Folklore-Music Council, where he was a member of the executive commission. In London he had classes with Alan Bush and Lloyd Weber, and in Paris with Charles Koechlin and Olivier Messiaen, among others.