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click here Leo Alves Vieira: Brazilian, born in February 13th, 1978, at Rio de Janeiro, Leo Alves
Vieira's parents both had musical experience. Portuguese father, Diniz,
used to play the violin in a priest school orchestra in Portugal, and
Brazilian mother, Lucia, used to play the acoustic guitar and sing
along with her friends, a successful Brazilian group called "Clube da
Esquina", that recorded their first record with Milton Nascimento on
vocals. She gave up her instrument to the MPB guitar player Francisco
Horta, at that time a political prisoner of Brazilian dictatorship.
Leo's grandfather, Mario Alves de Souza Vieira, father of Lucia, was
killed by that dictatorship, tortured (impaled) to death. It seems that
his revolutionary grandfather's blood runs in his veins. His musical
energy is filled with struggles to musical patterns of all sorts,
especially the so-called avant-garde academic scene around the western
musical world...
Though his influences relates to various avant-garde composers, as
well as popular Brazilian and worldwide 'folk' traditions, Leo Alves
Vieira tried to develop a intuitional composition process that flows
equally between rational and emotional boundaries.
He began his musical instruction in primary school at Niterói, Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil along this school's choir, conducted by Hermano Vianna.
Since then, he has had acoustic and electric guitar lessons with
teachers from Rio and São Paulo as well (when he lived there from 1988
to 1992). In 1994, he entered a full musical education at the Rio de
Janeiro State Conservatory, that included Classical Guitar lessons,
Traditional and Functional Harmony. After a 2 year period in Philosophy
unfinished graduation (1998-2000) at the Brazilian Federal University
(UFRJ), he entered the Composition Graduation Course at the same
institution (2001) where he continues his studies and also works as a
researcher.
His first professional artistic work was a musical score composed for
a short movie called "O Fantasma do Theatro Municipal" written and
directed by Luis Carlos Lacerda (1994). After some rock bands
demo-tapes recorded, and a CD from band called GORE, shows an etc, he
began a steady career into composing, signing musical directions,
conducting and eventually playing for theater and short movies scores.
Composing for theatre has given Vieira a great opportunity to study
and establish a new musical language research within this medium. The
organicity between the text, especially the ones written for children,
and music is always the goal, without transforming the musical score
primary to the theatrical performance, as it happens in musicals or
plays for children, where 'all of the sudden' everything (named, the
dramatical flow of the theatrical text) stops so that the music comes
in and so forth.
The compositional writing process developed by Leo at the academia
scenario has the objective to filtrate the historical composing
techniques into a personal writing style that blends the 'music for
concerto' expression with the other media ways of listening and
expressing music such as electroacoustic, jazz, traditional (popular)
and rock/pop music. Using the standard instrumental formations of the
'music for concerto', chamber, orchestra or solo, this blending effect
is a result not only of exploring new gestures (execution and feeling),
taken from these other musical genres, but also from literally mixing
up pre-recorded chamber sounds (electronically altered or not), for
instance, with electroacoustic fabrics. Or even the other way round
where we have electroacoustic timbres played live, in a chamber
concerto format. In this case, either acoustic instruments altered in
real-time or MIDI / Plugged electronic instruments are used. That was
done by the time of his debut as a composer at the XV Biennial of
Brazilian Contemporary Music, 2003, with the piece
"Estilhaços-Constante Volta ao Indeterminado" (2002) for acoustic and
electronic instruments, played by electroacoustic orchestra OFELEX.
Another musical aspect has a very important role in Leo's music making
and experimentations: rhythm. Polyrhythmical grids, exploring different
rhythmical accents and variations, and, above them all, bringing some
Brazilian feel to this so European influenced format that is the 'music
for concerto', are among of the best results Leo Alves Vieira's music
has achieved.
Leo Alves Vieira's debut solo album "Sounds of the Orange Coloured
Forest" was released September 2006 by Brooklyn, NY based Pralaya
Records, and brings mostly his electroacoustic work between 2003 /
2006, which pairs chamber music and Brazilian rhythms. Some of the 11
pieces of this album has been featured in festivals, concerts and
several radio shows around the globe, focused on electroacoustic music
or even rock/pop music.
Leo Alves' interest in video and image manipulation began in 1994,
when he started composing for short-movies, in Lacerda's film "O
Fantasma do Theatro Municipal". Until he had his own little digital
camera, he did several experimentations with VHS, besides working as a
producer in some other short-movies too, all of them shown at cinemas
and movie clubs. He also studied acting with great Brazilian movie and
theatrical play directors such as Moacir Chaves, Marcus Vinicius
Faustini and Carlos Augusto Nazareth.
Such experimentations involved collages and real time documentation on
day-by-day living of anonymous normal people from the streets of
Niterói, São Paulo, São Tomé das Letras (Minas Gerais) and Rio de
Janeiro. The documentary aspect was always influenced by the ideas
of Brazilian movie director Arnaldo Jabor, and his documentary
technique in the '60s (by the time of Cinema Novo movement) called
Cinema Verdade ("Truthful Cinema").
Nowadays, Leo Alves Vieira's production is focused on digital means of
filming, especially, the exploration of light and texture on cheap
digital equipment, which can result in many interesting effects one
almost cannot capture on hi-tech sources. The editing work would either
not interfere on these capturing effects or would enhance it
creativity, seeking always a great variety of tasteful plasticity and
form structure. Subjects are still connected to routine actions, only
now we have other than people as players/actors (always anonymous,
non-professionals), objects and places.
His last video project was done with assistance and music of several
great fretless guitar players around the globe, "Kronosonic Spheres".
It's a collection of great fretless and microtonal works and a video
installation, a philosophical research over the main theme that
surrounds and structures the whole 13 video pieces: "The Elements of
Reality". These 'elements' are, in sequence: Fire / Air / Mutation /
Speed / Work / Addiction / Obsession / Unknown / Consciousness / Truth
/ Death / Silence. The video installation features the musical works of
Dan Stearns, Marco Oppedisano, 3 Pups Music (Newbie Brad & Pantha),
Chris Shaeffer, Vincent Bergeron, The Carousel Painter, Sonic Deviant,
Leo Alves Vieira and has just received an offer to be shown at museums
and video clubs from Washington DC and Nashville, Tennessee.
Recently, a video piece has been commissioned to Leo Alves Vieira,
over a musical work of his debut solo electroacoustic album "Sounds of
the Orange Coloured Forest" and will be screened at Bydgoszcz, Poland.
Beside all his musical career as composer, conductor, instrumentalist
(acoustic guitar, clarinet, flute, percussion), and video maker, Leo
Alves Vieira makes his day-by-day living teaching acoustic guitar to
young children up to 17 years old at local schools. Recently he became
involved with a non-profit project at the poor community of Grota do
Surucucu (Niterói, Rio de Janeiro). In that internationally
accomplished enterprise he's responsible for teaching composition,
harmony, counterpoint and instrumental arrangements to poor young wood
house community inhabitants.