Christian Benvenuti

b i o g r a p h y

Christian Benvenuti (born 1975 in Porto Alegre) writes music that draws on a great variety of impetuses. Many of his pieces reflect his plural life as a performer, photographer, visual artist, and researcher, exploring different approaches to musical time and revealing his interest in multimedia resources, sampled sounds, temporal strata, Japanese traditional arts, film studies, early music, information theory, and physics. His piece Fantasmas de la Memoria for guitar and cello was warmly received in its première in late 2007 in the Royal Festival Hall, London, in that year's Park Lane Group Young Composers' Symposium, being noted by the panellists as "a fantastic piece", "extremely idiomatic", and "delicate and powerful". In 2009, Christian won the David Lovatt Prize composition competition for his piece Yellow Eagle on Red Sky, and in 2010 his piece Mnesterophonia was awarded the prestigious Funarte prize from the National Art Foundation of Brazil.

As an active percussionist of early and contemporary music, Christian performed alongside the Brisith ensemble Il Festino, as well as the award-winning Conjunto de Câmara de Porto Alegre for several years, having recorded albums of early music and contemporary music for historical instruments.

Under supervision of Antônio Carlos Borges Cunha, he completed his Master degree in 2006 with the dissertation entitled Jo-Ha-Kyu: motivações estéticas e estruturais na composição musical ("Jo-Ha-Kyu: aesthetic and structural motivations in music composition") at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. The dissertation can be downloaded here (in Portuguese).

In 2010, Christian finished his PhD in music composition at University of Surrey, where he won the David Lovatt Prize, under supervision of Stephen Goss. His thesis "Sound, Noise and Entropy: An essay on information theory and music creation" looks into an information theory approach to composition and music analysis. In Brazil, Christian studied composition with Celso Loureiro Chaves and Antônio Carlos Borges Cunha at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. He also attended composition master classes with Roger Reynolds, John White, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Brian Ferneyhough. His works have been performed in several countries and his pieces have been premièred by performers such as Marlene Hofmann Goidanich, Adriana Deffenti, Celso Loureiro Chaves, Antônio Carlos Borges Cunha, Lontano, and Gemini. Recent premières have taken place in venues as diverse as a planetarium in Brazil and the South Bank Centre in London.

He currently lives in Porto Alegre, Brazil.