Eli Eri Moura

Career

Eli-Eri Moura is a professor at the Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil, in the undergraduate and graduate programs of music. He is also the director of COMPOMUS (Laboratório de Composição Musical - Laboratory of Musical Composition). He studied composition with José Alberto Kaplan and Mário Ficarelli, in Brazil, and later with Brian Cherney, Alcides Lanza and John Rea, at McGill University, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he received two of his graduate degrees (Master of Music and Doctor of Music in Composition).

Work

His works include more than 100 titles: pieces for diverse chamber music groups, choir and orchestra, as well as music for theater plays, videos and films. His soundtracks have won many awards in Brazilian festivals, including the 10th Vitória Cine Vídeo, in 2003. The composer has also taken part in several important contemporary music festivals, among them the 2002 World Music Days Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music - ISCM, in Hong Kong (China). His essays are published in periodicals such as Contemporary Music Review, Em Pauta, Per Musi and Musica Hodie.

Eli-Eri Moura has been concerned with developing a compositional process he calls defragmental music, applied to his concert music (in works such as Circumsonantis, for string quartet, and Noite dos Tambores Silenciosos, for symphony orchestra). This process recreates and synthesizes several procedures of contemporary music, and interacts in a structural way with references from Brazilian popular musical manifestations, whose elements are explored from within their microdimensional aspects (defragmentation processes). Concomitantly, the composer also works with a language that encompasses a more conventional musical lexicon, almost tonal, employed in some of his choral pieces and in his incidental music.