MARCUS BITTENCOURT
Marcus Alessi Bittencourt, born in 1974, is a Brazilian composer and pianist based in the USA.
He studied music with composers such as Willy Corrêa de Oliveira and Tristan Murail,
and he is best described as an Experimental musician, for he is a practitioner
of a type of music which lives outside known traditions. This type of music
springs from his understanding of Composition
as an almost archetypical concept, a principle quite akin
to the ideas of Musique Concrète and the theories of Pierre Schaeffer.
Because of this, his music is marked by an extremely varied pallete of musical sound materials
and techniques, which reflect his intense investigation in the domains of form, polyrhythm and
simultaneities, timbre, sound spatial perspective, microtonality, and orchestration of sound objects.
Prolific both as an instrumental and an electroacoustic composer, his list of compositions includes works for orchestra,
chamber ensembles, choir, solo instruments (specially the piano), as well as several electroacoustic works.
Marcus Bittencourt has been performing widely as a pianist, conductor, and sound-projectionist,
often taking those tasks simultaneously, as in the case of his several piano performances with live
electronics. His music has been played throughout the United States, Europe, and Brazil, and it is available through
the Electric Music Collective label.
Among the awards he has received are the first prize at the Projeto Nascente V (1996), a seven year
scholarship at Columbia University, and a residency at the Centro Studi Ligure of the Bogliasco
Foundation in Genoa, Italy.
His academic credentials include a Baccalaureate in Piano Performance from the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil,
and Master's and Doctoral degrees in Music Composition from Columbia University in the City of New York.
He has taught Music at Columbia University and at Lehman College of CUNY, and he currently teaches
Composition, Theory, and Computer Music at the College of William and Mary in Virginia (USA).
Since 2000, he runs his own highly experimental studio for Musique Concrète, the Zoológico.
