Donemus Webwinkel — Vasques Dias, Amílcar

Amílcar Vasques-Dias was born in Badim (Monção), Portugal, in 1945. He Completed his advanced Piano and Composition studies at the Oporto and Braga Conservatories.
On Gulbenkian Foundation and Portuguese Ministry of Culture scholarships, he studied instrumental composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague (The Netherlands) with Louis Andriessen, Peter Schat and Jan Van Vlijmen, and electroacoustic music with Dick Raaijmakers and Gilius van Bergeijk.
Noteworthy is the training he had with Karlheinz Stockhausen, in the Netherlands, with Iannis Xenakis, in France, and with Cândido Lima, in Portugal, considering these composers/teachers as the ones who most influenced him as a musician and composer. In 1989, he met the composer Fernando Lopes-Graça. It is from this conviviality that he begins to pay more attention to portuguese traditional music, manifesting his influence in some of his pieces.
He received commissions from: the Dutch Ministry of Culture, the Amsterdam's Foundation for Art, The Foundation for Musical Creation, the De Volharding Foundation, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Oporto, Lisbon and Évora City Councils, the Instituto Camões, the Ministry for Science and Technology, the World Expo '98, and the Musicamera Productions.
He has composed pieces covering instrumental/vocal chamber music and electroacoustic music, multimedia works, music for film, theater, symphonic orchestra and opera.
His music has been played in Europe, U.S.A and Asia, namely at Contemporary Music Meetings.
As a pianist he has performed many concerts in Portugal, Spain, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Russia, U.S.A., Canada.
Simultaneously, he developed an intensive activity as a pedagogue at the Universities of Aveiro and Évora, and at the Lisbon and Oporto High Music Schools (Portugal).
He was the artistic director of the music-festival Encontro do Alentejo de Música do séc. XX.I, held from 1998 to 2009 at the city of Évora (Portugal).