victor gama

victor gama

contemporary music and new instruments

As a musician-citizen I am mostly interested and inspired by processes of cultural resistance in which unique musical and artistic languages have been developed, sustained and continued throughout history. Examples such as capoeira, samba, tango, candombe, bomba, rumba/mambo, kumbia and many others have roots in my home country, Angola, and their striving existence today reveal a complex web of cultural resistance mechanisms and imense creativity dispite the ordeals of slavery and colonialism.

Today, we are being faced with a process of globalization that's imposing huge chalenges on cultural diversity, intercultural dialogue and cultural development.

I've approached these chalenges in my work by creating resonating objects that act as "performing mediators". These are musical instruments that have been developed in the last twenty years, through a process I've called the Golian Modes.

Moving away from the common perspective on writing for specific instruments as the main scoring method in music composition, the Golian Modes redirects the focus from instruments with a fixed design to instruments in which design is a variable. Whereas in the former method an instrument is chosen for its specific timbre, scale, volume, etc., in this method the instrument represents an additional set of variables that is used in the development of the composition(s). It challenges the fixation on making music for "conventional" instruments and on making instruments for "conventional" music and it proposes a new approach to making music by including the process of developing the tools (the instruments) for that aim. As a creative process, the Golian Modes offers the composer an open field to develop his own cultural and aesthetic modes of communication through music. This process has allowed my projects to navigate through a borderless territory between the areas of music, installation art, video, performance, musical instrument development and education, often shown through concerts, interactive exhibitions and workshops. My most recent piece Vela 6911, has been writen for an ensemble of musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the instruments acrux, toha and dino.

blog
08 maio 2012, Notícias
Royal Opera House, London
Deloitte Ignite Festival, 31 Aug, 1 and 2 Sept: INSTRUMENTOS, a major interactive exhibition of Victor Gama's instruments, developed over the last two decades will be installed at the Paul Hamlyn Hall with concerts, workshops, talks and games.
08 maio 2012, Notícias
Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon
20 January 2013: VELA 6911, a piece recently commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and MusicNOW, staged at Harris Theater last March, will be have its European premiere with an ensemble of musicians from the Gulbenkian Orchestra.