Clarice Assad
Clarice Assad is a Brazilian-American composer, pianist, arranger and singer from Rio de Janeiro. She is influenced by popular Brazilian culture, Romanticism, world music and Jazz.
She comes from a musical family, which includes her father, guitarist Sergio Assad, her uncle, guitarist Odair Assad, and her aunt, singer songwriter Badi Assad.
Assad has performed professionally since the age of seven. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Roosevelt University in Chicago and a master's degree in Composition from the University of Michigan, where she studied composition with Michael Daugherty. She is a 2009 Latin Grammy nominee.
Early years
Born in Campo Grande, a modest suburb in the west portion of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Assad is the first daughter of musician Sergio Assad and school teacher Celia Maria Vasconcelos da Cunha, who named her child after the late Brazilian-Ukrainian writer Clarice Lispector. Assad began creating music at the age of six with the help of her father.Assad was born with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a group of disorders that affect connective tissues, which severely limited her ability to perform musical instruments at an early age, but the condition did not affect her voice. As a child Assad sang numerous jingles for radio and television, as well as albums including tracks for pop star Luiz Caldas and Brazilian soul musician Hyldon. During early adolescence, as her joints became stronger, she began playing piano mostly by ear and became interested in jazz. The years that followed were filled with intensive training in music, piano, composition and arranging with Sheila Zagury, Linda Bustani and Leandro Braga.
In 1993, Assad and her younger brother Rodrigo Assad moved to France to live with their father, in a home he shared with his second wife and their child Julia. Assad studied piano and improvisation privately with Natalie Fortin, a professor from Le Conservatoire national Supérieur de Paris, and benefited also from her father's mentorship, composing and arranging numerous pieces. This was a prolific period, though short lived amidst a turbulent time. Mr. Assad's wife, who had been battling cancer, died a year later at 38. Assad returned to Brazil with her brother.
In Rio de Janeiro, between 1995-1997, Assad acted as a pianist, arranger and keyboardist on several musicals including Tá na Hora, A Estrela Menina and Doidas Folias by playwright and composer Tim Rescala. Though passionate about music, she struggled with the decision to pursue an academic degree, due to the limited prospects in the industry in Brazil. As she prepared to study for the entry college exams majoring in marine biology, her father Sergio had met astro physicist Angela Olinto, and moved to Chicago. A year later, Assad was given the opportunity to study film scoring at the Berklee College of Music, leaving Brazil in 1998.
Career
Orchestral and chamber music
Assad's compositions include pieces for a variety of instrumentations, including smaller works for piano, guitar pieces as well as pieces for large and small chamber ensembles, and fifteen orchestral works. Though the ensembles she writes for are largely classical, her voice as a composer has been heavily influenced by Brazilian music, Jazz and World Music. Her orchestral work Nhanderú and Terra Brasilis, commissioned and premiered by the Orquestra Sinfônica de São Paulo are examples of her Brazilian roots, drawing on Assad's knowledge of the country's folk style and the work of fellow classical composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. Among other works influenced by Brazilian popular culture is her concerto for guitar and orchestra, O Saci-Pererê and Brazilian Fanfare, an overture for orchestra commissioned by the Chattanooga Orchestra in 2005.She first came into the national spotlight in 2004, when conductor Marin Alsop programmed her violin concerto with the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music featuring Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg as the soloist. The piece was recorded by Salerno-Sonnenberg and Marin Alsop leading the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and released on the NSS Music label when Assad was 26 years old. Since then, Assad has been steadily commissioned, pursuing ways of incorporating her composing and performing. Such attempts culminated on the creation of a major work: a concerto for scat singing, piano and orchestra which she wrote for herself to perform. Scattered was premiered by the Albany Symphony under the baton of the conductor David Alan Miller, and has since been performed by many other ensembles and conductors, including the Michigan Philharmonic, Chicago Composers Orchestra and OCAM. Other works include “The Disappeared,” a political piece for orchestra and concert band that draws on impressions of Rufina Amaya, the sole survivor of the El Mozote massacre in 1981, during the Salvadoran Civil War, and most recently, “Ad Infinitum,” a percussion concerto written for Dame Evelyn Glennie involving improvisational gestural techniques - such as sound painting - for the orchestra, soloist and conductor alike.
Her music has been commissioned by many institutions, performers and orchestras including Carnegie Hall, The Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, the Orquestra Sinfônica de São Paulo, General Electric, the Chicago Sinfonietta, and Duo Noire, to name a few. Her works have also been recorded by some of the most prominent names in the classical contemporary music scene today, including Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, pianist Anne-Marie McDermott and oboist Liang Wang. She has also collaborated with the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, Turtle Island String Quartet, the Aquarelle Guitar Quartet, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Louisville Symphony Orchestra, Austin Symphony Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Edmonton Symphony, as well as conductors Marin Alsop and Christoph Eschenbach, Kazuyoshi Akiyama and Carlos Miguel Prieto. She has written extensively for active members on the new music scene in the United States such as the Cavatina Duo, Sybarite5 and SOLI ensemble
Assad has served as composer-in-residence for the Albany Symphony, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music and the Boston Landmarks Orchestra.
Assad's works have been published in France,Germany, in the United States by and Criadores do Brasil.
Other projects
Assad has contributed significantly to the growing repertoire of classical guitar, having written works ranging for solo to duos and quartets such as the piece Bluezilian, which has become a staple of the guitar quartet repertoire. Larger works include three concertos: Album de Retratos, commissioned by the ProMusic Chamber Orchestra for two guitars and orchestra, O Saci-Pererê, for solo guitar and chamber orchestra, commissioned by the Harris Foundation and a concerto for two guitars and string orchestra, commissioned by the Tychy guitar festival for the Brazil guitar duo.In 2010, Assad wrote the first of its kind, a concerto for scat singing, piano and orchestra, named SCATTERED. Many other works followed on this verge, and in 2019, Assad wrote SYNTHETICO, a work for chamber ensemble and vocal electronics.
Assad's first work for the stage was a soundtrack written for a 2001 re-adaptation of the play La Lección de Anatomía, by Argentinian playwright Carlos Mathus, originally published in the 1970s. Directed by an original cast member Antonio Leiva, the play received mixed reviews, but garnered the composer favorable mentions from the acclaimed theatre critic Bárbara Heliodora. Following a hiatus of over a decade, Assad resumed writing for stage in 2010, when she was invited by choreographer Kristi Spessard - then in residency at Mabou Mines - to compose the score to her piece "Essentials of Flor."
Recent works include the ballets Iara, and Sin Fronteras, Opera das Pedras
and collaborations with librettist Niloufar Talebi and playwright E.M. Lewis. Strongly shaped by a conscious drive towards narrative, her works wear its influences well, feeling inspired rather than derivative.
Assad has worked with numerous youth groups, often culminating on performances involving large ensembles and orchestras, through residency programs. Most notable are Assad's partnerships with ZUMIX in East Boston and the Boston Landmarks Orchestra.; partnerships between the Michigan Philharmonic with WRCJ-FM Detroit public radio and the Detroit School of Arts; as well as the partnership between Girls INC. and the Albany Symphony. Assad's projects tend on focus on social impact programs that involve empowering young women.
Arranger
Assad was the featured composer for the 2008–2009 season at the New Century Chamber Orchestra, where she worked as the orchestra's primary arranger and orchestrator for a decade.Upon graduating from the University of Michigan, Assad moved to New York City to experience the exploding music scene, freelancing as a composer and arranger while trying to build a career as pianist and singer. During her New York years, Assad worked as the featured composer for the New Century Chamber Orchestra, as well as serving as the orchestra's primary arranger from 2007-2017, contributing vastly to the addition of new works for strings, by orchestrating and transcribing over twenty five major works from the symphonic repertoire, including Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Richard Strauss' Dance of the Seven Veils from the opera Salome, and the suite An American in Paris, by George Gershwin.
Assad's keen sense of orchestration carefully curates some of the most effective tricks of orchestrator's past greats: Maurice Ravel's elegance and subtleties and Njcolaj Rimski-korsakov's coloristic orchestral effects - All while retaining a personal, unique fingerprint that's compelling and dramatic in its very construction.
Performer
Hailed by the LA Times as a "dazzling soloist", Assad is an accomplished singer and pianist and appears frequently with orchestras and chamber music ensembles, performing her original works or arrangements of classical, Brazilian, jazz and contemporary music.In 2010, Assad began performing more frequently, and eventually founded the international ensemble Off The Cliff, an energetic and daring four piece ensemble of internationally accomplished musicians.
Notable performances include the Savannah Music Festival, Moab and the Mendocino Music Festival. Included amongst the venues and series that Off the Cliff has appeared on are Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City and Doha, Qatar, The Stone, Cal Performances in San Francisco, and Sesc São Paulo in Brazil. Special guest artists have included Japanese singer Hiromi Suda, Swiss-American singer Beat Kaestli, clarinetist Derek Bermel, mandolinist Mike Marshall, Paquito D'Rivera and the group Choro Famoso.
Awards in Music Composition
Assad is the recipient of such awards as the American Composers Forum National Composition Competition, the McKnight Visiting Composer Award, the New Music Alive Partnership program -, the Van Lier Fellowship, Latin Grammy nomination for best contemporary composition, the Aaron Copland Award, the Morton Gould Young Composer Award, All Songs Considered - NPR, the Franklin Honor Society Award and the Samuel Ostrowsky Humanities Award.Discography
Solo albums
- 2016: Clarice Assad & Friends: Live at the Deer Head Inn
- 2016: RELÍQUIA
- 2014: IMAGINARIUM
- 2012: HOME
- 2008: LOVE, ALL THAT IT IS
- 2004: INVITATION, Introducing Clarice Assad
- 2004: A BRAZILIAN SONGBOOK, Um Momento de Puro Amor' Sergio Assad & Their Family
Recorded works
Arrangements & Guest Appearances
| Title | Album details |
| O cinema que o sol não apaga |
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| Bandzilla rises |
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| MIL COISAS |
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| QUERELAS DO BRASIL |
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| The Elkcloner |
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| The Music of Astor Piazzola |
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| Merry, A Holiday Journey |
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| WONDERLAND: Badi Assad |
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| VERDE: Badi Assad |
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