Felipe Lara

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Felipe Lara is a Brazilian composer based in the United States since 1999. His work—which includes orchestral, chamber, vocal, film, electroacoustic, and popular music—engages in producing new musical contexts by means of (re)interpreting and translating acoustical properties of familiar source sonorities (with the help of the computer) into project-specific forces.

At the Radcliffe Institute, Lara is working on three projects: "Fringes," a large scale work for spatialized chamber ensemble (20 musicians) for the Ensemble Intercontemporain; "Dif(fusion)," a duo with electronics for Esperanza Spalding (voice and contrabass) and Claire Chase (voice and contrabass flute); and "A Fera na Selva," a feature-film score for a Brazilian adaptation of Henry James’s novella The Beast in the Jungle, directed by Paulo Betti.

Lara was a MacCracken Fellow in music composition at New York University, where he earned his PhD degree in 2013. His works have been performed worldwide by such ensembles as the Arditti Quartet, Brentano Quartet, ensemble recherche, International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, London Sinfonietta, Mivos Quartet, and Radio Kamer Filharmonie and at such venues as Acht Brücken Musik für Köln, Aldeburgh Music, Ars Musica, Aspekte Salzburg, ASPHALT Festival, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Europalia, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart, and Tanglewood. Lara has received awards and fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Fromm Music Foundation, Funarte (Brazilian National Arts Foundation), Heidelberger Frühling, and Instituto Sacatar and was a finalist for the 2014–2015 Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.