Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta

Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta was born in São Paulo, Brazil. He also is Portuguese, Italian and Swiss. He lives in Locarno, Switzerland; but also lives part of the year in New York City, in Italy and in Portugal. He studied with Hans Joachim Koellreutter (Paul Hindemith, Hermann Scherchen, Kurt Thomas and Marcel Moyse), Conrado Silva (Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen), and Holger Czukay (Stockhausen) among others. He started his career as composer in the end of the 1970s. Since then, he has developed four dimensional virtual music scores for more than four hundred compositions, many of them recorded. In 1985 he started collaborating with John Cage - who would became his great friend - as composer for Merce Cunningham. He remained composer for Merce Cunningham, who also was a great friend, until his death in 2009. His concerts have been performed in some of the most important theaters all over the world, like the Lincoln Center, the Joyce Theater or The Kitchen in New York City; the Opera Garnier, the Opera Bastille or the Theatre de la Ville in Paris; La Fenice in Venice; the Shinjuku Bunka Center in Tokyo and so on. Several important musicians have performed his pieces, like David Tudor, Takehisa Kosugi, Christian Wolff, Maurizio Barbetti, and Francesco Cuoghi among many others. His music scores are now part of contemporary art collections all over the world. He published around forty cds in several countries and more than fifty books. Emanuel Pimenta composed the first opera on Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy in the history of music, which was first performed in 2008 at the Abstracta Festival in Rome. His concerts were also used for several movies on Joseph Beuys, in European productions.