Arthur Kampela’s collaboration with the New York Philarmonic, Macunaíma, premieres this week.

A Brazilian composer with a Ph.D. in composition from Columbia University, Arthur Kampela has been playing in New York for quite a while, receiving enthusiastic reviews from The New York Times and several prestigious international publications. This coming week, Mr. Kampela premieres his newest piece named “Macunaíma,” which is part of a brand-new series organized by The New York Philharmonic. “Contact!,” as the series has been named, is exclusively dedicated to contemporary music.

Arthur Kampanela

In a recent interview, Kampela described his piece “Macunaíma” (after a famous novel by Mario de Andrade, a writer from the Brazilian Modernist Movement of 1920’s) as “a continuation, somehow, of my previous piece “Antropofagia” for electric guitar and large chamber ensemble, a 30-minute work premiered at the World Music Days, in Stuttgart in 2006 by the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0XshLJbtZ0

Here are the dates and locations of this week’s concerts:

Date: Thursday, December 17,2009
Time: 8:00 p.m.
Where: Symphony Space
Address: 95th and Broadway, New York, NY (Directions)
Price: $28.00

Date: Saturday, December 19, 2009
Time: 7:00PM
Where: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Address: 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York, NY (Directions)
Tickets: visit http://www.metmuseum.org or call (212) 570-3949.

Arthur Kampela is internationally recognized as both a composer and a virtuoso guitarist. He studied privately with renowned British composer Brian Ferneyhough, and received his doctorate in composition from Columbia University, where his teachers included Mario Davidovsky and Fred Lerdahl.

Arthur Kampela’s works have been performed in leading forums for contemporary music around the globe. An active participant in the New York new music scene, he has been composing and performing with his band in the Americas and Europe in prestigious music halls and in unorthodox venues. He has also broken new ground: first, in his native country he has fused popular and vernacular styles with contemporary textural techniques by, for example, deconstructing samba, jazz, and musical theater with new music resources, creating a truly hybrid genre. Second, he has developed innovative extended techniques for acoustic instruments.

In his series of Percussion Studies for solo guitar, he has created a new playing technique named Tapping Technique, which exploits timbre, pitch, texture and complex rhythmic designs. He has received commissions and awards from important organizations such as the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Fromm Music Foundation, the Rio Arte Foundation, and fellowships from the Brazilian Government and Columbia University, among others, and has won two guitar composition competitions.

Some recent achievements include Elastics II and Percussion Study V performed by the Linea Ensemble in Strasbourg (France), and the premiere of Antropofagia at World Music Days 2006 in Stuttgart by the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin. He believes that with these Philharmonic commissions, “Alan Gilbert and Magnus Lindberg want to touch base with music that does not make concessions to expectations, explores new modes of articulating musical discourse and novel techniques for playing, and shows a desire to re-focus hearing—amplifying its conventions and creating energy, joy, and adventure.”