Paulo de Assis

Biography

Paulo de Assis combines musical practice (as a pianist of the classical repertoire and experimental performer), musicological expertise on 20th century Western Art Music, publishing experience (as author and editor), and wide-ranging transdisciplinary interests in contemporary philosophy and epistemology. His work over the last decades has been devoted to artistic research: he was the Principal Investigator (PI) of a European Research Council (ERC) grant (2013–2018), he founded the international conference series Deleuze and Artistic Research (DARE), and initiated a book series on 'Artistic Research' at Rowman & Littlefield International (London/New York). He is regularly invited for keynote speeches, evaluation committees, review panels, PhD external examinations, masterclasses, and performances. He works at the Orpheus Research Centre in Music at the Orpheus Institute Ghent.
Between 2013 and 2018, he was the Principal Investigator of the ERC project "Experimentation versus Interpretation: Exploring New Paths in Music Performance in the Twenty-First Century" (MusicExperiment21), hosted at the Orpheus Institute.
Previously, he studied piano with Vitaly Margulis and Michel Béroff at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg i. Br. (Germany), and with Alexis Weissenberg in Verbier and Engelberg (Switzerland). He has a PhD in music analysis on the works of Luigi Nono (Aveiro/Venice/Salzburg, 1999–2004; supervised by Jürg Stenzl and advised by André Richard, João Pedro Oliveira, and Wolfgang Motz). Between 2003 and 2005, following a commission by the Foundation Giorgio Cini (Venice), he completed Camillo Togni's unfinished piano concerto, which he also premiered at the theatre La Fenice in Venice (2006). Between 2009 and 2012, he was Research Fellow at the Centre for the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music (CESEM) at the Universidade Nova in Lisbon. Since 2015, he has been a guest professor at the DART doctoral program at the Gurska Centre for Artistic Research in Madrid.
He has served as a panel member for the European Research Council, and he is President of the evaluation panel "Arts, Design and Architecture" at the Swiss National Foundation in Bern.
In addition to many edited volumes, he has authored "Logic of Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance Through Artistic Research" (LUP, 2018), and "Luigi Nonos Wende" (Wolke Verlag, 2006).