DR. PEDRO HENRIQUES DA SILVA IS A PORTUGUESE COMPOSER, MULTI-INSTRUMENTALIST, PROFESSOR, AND LECTURER IN VARIOUS FIELDS OF MUSIC, ARTS, AND SCIENCES. HE IS A MEMBER OF THE NEW YORK UNIVERSITY FACULTY IN COMPOSITION, CLASSICAL GUITAR, MANDOLIN, BANJO, AND SITAR. HE ALSO PRESENTS MASTER CLASSES AND LECTURES INTERNATIONALLY AT MUSEUMS, UNIVERSITIES, AND INSTITUTIONS ON A VARIETY OF TOPICS RANGING FROM MUSIC AND PHYSICS, ART, MUSIC TECHNOLOGY; WITH SOLD-OUT COURSES AT MUSEUM OF MODERN ART (NYC).
Dr. Pedro Henriques da Silva is a Portuguese composer of concert and film music, a multi-instrumentalist, professor, and lecturer in various fields of music, arts, and sciences. His numerous awards include the 2015, 2016 and 2020 ASCAP Plus Award (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers), the 2017 International Portuguese Music Awards (IPMA) for Best Instrumental Performance, the Best Emerging Filmmaker Documentary Award at the American Pavilion at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, and the Jury and Audience Awards at the 2021 South By Southwest Film Festival. His film music has been in the official selection of over forty film festivals, including the above and the Venice Biennale and Sundance Film Festival in 2020.
He is a member of the New York University faculty in composition, classical guitar, mandolin, banjo, and sitar. He also presents master classes and lectures internationally at museums, universities, and institutions on a variety of topics ranging from music and physics, art, and music technology, with sold-out courses at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC).
In April 2016, he received the great honor of performing and arranging music for the Orchestra and Choir of the Swan for the 400th anniversary memorial of Shakespeare’s death at his church, the Holy Trinity Church of Stratford-upon-Avon, UK, which was attended by esteemed Shakespearean actors, members of parliament, and members of the royal family. After this performance, Pedro and his wife Lucia Caruso were selected by the Orchestra of the Swan to be their composers and artists-in-residence for 2016-19. He was commissioned a ballet by the José Limón Dance Company, which premiered in April 2014 with all sold-out performances at the Joyce Theater in New York City. Pedro performed and recorded his own works as a soloist with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, the London Metropolitan Orchestra, and the Orchestra of the Swan in the UK, and Orchestre Lamoureux in Paris. He has also been commissioned to write and perform orchestral and chamber music by the Ahae foundation at the Jardin des Tuileries and Louvre Museum in Paris, Versailles Palace, Grand Central Station in New York, Magazzini del Sale in Venice, and Kew Royal Palace in London.
He was commissioned a cycle of five songs for soprano, choir and orchestra, “Echoes of Nature” in 2014, and the first concerto for Portuguese guitar and orchestra in history in 2017, both by the Ahae Foundation and the Sorel Foundation. In 2019, he was commissioned to compose and album of Shakespeare songs by Sue and Allen Rogers. His Portuguese guitar concerto had its world premiere on December 5th 2017 with Orchestra of the Swan in Stratford-upon-Avon, UK, at the Stratford Arts House, and it was recorded with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields at the Abbey Road Studios in London in July 2019, in both occasions with Pedro as a soloist. Both albums of songs “Echoes of Nature” and “Shakespeare Songs” had their world premiere and recording in June 2019 with Orchestra of the Swan in Stratford-upon-Avon, also at the Holy Trinity Church, with soprano Laetitia Spitzer, conducted by the Royal Shakespeare Company Music Director Bruce O’Neil.
Pedro and his wife, Lucía Caruso, are the composers and stars of the 2018 documentary, Death Metal Grandma. The film had its world premiere at SXSW Film Festival, was featured in the front pages of the New York Times’ Op-Docs, Washington Post, the Atlantic, etc., and was screened in over forty different film festivals, including Aspen Shortsfest, Toronto Hot Docs, NYC Docs, and the American Pavilion at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Best Emerging Filmmaker Documentary Award.
He also appears in the 2021 documentary, “Forte”, a film about three groundbreaking women in the arts. Lucía was asked to be one of the three women and to compose the score. Pedro orchestrated and composed additional music.
Pedro and Lucia are co-owners of Light & Sound Scoring, a New York based film music company. Collectively, the two have recorded for many films, TV and streaming series including: two scores for Oscar-winning director Michel Gondry (“Be Kind Rewind,” “Interior Design” from the “Tokyo” triptych), as well as recordings with acclaimed film composer Jean-Michel Bernard (“The Science of Sleep,” “Human Nature”). He has scored several award-winning projects, including “4 Feet High” (2021) for Arte France, “Motel X” (2020) by Christine Shrum, “Death Metal Grandma” (2018), and “Tijuana nada más...” (2009) by Yolanda Pividal and Carmen Vidal, the winner of a student Oscar. He has also written the music for Richard Témtchine’s “How to Seduce Difficult Women” (2009), and two new scores for silent masterpieces by Georges Méliès for full orchestra and choir: “Trip to the Moon” and “Joan of Arc” in 2016.
Pedro’s compositions and performances have taken him to over a dozen countries across four continents: throughout the US, Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, Argentina, UK, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, Hungary, Denmark, Finland, Israel, South Korea, and India. He has performed at the world’s preeminent concert halls: Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, (le) Poisson Rouge, and MoMA in New York; Kennedy Center in Washington DC; Musée du Louvre, Jardin des Tuileries, and Versailles in France; Monserrate Palace, and Centro Cultural de Belém in Portugal; Auditorio Silvestre Revueltas in Mexico City; Kew Royal Palace in London, and Bartók Radio in Budapest, Hungary among many others.
At Carnegie Hall, Pedro has had many performances in both the Isaac Stern Auditorium and Weill Hall: as a soloist, as part of an ensemble, and as a composer. After having written dozens of orchestral works, 16 of them were commissioned by the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas. He has performed with them as a soloist, as well as with other orchestras such as the Pittsburgh Symphony, the London Metropolitan Orchestra, the Orchestre Lamoureux in Paris, and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields — arguably the finest chamber orchestra in the world. He has collaborated with members of illustrious orchestras – London Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and New York Philharmonic – and has recorded his orchestral and chamber works at some of the world’s greatest studios: Abbey Road Studio 1 with Grammy-winning producer Stephen McLaughlin, British Grove Studios, New York University’s Dolan Studios, and Legacy Studios in New York.
Pedro is the Music Director of the Manhattan Camerata, which he co-founded in 2009 with Lucía Caruso. The Manhattan Camerata is an innovative chamber orchestra that performs transclassical music – a term Lucía Caruso coined to describe a style based on classical music techniques and instruments, incorporating improvisation and elements from different cultures around the world, integrating Western classical and world instruments in a range of styles and genres. The orchestra counts as its members three Grammy-nominees including Daniel Binelli – arguably the greatest living bandoneon player. The Manhattan Camerata won an International Portuguese Music Award for Best Instrumental Performance in 2017.
He completed a bachelor’s degree in classical guitar studying with Oren Fader, and holds a master’s degree and a doctorate in composition studying with Nils Vigeland and Richard Danielpour at the Manhattan School of Music. He wrote his doctoral thesis – “Modal Relations and Classification” – on modes and scales from all over the world, classifying, researching and analyzing over 2000 scales from four different standpoints: acoustics, ethnomusicology, music history and set-theory. Some of the modal systems he investigated are: Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, Indonesian, Persian, Turkish, Ancient Greek, Ecclesiastical, as well as African and Latin American music. Furthermore, he studied sitar in India in 2001 and 2002 with Neeraj Prem, who is a disciple of Ustad Vilayat Khan’s gharana – the most respected musician in India when he was alive.
Pedro has given master classes and lectures in the fields in which he specializes: composition, ethnomusicology, tuning, music and physics, music and the visual arts, Wagner, Messiaen, film scoring, John Williams’ leitmotif system, music technology, and guitar, in the US, Mexico, Argentina, and Portugal.
His acoustical investigations have led him to explore the possibilities of electronic instruments and software to create microtonal music, and to reproduce the subtleties of historic and non-Western tuning systems. To that effect, he has explored the hundreds of tuning systems of Logic, Scala, and several iPhone applications, and is a proponent of Hermode tuning and custom tunings.
Throughout his youth and early adulthood, his family moved to a dozen countries on five continents, which resulted in his lifelong exploration of World music and ethnomusicology. He is also a respected player on the ukulele, specializes in sitar and mandolin as well, and can play any plucked stringed instrument – having a collection of eighteen different instruments, including: sitar, bouzouki, cuatro, oud, lute, mandolin, mandola, banjo, balalaika, bass, ukulele, cavaquinho, viola braguesa, and classical, electric and Portuguese guitars. He is an innovator who plays classical music and other styles beyond fado on the Portuguese guitar, and is expanding the vocabulary of the instrument.