Clotilde Rosa (1930-2017)

Clotilde Rosa (1930-2017), composer, harpist and professor, passed away on November 24, 2017 at the age of 87.

"Her creative irruption on the Portuguese musical scene is simultaneously atypical and symptomatic" - wrote Manuel Pedro Ferreira on the pages of his book “Dez Compositores Portugueses” (2007, Lisbon). Clotilde Rosa, together with Jorge Peixinho, was one of the first to bring to Portugal the experience of the famous Darmstadt Summer Courses. She awakened for composition around the age of forty five through the participation, as performer, in the Lisbon Contemporary Music Group, becoming one of the most important personalities regarding the creation and divulgation of contemporary music - she was "the Mum" for many Portuguese contemporary composers.

Clotilde Rosa's catalogue includes around 110 titles (the majority of them being published by MIC.PT): chamber music works, orchestral music, an opera, a ballet and also didactic pieces; various of them still awaiting their premiere performances. In her musical language, exercising a posture of creative freedom Clotilde Rosa did not obey any established code, using freely a symbiosis of different aesthetics – from serialism to repetitive minimalism present in works with aleatoric fragments. It was the dramatic, emotional and poetical content that Clotilde Rosa always valued most in music creation.