Michelle Agnes Magalhaes (Brazil-France) is a composer, improviser, and researcher. Her practice spans instrumental, orchestral, vocal, chamber, and interactive electronic music. Her music moves beyond stylistic boundaries, reaching for the essential core of musical experience—listening as a form of expansion, in the transits between the audible and the unseen.
Her compositional approach conceives the musical score as a living web—anchored in bodily knowledge and experience—that remains open to internal and external interactions. Her scores create "conditions" for the emergence of sound, revealing them indirectly through a musical architecture of openness. This numinous quality transforms notation into a system that breathes, inviting performers into a space where the written becomes lived experience.
Notable works include Mobile (2012), which reinvents the piano's sonic possibilities through a poetics of transcendence, mutation, and openness. The listener experiences an internal transformation moving towards a multidimensional expansion: "an exit towards the cosmos" (Pascale Criton). In Symphonia Botanica, the orchestra becomes a metaphor for a living ecosystem.
Her interdisciplinary collaborations include the art film Before the Volcanoes Sing with visual artist Clarissa Tossin and archaeologist Jared Katz, featuring 3D-printed pre-Columbian instruments; and Constella(c)tions (2019) with Frédéric Bevilacqua (IRCAM)—an interactive musical experience where audiences shape the sonic environment through their connected devices and collective presence.
She has performed as pianist and improviser in duo with Luca Piovesan (Rai(z)e), creating music that integrates field recordings, expanded accordion, prepared piano, and objects. She has also recorded several albums in duo with double bassist Celio Barros, bridging composed and free jazz.
Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2017-2018) in music composition and UNESCO-Aschberg fellow (2003), her projects have been supported by institutions including Siemens Foundation, IRCAM, FAPESP, Venice Biennale, Camargo Foundation, Diaphoniques, Impuls Neue Musik, Institut Français, EMPAC, Villa Sträuli, Royaumont Abbey, European Commission, STARTS, CAPES, and the Ministries of Culture of Brazil, France, and Norway.
She has collaborated extensively with ensembles, orchestras, and artists in the Americas and Europe—L'Itinéraire, Soundinitiative, 2e2M, Lovemusic, Talea Ensemble, Accroche Note, Multilatéral, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Abstraït, Percorso Ensemble, Quarteto Prometeo, Zaide Quartet, Promenade Sauvage, Der/Gelbe/Klang, Choeur en Scène, Vertixe Sonora, TaG Neue Musik, Linea, Duo Xamp, PHACE, Zafraan, Goiás Philharmonic Orchestra, São Paulo Municipal Symphony Orchestra, Croatian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra, Inhotim Orchestra, University of São Paulo Chamber Orchestra...
Currently artistic researcher at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels (Erasmus University College), professor at Francis Poulenc Conservatory in Paris, and artistic co-director of Soundinitiative ensemble.
Music, dreamed embodied abstractions. Music, laboratory forged between listening, motor experience, nature, and the symbolic.
The seeds of abstraction grow in the soil of physical experience. Composition is above all a gesture, an expression of life.
My pieces embody principles of interconnectedness, integrating a diverse array of musical practices. Openness and listening become a form of knowledge, taking residence in soul-bodies to enliven beings.
My scores are open pathways, structures to resonate angelic voices and numinous polyphonies.