Michelle Agnes Magalhaes (Brazil-France) is a composer, improviser, and researcher whose practice spans instrumental, orchestral, vocal, chamber, and interactive electronic music. Her work searches for the essential core of musical experience.
Her compositional approach conceives the musical score as a living web, open to internal and external interactions. Anchored in embodied knowledge, her scores create conditions for sound to emerge—music as an architecture of movable forms. Her notation systems breathe, remaining open to the numinous and inviting performers into a discovery journey. A playful experience of reality, an experimentation of the subtle within matter. The symbolic as a key to access the spiritual.
Notable works include Mobile (2012), which reinvents the piano's sonic possibilities through a poetics of mutation and transcendence. "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 polyphonic listening of the world.
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 body participation and relations.
As a pianist, the piano has always been her laboratory and metaphor—a space where the tactile aspect of sound production becomes inseparable from her mode of expression. She has performed 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 aesthetics.
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 across the Americas and Europe—L'Itinéraire, Soundinitiative, 2e2M, Lovemusic, Trio Abstrakt, Talea Ensemble, Accroche Note, Multilatéral, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Abstraï, 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, among others.
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.