Carlos Marecos

Carlos Marecos was born in Lisbon in 1963. He began his formal musical studies at the Academia de Amadores de Música. He earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Composition from the Lisbon School of Music (Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa) in 1999, where he studied with Eurico Carrapatoso, António Pinho Vargas, and Christopher Bochmann, among others.

He holds a PhD in Music from the University of Aveiro (2011), where he presented the thesis “Interaction between Interval Structures and Spectral Structures in Instrumental/Vocal Music,” under the supervision of João Pedro Oliveira and Christopher Bochmann, as a grant holder from the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).
He was awarded the Lopes Graça Composition Prize in 1999 for his work Canções Populares Portuguesas for soprano and piano, and, for the second consecutive year, won the same prize in the 2000 edition with the work 5 miniaturas for solo cello.
He is the musical director of the ensembles Jardins Suspensos and Ensemble Portátil, with which he has developed a regular body of work since 1998 in the field of contemporary music and in harmonizing traditional Portuguese music. He also directed the Ensemble de Música Improvável in a secondary school context between 1996 and 2014.

He currently directs the ClusterLAB ensemble at the Lisbon School of Music (ESML), with which he has developed, since 2011, regular practice-based research involving works by ESML students and researchers, as well as repertoire from the 20th and 21st centuries, featuring collaborative rehearsals among instrumentalists, singers, composers, and conductors before concert presentations.

He has received commissions from entities such as the Acarte service of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the National Ballet Company (Companhia Nacional de Bailado), the Continuum Duo, Cistermúsica – Alcobaça Music Festival, the Castelo Branco Regional Conservatory, Culturgest – Caixa Geral de Depósitos Foundation, the Castelo Branco School of Applied Arts, the Lisbon Expo 98, the DME Festival – Days of Electroacoustic Music, the Viseu International Spring Music Festival, the Estoril International Music Festival, the Lisbon Contemporary Music Group, Inestética, the Lontano Trio, Miso Music Portugal, MPMP – Patrimonial Movement for Portuguese Music, the Algarve Orchestra, the Almada Clarinet Orchestra, the Orquestra Utópica, among others.

He has regularly collaborated with theatre and contemporary dance, working with directors such as Alexandre Lyra Leite, João Brites, José Russo, Laurinda Chiungue, Luís Miguel Cintra, Paulo Lages, and Raul Atalaia, and with choreographers including Madalena Victorino, Sasha Waltz, Sofia Silva, Vera Mantero, and Victor Hugo Pontes.
His music has been performed in Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Czechia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, and the USA.

Since 2002, he has developed a regular body of work as a composer in the field of contemporary opera, with works including:

La Serva Padrona / A Criada Patroa (2002), a modern version with its own orchestration and staging by Paulo Lages of the intermezzo musicale by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi;

Caminho ao Céu (2003), based on a poem by Teresa Duarte Martinho, staged by Paulo Lages and commissioned by Culturgest for its tenth anniversary, under the musical direction of Cesário Costa;

O FIM – Ópera Íntima (2004), a chamber opera with a libretto by Paulo Lages based on a play by António Patrício, under the direction of Humberto Castanheira;

branco, branco, branco (2022), based on sentences from Blindness by José Saramago, in its 2024 stage version, featuring soprano Laura Alves and the ESML ClusterLab ensemble, under the stage and musical direction of Carlos Marecos;

Clepsydra (2024), a chamber opera based on the poem ‘Branco e vermelho’ by Camilo with a libretto and staging by Alexandre Lyra Leite, featuring soprano Joana Manuel and baritone Rui Baeta, under the musical direction of Carlos Marecos;

Caminho ao Céu – Cenário Gaza, in a new 2025 stage version by Carlos Marecos based on the same poem by Teresa Duarte Martinho, featuring sopranos Catarina Martins and Maria João Pacheco, with the ESML ClusterLab ensemble. This version seeks to transpose some of the images and postures of the Via Sacra onto the bodies of the innocent victims of unjust wars, where the setting is inevitably Gaza.

He is a lecturer and researcher in the field of Composition at the Lisbon School of Music (ESML), where he currently serves as director. He is an integrated member of CESEM at the ESML/IPL hub, developing various research lines such as contemporary opera, post-opera, music for specific spaces, and other scenographic-musical practices that intersect composition, space, and performativity.