Bio:
Victor Gama was born in Angola and currently lives between Luanda, Lisbon and Bogota. His work of musical composition intersects areas as diverse as music, image, field recording, audio-video installation and the design of contemporary musical instruments. Gama has been commissioned work by ensembles and institutions such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Kronos Performing Arts Association, the National Museums of Scotland, the Tenement Museum in New York, Prince Claus Fonds, the Amsterdam Fonds for the Arts, the Royal Opera House of London or the Kennedy Center in Washington DC.
A graduate in Electronics Engineering and a Master's degree in Organology and Music Technology from the Sir John Cass College of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University, he was recently guest artist at the Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in California and the MIT Center for Arts Science and Technology. He composed for the Kronos Quartet, who premiered his piece 'Rio Cunene' at Carnegie Hall in New York with a European premiere at the Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon. The multimedia piece 'Vela 6911'premiered at the Harris Theater in Chicago commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra/MusicNOW and the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Vela6911 was further presented at the Dinkelspiel Auditorium in Stanford and at the Hous der Kultur der Welt in Berlin. Gama's multimedia opera '3 thousand RIVERS' commissioned by the Prince Claus Fund and the Gulbenkian Foundation premiered in Lisbon in 2016 and in Bogota in 2017. 'Aisa Tanaf: the Book of Winds' premiered in February 2017 at the Kennedy Center with musicians from the National Symphony Orchestra directed by Edwin Outwater.
Gama has been at the origin of projects such as Berimbau-Ungu with Naná Vasconcelos and Kituxitouring in Southern Africa, the Folk Songs Trio with New York musicians William Parker and Guillermo E. Brown, Odantalan with Barbararo Martinez-Ruiz and Hugo Candelario, and the Makakata Exchange in South Africa with Diso Platges and the Kalahary Surfers.
In 1997 he started Tsikaya, an online platform of musicians from the interior of Angola. Among several works, Pangeia Instruments was released by Aphex Twin on Rephlex Records, Naloga, Oceanites Erraticus and Quatro Momentos were released by his own label PangeiArt.
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
Gama's meditative solo pieces for the metallic acrux evoked both the Balinese gamelan and Cage's prepared piano, while his studies for the gleaming toha had the sophisticated simplicity of Howard Skempton or Ludovico Einaudi...
- John L. Walters, The Guardian
Fantastic desert music from radical experimentalist Victor Gama on Naloga album ...
- Louise Gray, New Internationalist
Victor Gama is a composer whose process begins with the creation of an entirely new instrument, one whose design is steeped in symbolic meaning. Concept design, the selection of materials, fabrication, and scoring is all part of the rigorous way Gama creates new music for the 21st century, blending current fabrication technologies with ideas, materials, and traditions inspired by the natural world. "The post-digital world has circled back to the object. The same technology that has dematerialized the object is working to rematerialize it,” Gama said in his lecture/demonstration at MIT. "Innovations like 3D printing, digital CAD modeling and Finite Element Analysis have brought the potential to free the instrument from the fixed design paradigm and move beyond pre-sampled digital sound libraries with controller interfaces."
- Ania Ventura, Arts Research Writer at MIT
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).