Fernando Lopes-Graca

From Wind Repertory Project
Fernando Lopes-Graça

Biography

Fernando Lopes-Graça (17 December 1906, Tomar, Portugal – 27 November 1994, Parede, Portugal) was Portuguese composer.

After beginning his music studies in his hometown, he studied at the Lisbon Conservatory and Lisbon University. He organized concerts with his fellow students and also worked as a writer on music subjects. He was a political prisoner, thus preventing him from accepting a teaching post at the Lisbon Conservatory.

In 1937, Lopes-Graça went to Paris and studied musicology. He returned to Lisbon in 1939, where he worked as a writer, musicologist, concert organizer, and choirmaster. He also taught piano, harmony, and counterpoint at the Academia de Amadores de Musica and did research into folk music.

Lopes-Graça composed a large amount of music for orchestra, four stage works, many choral works, and a great deal of music for solo voice and for solo instruments. He was influenced by Portuguese popular music, which he also studied, continuing the work of the composer and musicologist Francisco de Lacerda. He completed the Dicionário de Música (Dictionary of Music), started by his teacher, Tomás Borba, himself a composer.

He was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party and strenuously opposed the Estado Novo and its leader António de Oliveira Salazar.


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