About
Danniel Ribeiro is a Brazilian composer, electric guitarist, and researcher completing his Ph.D. in composition at UC Berkeley. His work focuses on hybrid instruments, expanded performance setups, and cultural in-betweenness in contemporary concert music, through notated chamber projects, experimental improvisation, and electronics. His music has been presented by ensembles such as JACK Quartet, Schallfeld Ensemble, and Yarn/Wire, and supported by awards including the George Ladd Prix de Paris and four Brazilian National Prizes for Classical Composition.
Bio
(500 words)
Danniel RIBEIRO is a Brazilian composer and performer from Bahia whose work treats composition as a site where instruments, bodies, and technologies are reconfigured. His practice is research driven, focusing on exploratory instrumental writing and improvisation supported by electronics, and informed by questions of cultural in-betweenness and diasporic identity. He develops hybrid performance systems in which instruments are prepared, extended, or electronically mediated, so that musical gesture, instrumentality, and materiality become central compositional parameters.
In his recent projects, Ribeiro builds piece-specific ecologies that combine tailored preparations, modified hardware, graphic and hybrid notation, practical sculptural objects, and transduced or amplified bodies. These systems are designed to reorganize the affordances of familiar instruments and to redistribute agency between performers, objects, and electronics. His music often emerges from intensive workshop processes, in which performers’ skills, habits, and embodied knowledge are treated as compositional materials rather than neutral tools.
Ribeiro’s musical roots are closely connected to the Grupo de Compositores da Bahia, where he studied with Paulo Costa Lima, Agnaldo Ribeiro, and Wellington Gomes, engaging a tradition of cultural resistance, syncretism, and experimental practice. He is a four-time recipient of the National Prize for Classical Composition from Brazil’s National Foundation of the Arts (FUNARTE), awarded in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2023, and has received additional research support in Brazil, Canada, and the United States.
Photo by Klangspuren Schwaz, 2023
His works have been commissioned or performed by ensembles including JACK Quartet, L’Instant Donné, Yarn/Wire, Schallfeld, collective lovemusic, RAGE Thormbones, Dal Niente, Vertixe Sonora, Suono Giallo, Eco, Paramirabo, and Abstrai, and have appeared at festivals and venues such as Klangspuren Schwaz, Festival Musica, Festival Empreintes, the Darmstadt Summer Course, Barcelona Modern, Banff Centre, Domaine Forget, New Music on the Point, DePaul Summer Residency for New Music, the Festival de Morelia, the Biennial for Brazilian Contemporary Music, and Sala São Paulo.
As a performer, Ribeiro focuses primarily on the electric guitar and its evolving techniques, working with prepared setups, custom tunings, transducers, and live processing. His performance practice spans improvised concerts, notated works with electronics, studio-based projects that feed back into his notation, and long-term collaborations with other musicians and artists.
Ribeiro earned his Bachelor of Music in composition from the Federal University of Bahia, his Master of Music in composition from the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, and a postgraduate specialization in instrumental and mixed composition at the Conservatoire de Strasbourg. He is currently a PhD candidate in music composition at the University of California, Berkeley, studying with Edmund Campion, Ken Ueno, Myra Melford, and Carmine Emanuele Cella. As laureate of UC Berkeley’s George Ladd Prix de Paris, he spent 2023–24 in France pursuing independent dissertation research.
Alongside his creative work, Ribeiro teaches composition, music technology, and interdisciplinary courses with a strong emphasis on inclusive pedagogy and critical listening. His teaching record includes courses in sound and music computing, music perception and cognition, contemporary music, and was recognized by UC Berkeley’s Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award in 2022.
Statement
I treat composition as a way to rethink how instruments, bodies, and technologies relate to each other. My work grows from close attention to musical gesture, instrumentality, and materiality, and from collaboration with the performers whose bodies and decisions shape each piece in real time. I am interested in how a musical event can emerge from the friction between what an instrument usually does and what it is made to do under new physical and technological conditions.
A recurring concern in my practice is embodiment. I design performance systems that place players in contact with reconfigured instruments and object-assemblages, so that their usual techniques have to be renegotiated. Prepared and repurposed instruments, shared resonant bodies, and transduced materials become sites where gesture, form, and sound interact. I often work with expanded modes of playing that encourage performers to transfer skills from one instrument or context into another, producing unfamiliar but internally coherent ways of moving and sounding.
My approach is also shaped by Afro-diasporic references and by theories of creolization and in-betweenness. Growing up in Bahia and later working across Brazil, Canada, France, and the United States, I encountered music as something that already carries multiple lineages. I try to let this condition of in-between cultural spaces become audible in the work, not as quotation, but through syncretic instrumentality, hybrid performance environments, and collaborative processes that keep different traditions in circulation rather than resolved into a single style.
Photo by Matteo Gualandi, 2025
Technology is one of the ways I probe these questions. I build context-specific electronic setups that listen to and respond to live performance, using transducers, amplification, corpus-based processing, and feedback systems. The goal is not to replace the acoustic instrument, but to create situations in which performers and technological systems co-shape the music, each constraining and expanding the other.
Finally, my compositional work is inseparable from a pedagogical and social concern. I see the composer not only as a maker of scores, but as a participant in conversations about how and why we make music, what forms of knowledge it produces, and whose experiences it centers. In teaching and in collaboration I try to make room for different musical literacies, encourage reflective listening, and connect experimental practice to broader cultural and political questions.
MORE:
-
CNMAT Profile (UC Berkeley)
Photo by Gui Machala for the Plurisons Festival, 2024
Copyright © 2025 Danniel Ribeiro