Clarice Assad

Clarice Assad (born February 9, 1978) is a Brazilian-American composer, pianist, arranger, singer, and educator from Rio de Janeiro.

She is influenced by popular Brazilian culture, Romanticism, world music, and jazz.

She comes from a musical family, which includes her father, guitarist Sergio Assad, her uncle, guitarist Odair Assad, and her aunt, singer-songwriter Badi Assad.

Assad has performed professionally since the age of seven.

She holds a bachelor of music degree from Roosevelt University in Chicago and a master's degree in composition from the University of Michigan, where she studied composition with Michael Daugherty.

Other works include The Disappeared, a political piece for orchestra and concert band that draws on impressions of Rufina Amaya, the sole survivor of the El Mozote massacre in 1981, during the Salvadoran Civil War, and most recently, Ad Infinitum, a percussion concerto written for Dame Evelyn Glennie involving improvisational gestural techniques—such as sound painting—for the orchestra, soloist and conductor alike.

Her music has been commissioned by many institutions, performers and orchestras including Carnegie Hall, The Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo, General Electric, the Chicago Sinfonietta, and Duo Noire, to name a few.

Her works have also been recorded by some of the most prominent names in the classical contemporary music scene today, including cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, pianist Anne-Marie McDermott and oboist Liang Wang.

She has also collaborated with the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, Turtle Island String Quartet, the Aquarelle Guitar Quartet, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Louisville Symphony Orchestra, Austin Symphony Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Edmonton Symphony, as well as conductors Marin Alsop and Christoph Eschenbach, Kazuyoshi Akiyama and Carlos Miguel Prieto.

She has written extensively for active members of the new music scene including the Cavatina Duo, Takács Quartet SOLI ensemble and violinist Pekka Kuusisto.

Assad has served as composer-in-residence for KMFA, MIT, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Albany Symphony, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music and the Boston Landmarks Orchestra.

She is currently serving as the composer-in-residence for the Allentown Symphony Orchestra.

Assad's works have been published in France (Editions Lemoine), Germany (Trekel), in the United States (Virtual Artists Collective Publishing), and Brazil (Criadores do Brasil).

Assad has contributed significantly to the growing repertoire of classical guitar, having written works ranging from solos to duos (Valsas do Rio) and quartets such as the piece Bluezilian, which has become a staple of the guitar quartet repertoire.

Larger works include two concertos: O Saci-Pererê, for solo guitar and chamber orchestra, commissioned by the Harris Foundation, and Folk Tales, a concerto for two guitars and string orchestra commissioned by the Tychy Guitar Festival for the Brazil Guitar duo.

In 1993, Assad and her younger brother Rodrigo moved to France to live with their father, in a home he shared with his second wife and their child Julia.

Assad studied piano and improvisation privately with Natalie Fortin, a professor from Le Conservatoire national Supérieur de Paris, and benefited also from her father's mentorship, composing, and arranging numerous pieces.

This was a prolific period, though short-lived amidst a turbulent time.

Sergio Assad's wife, who had been battling cancer, died a year later at 38.

Assad returned to Brazil with her brother.

In Rio de Janeiro, between 1995 and 1997, Assad acted as a pianist, arranger, and keyboardist on several musicals including Tá na Hora by playwright Lucia Coelho, A Estrela Menina by Joaquim de Paula, and Doidas Folias by playwright and composer Tim Rescala.

Though passionate about music, she struggled with the decision to pursue an academic degree, due to the limited prospects in the industry in Brazil.

As she prepared to study for the entry college exams majoring in marine biology, her father Sergio had met astrophysicist Angela Olinto, and moved to Chicago.

A year later, Assad was given the opportunity to study film scoring at the Berklee College of Music, leaving Brazil in 1998.

Assad's compositions include pieces for a variety of instrumentations, including smaller works for piano and guitar as well as for large and small chamber ensembles, and 15 orchestral works.

Though the ensembles she writes for are largely classical, her voice as a composer has been heavily influenced by Brazilian music, jazz, pop, and world music.

Her overtures Nhanderú and Terra Brasilis, commissioned and premiered by the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo are examples of her Brazilian roots, drawing on Assad's knowledge of the country's folk style and the work of fellow classical composer Heitor Villa-Lobos.

Assad first came into the national spotlight in 2004, when conductor Marin Alsop programmed her violin concerto with the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music featuring Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg as the soloist.

The piece was recorded by Salerno-Sonnenberg and Marin Alsop leading the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and released on the NSS Music label when Assad was 26 years old.

Since then, Assad has been steadily commissioned, pursuing ways of incorporating her composing and performing.

Such efforts culminated in the creation of a major work: a concerto for scat singing, piano and orchestra which she wrote for herself to perform.

Scattered was premiered by the Albany Symphony under the baton of the conductor David Alan Miller, and has since been performed by many other ensembles and conductors, including the Michigan Philharmonic, Chicago Composers Orchestra and OCAM.

Earlier works influenced by Brazilian popular culture include the concerto for guitar and orchestra, O Saci-Pererê and Brazilian Fanfare, an overture for orchestra commissioned by the Chattanooga Orchestra in 2005.

She is a 2009 Latin Grammy and 2022 Grammy nominee.

Born in Campo Grande, a suburb in the west portion of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Assad is the first daughter of musician Sergio Assad and school teacher Celia Maria Vasconcelos da Cunha, who named her child after the late Brazilian-Ukrainian writer Clarice Lispector.

Assad began creating music at the age of six with the help of her father.

Assad was born with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a group of disorders that affect connective tissues, which severely limited her ability to perform musical instruments at an early age, but the condition did not affect her voice.

As a child, Assad sang numerous jingles for radio and television, as well as albums including tracks for pop star Luiz Caldas and Brazilian soul musician Hyldon.

During early adolescence, as her joints became stronger, she began playing piano mostly by ear and became interested in jazz.

The years that followed were filled with intensive training in music, piano, composition, and arranging with Sheila Zagury, Linda Bustani, and Leandro Braga.