School of Music Visiting Artist
Contemporary Vocal Techniques, Repertoire, and Performance class
Monday October 31st, 4:00 p.m. - 5:50 p.m. PST (Los Angeles Time)
Tuesday November 1st, 1:00 a.m. - 2:50 a.m. CET (Madrid Time)
Fátima Miranda was born in Salamanca and lives in Madrid. She is a singer-performer and composer, from 1983 to today she carries out research work on the experimental voice and vocal music of traditional cultures. Fleeing from comfortable stereotypes, she combines Eastern and Western vocal techniques and those of her own invention, conceiving the voice as a wind and percussion instrument installed in her own body. This has allowed her to develop a register of more than four octaves that she puts at the service of creation, VOCAL ART and an entire musical language of her own in which the borders between singing, poetry, theater, composition, improvisation and interpretation are blurred. In her concerts, a single voice in symbiosis with a significant poetic, gestural, visual, dramatic and humorous component moves us to the depths.
She has a degree in Art History, she researches in the field of contemporary art and architecture and has published two books on these topics. Her interest in the avant-garde led her to pay special attention to performance-art, video-art and minimalist music.
Between 1982 and 1989 she directed the Fonoteca of the Complutense University of Madrid and in 1985 she received the National Prize for Culture and Communication granted by the Ministry of Culture for her book La Fonoteca. Glimpsing the unlimited possibilities of the voice and discovering in hers an unsuspected and precious potential, she decided to explore it to its fullest consequences, giving her life a radical turn. Going deeper into unknown and distant vocal cultures while she was studying lyrical singing, would allow her to put some and other vocal techniques, usually considered incompatible, in a rich and unprejudiced dialogue with the avant-garde, contributing her own new musical language. In 1987-1988 she received a scholarship from the Juan March Foundation to study in Paris. She has studied with the Japanese singer Yumi Nara, Mongolian diphonic singing with Tran Quang Haï, Dhrupad Singing from India with the eminent Dagar family and with Uday Bhawalkar, Muhgam Singing from Azerbaijan, with Fargana and Alim Qasimov, Persian Classical Singing (currently) with Mahsa Vahdat and bel canto with several professors, managing to put some and other techniques usually considered incompatible in rich coexistence with the avant-garde.
Among other awards and scholarships, she was invited by DAAD (Berliner Künstlerprogramm des Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst), as artist-in-residence in the city of Berlin) and she received the IV Premio Intenazionale Demetrio Stratos. In 2018 she is distinguished with the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts. She founded with Llorenç Barber in the 80s the Mundana Music Workshop and the Flatus Vocis Trio. From the 1990s to today, she has created performance-concerts for solo voice: Las Voces de La Voz, Concierto en Canto, ArteSonado, Cantos Robados and Living Room Room and as a duo perVERSIONES y aCuerdas released on LPs, CD or DVD. Her work has circulated on stages around the world.