Miguelángel Clerc Parada - Experimental Music Composer, Performer and Researcher

Miguelángel Clerc Parada (Chile/Netherlands), PhD, is a researcher, performer and experimental music composer. His work explores the relations and tensions that arise between music and its sonic environment. Clerc Parada seeks to blur the artistic object and to achieve a multi-directed sensory experience that exposes the multiple forces that interact with the artistic space. Immersion, interdisciplinary methods and the integration of the body in compositional processes are a central part of his artistic work.

 

Clerc Parada has composed music for soloists and ensembles from Europe and the Americas, some as the Nieuw Ensemble, Ensemble Klang, Ensemble Modelo62, Het Nederlands Saxofoon Octet, Het Balletorkest (NL), Ensemble Taller de Música Contemporánea (CL), Schlagquartett Köln (DE), among others. Since the late 2000s he has regularly collaborated as a composer and sound designer in numerous contemporary dance productions, with choreographers such as Astrid Boons, Pedro Goucha Gomes, Marina Mascarell, Dimo Milev, Loïc Perela, Ivan Perez and Heidi Vierthaler, among others. His individual works and collaborations have been presented in diverse festivals, theaters and universities, some such as the Gaudeamus Festival, Julidans, Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, Paradiso, Theater Rotterdam, Nederlands Dans Theater, Korzo Theater (NL), Dans I Nord, Opera of Gothenburg (SE), Mercat de les Flors,  Compañia Nacional de Danza (ES), Fringe Festival, London Biennale (UK), state theaters of Heidelberg, Sarre, Trier and Bielefeld (DE), GAM (CL), among others.

 

His music has received the Proms Prize 2006 in Paradiso (NL) for the piece Paradiso's Pendulums composed in collaboration with Grzegorz Marciniak. He was selected for the Gaudeamus Composition Competition 2008 for What About Woof? for five percussionists. In 2011 he was nominated for Premios Altazor (CL) for Eufotica for six percussionists.

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Clerc Parada holds a PhD in artistic research from Leiden University and Orpheus Institute in Ghent (docARTES doctoral program). His doctoral research explores various perspectives on the term immersion, and its relation with, and transformation through, his composer's practice. Immersion through music is proposed as a transitional experience that exposes and interrelates multiple layers of reality, questioning critically the tendency to think immersion as an experience within a particular or self-contained space.

 

Since 2023 he is a member of CORPoREAL research group at the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp.