Joan Arnau Pàmies

Following his formative years in local conservatories, in 2007, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts in order to pursue a bachelor’s degree at the New England Conservatory of Music. As a young composer, two events in particular had a marked impact. First, Pàmies attended a performance of renowned minimalist composer Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, which demonstrated to him that a highly structured compositional approach could result in profoundly emotional responses for the audience. Second, Pàmies had the honor of performing with Christian Wolff, who along with John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown, comprised the New York School of composers. This experience and the exposure to their ideas led Pàmies to understand that, given the right circumstances, any sound could be defined as music. After graduating, Pàmies continued his formal education and was accepted into a highly competitive graduate program at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he earned a doctorate in composition and music technology in 2016.

This outstanding academic training, which he was able to receive due to multiple merit-based scholarships, led him to develop a sophisticated understanding of music as an art form. During that time, he studied a wide array of artists whose music would significantly influence his own, including Japanese electronic composer Ryoji Ikeda, free jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor, modernist composer Brian Ferneyhough, and ambient producer Brian Eno. These, paired with some of Pàmies’s teenage icons such as Pink Floyd and Mike Oldfield, are part of the landscape of his aesthetics.

Known for their extreme technical demands and complexity, Pàmies’s pieces have been performed by prominent ensembles and soloists, including BCN 216, Chartreuse, Diamanda La Berge Dramm, Ensemble Dal Niente, Ensemble Recherche, Fonema Consort, the JACK and Arditti quartets, Jeff Gavett, Jeff Siegfried, Jessica Aszodi, Joan Martí Frasquier, Kathryn Schulmeister, Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn, Laura Cocks, Liam Hockley, Loadbang, Marc Horne, Miranda Cuckson, Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, NO_Input Ensemble, TAK Ensemble, Tessa Lark, Tony Rymer, Uusinta, Vertixe Sonora, and William Lang, at venues and festivals such as Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (United Kingdom), MATA, Resonant Bodies Festival, Spectrum, DiMenna Center, The Stone (New York), Ear Taxi, Constellation (Chicago), Center for New Music (San Francisco), Versipel New Music (New Orleans), Tsai Performance Center (Boston), Unruly Music Festival (Milwaukee), Foro Internacional de Música Nueva Manuel Enríquez (Mexico City), Ostrava New Music Days (Czech Republic), Cité Universitaire (Paris), Darmstädter Ferienkurse (Germany), Kloster Lehnin (Berlin), Intersonanzen Brandenburgisches Fest der Neuen Musik (Potsdam), National Museum Reina Sofía (Madrid), 36th Encontre Internacional de Compositors, ME_MMIX (Palma de Mallorca), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Santiago de Compostela), Cafè del Teatre (Lleida), Petit Palau, Continental, and Mixtur (Barcelona).