Daughter of the musicians José Rosa and Branca Belo Carvalho Rosa, Clotilde Rosa was born in Lisbon in 1930. She took an early interest in music and started to study piano privately. She later concluded the Higher Course in Piano at the National Conservatory, having studied with Ivone Santos and Cecília Borba. She would dedicate her professional career to harp, having resumed her figured bass and ancient music interpretation studies with Macário Santiago Kastner. She was then an element of the Lisbon Minstrels. Between 1960 and 1963 she received scholarships from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Dutch Government to have private harp lessons with Phia Berghout, Jacqueline Borot and Hans Zingel, in Holland, Paris and Cologne. Following Mário Falcão’s suggestion, Clotilde Rosa played Jorge Peixinho’s Imagens Sonoras (Sound Images), which apparently brought her closer to this composer and to modern Portuguese music. The courses she attended in Darmstadt after 1963 were also decisive to the future of her career as a composer. She participated in the group organized by Jorge Peixinho that in 1970 led to the Lisbon Contemporary Music Group. However, she was still interested in the interpretation of ancient music and with Carlos Franco and Luísa de Vasconcelos formed the Trio Antiqua. She was also an element of the National Symphonic Orchestra and the National Radio Broadcast Company Orchestra, and collaborated with the S. Carlos National Theatre Orchestra and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Orchestra. Between 1987 and 1989 she lectured in Composition Analysis and Techniques at the Music School of Lisbon’s National Conservatory and was transferred to the harp class between 1989 and 2000. It was then that she introduced for the first time in Portugal contemporary music in the harp syllabus. Among her different activities, Clotilde Rosa is also a member of the Erudite Music Commission of the Portuguese Authors Society. After an invitation by Jorge Peixinho, she drafted in 1974 her first music piece in the joint project In-con-sub-sequência. She asserted herself as a composer with the 1976 piece Encontro. After Jorge Peixinhos’s suggestion, the piece was taken to the Paris International Composers Tribune by Joly Braga Santos and Nuno Barreiros. It was recorded at the National Radio Broadcast Company and got a 10th place among sixty works of thirty different countries. She also won a First prize at the National Composition Competition of Porto’s Music Workshop for her piece Variantes I (Variants I), for solo flute Despite her tendency for sound experiments, of which the pieces As quatro estações do ano (The Year’s Four Seasons) and Projecto-collage (Collage-Project) are clear examples, she never had the chance to work in a electroacoustic music studio. Her work is majorly either for voice or for acoustic instruments. (Adapted from a text by Patrícia Lopes Bastos, 2003)
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