Armando José Fernandes

Armando José Fernandes was born in Lisbon, 1906. He took a degree in Engineering before having decided in 1924 to dedicate himself to music, an art form he had felt attracted to from an early age. He started his studies in 1927 at Lisbon's National Conservatory. Alexandre Rey Colaço and Lourenço Varela Cid (piano), Luís de Freitas Branco (Music Sciences) and António Eduardo da Costa Ferreira (Composition) were among his teachers. He finished the course in 1931 and was awarded the first prize in piano and also the Rodrigo da Fonseca Award. Between 1934 and 1937, with the sponsorship of the National Education Council, he developed his piano and composition studies in Paris with Alfred Cortot, Nadia Boulanger, Paul Dukas and Igor Stravinsky. Between 1940 and 1942, he taught Piano and Composition at the Music Amateurs Academy. From 1942 on he worked exclusively as a composer for the Musical Studies Department of the National Radio Broadcast Company. In 1953 he joined Lisbon's National Conservatory as a Composition teacher. He honourably retired from this position on his 70th birthday. Although his lineage, harmonically chromatic in the colours and formally neo-classic in spirit, denounces a cosmopolitan character, permeable both to the sensitivity of someone like Fauré as well as to the constructivism of someone like Hindemith, it also displays a certain kind of Portuguese inspiration, thanks to the likely search for motivation in Portuguese popular themes. He received the composition awards Moreira de Sá (Porto, Orpheon Portuense, 1944) and Círculo de Cultura Musical (Lisbon, 1946). He died in Lisbon in 1983. (photo and text from PMIC - Based on the biography included in the Catálogo Geral da Música Portuguesae, organized by Humberto d'Ávila).