Title: Antropofagia
Commission: 1998
Completed: 2001
Instrumentation: electric guitar and chamber orchestra
Premiere Location: Berlin
Premiere Ensemble: Kammerensemble Neue Musik
Notes:

Composer and virtuoso guitar player Kampela is the winner of the 1995 International Guitar Composition Competition (Caracas, Venezuela) and winner of the 1998 Lamarque-Pons Guitar Composition Competition (Montevideo, Uruguay). He has received commissions and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation (2014), Collegium Novum Zurich (2013), DAAD (Artist-in-Residence Berliner Künstlerprogramm 2012–13), The New York Philharmonic (2009), Koussevitzky Foundation (2007), Fromm Music Foundation (1998), ISCM/World Music Days Stuttgart 2006, Germany, Rio-Arte Foundation, Brazil (1999) and fellowships from the Brazilian Government (CNPq) and Columbia University (1990–1998), among many others.

Kampela has broken new ground in two particular ways: first, in his native country he has fused popular and vernacular styles with contemporary textural techniques. His 1988 CD Epopéia e Graça de uma Raça em Desencanto… (‘Epic and Grace…’) uses popular music forms deconstructing samba, jazz, musical theater, with new music’s resources creating a true hybrid genre. Second, working with new extended-techniques for acoustic instruments. In his series of Percussion Studies for solo guitar (1989–present), Kampela has created an entirely new playing technique. He is currently considered one of the most important innovators of the guitar. He subsequently extended these techniques to diverse acoustic instruments creating complex compositional designs based on ergonomics and mortoric considerations. Several Doctorate thesis across the globe have been written about Kampela’s music, theory and extended-techniques principally the ones focusing on his theoretical ideas of Micro-Metric Modulation and on his Percussion Studies for guitar (i.e. Graziela Bortz (2003), Paulino de Oliveria Neto (2010), Marlon Titre (2013), Fernando Cury (2006 Masters/2014 Doctorate), among many others).