Born in Sao Paulo - Brazil, Celio Vasconcellos is an auto-didatic musician. He has researched over years Afro-Brazilian music, Afro-Cuban music, north and south Indian classical music, and addittionaly in the 1990s studied in Berlin, Germany piano jazz with Aki Takase; classical counterpoint,harmony and computer music with Orm Finnendahl; contemporary music and composition with Walter Zimmermann, and in The Hague, Netherlands computer music with Clarence Barlow.

He has also received a variety of degrees and certifications in computer sciences and related management of technology disciplines.

He has performed in Europe and Latin America and his performances include real time interactive software applications connected through a computer network with electronic percussive interfaces like : Percussion Pad (Roland SPD 11 and 21), Hand Percussion Pad (Roland HPD-15), Zendrum, Yamaha Disklavier, and Playola system.


ME ABOUT MYSELF

Well, I think everything started many and many years ago. I was having some acoustical illusions like hearing concatenated sounds, which could never be played by a human being. Ironically, it took the advent of the deterministic tool "par excellence" namely the computer, to cause me to rethink the whole matter.

With mathematical models it is possible to achieve the harmonic structures those over years were stored in my head. The result of these sounds I have compared like accurate predictions of planetary motions and tides. Beyond that all that I have feeling was like words such as "chaos", "order", "simple" and "complex".
When I am asked what kind of music I perform, I am no longer able to give a definition, I prefer to tell a story.... What I feel is like the dissolving of the dualism between composer (active) and material (passive), between subject and object, which is taking place in my work and in myself: I feel as though I were a channel through which sound waves pass, as though I were a dynamic filter... Music coming from other cultures enters my music and leads me do things which I would have never done as composer up to a few years ago... It is as though I was becoming more transparent, some pieces I no longer claim as mine, I leave them to live as they are, others instead are profoundly transformed after they have transformed me.