Felipe Lara’s work ranges from orchestral to popular Brazilian music, and engages in producing new musical contexts by means of reinterpreting and translating acoustical and extra-musical properties of familiar source sonorities into project-specific forces.
His music has been recently commissioned by leading ensembles and institutions such as the Arditti Quartet, Brentano Quartet, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Ensemble InterContemporain, Ensemble Modern, Helsinki Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, Los Angeles Philharmonic and São Paulo Symphony Orchestra. It has been performed by the Amazonas Philharmonic, Ensemble Recherche, Ilan Volkov, JACK Quartet, Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, Mivos Quartet, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Peter Eötvös and Thomas Adès.
The recipient of a 2015 Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship from Harvard University, Felipe has been awarded a Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award (2021), Prêmio Concerto (São Paulo, 2021) and a New Jersey Council for the Arts Fellowship (2020).
Lara is an Assistant Professor and Chair of the Composition Department at Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute. Having previously taught at Boston Conservatory at Berklee and the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University, he was Visiting Lecturer at Harvard’s Department of Music. He holds a PhD in Music Composition from New York University (Graduate Scholl of Arts and Science).