Barbara Varassi Pega
artist, pianist, arranger, composer, researcher and educator
Netherlands (residence), Argentina, Italy (citizenship)
research interests: music, education, composition, arrangements, Film-making, films, film music, film score, interdisciplinarity, Arts, artistic research, tango music, events, installation
affiliation: Codarts University for the Arts, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Fontys University of Fine and Performing Arts, Tilburg, the Netherlands.
en
Bárbara Varassi Pega is a Rotterdam based artist, pianist, arranger, composer, researcher, film maker and educator born in Rosario, Argentina. Specialised in River Plate tango music, she has toured the world with diverse ensembles, recorded several CDs and published articles related to her fields of expertise.
She has created works including music, theatre, dance, puppets, fine arts, animation and audiovisuals, and is currently working on inter and transdisciplinary projects with international artists.
She is the author of The Art of Tango, a unique book with a companion website on tango performance, arrangement and composition published in 2021 by renowned Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. She currently works at Codarts University of the Arts, Rotterdam and at Fontys University of Fine and Performing Arts, Tilburg. She obtained two Bachelor degrees in piano, at the Instituto Provincial del Profesorado de Música in Rosario (1998) and the Conservatorio Statale di Musica Giuseppe Verdi, Milan, Italy (2003). In 2009 she completed a Master of Music at Codarts University of the Arts, Rotterdam and in 2014 a PhD trajectory at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University. She completed studies in composition at the Conservatoire de musique, de danse et d'art dramatique du Pays de Montbéliard, France, 2015.
research
activities
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Doctor of Arts
(2010)
connected to: Polifonia
Degree: Doctorate, Leiden University (Netherlands), Orpheus Institute (Belgium), recipient: Barbara Varassi Pega
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“Creating and recreating tangos: Artistic processes in modern tango music”.
Polifonia project, Principal Investigator: Barbara Varassi Pega
Today's tango is the result of the artistic work of several great twentieth-century musicians. However, very few of them have made explicit the musical influences and innovative concepts and ideas that are implicit in their music. In spite of its ever-expanding practice and popularity, there is little knowledge about the art of creating and recreating tangos. In order to get a deeper understanding of the artistic concepts and theoretical foundations of Argentinean tango and my own creative process, my research aims to reflect on, analyse and decode the most significant arrangements and compositions of pianists Osvaldo Pugliese, Horacio Salgán and Gustavo Beytelmann, as well as bandoneonist Astor Piazzolla. Articulating this embodied knowledge will result in an original contribution that provides new insights, with which both I and other artists will be able to enrich our skills in arranging and performing tango music. It will also inspire future research and musical practice, and respond to a set of on-going issues, concerns and interests on the subject of tango.