BIOGRAPHY
From an occasional gathering on a cold December night to share warm stories and music, B'rbicacho is born. Knot after trouble after knot, a tale never loses in the telling and it is within complicity and friendship that their music unfolds. How to combine a viola da gamba, a clarinet, a guitar and 3 voices?
Travelling from medieval times to the present, mainly focusing on music with lusophone roots, B'rbicacho creates a concert where you can taste from the most amusing portuguese traditional dance to the sweetest mazurka.
Ana Sousa
Viola da Gamba, Voice and Percussion
Born in 1987 in Lisbon, Ana starts her music studies at the age of 11 by attending piano at the Regional Conservatory in Almada, and later, singing classes, at Lisbon National Conservatory, where she has the first approach to Early Music and Viola da Gamba. During this time, Ana participated in several ensembles, for instance, the symphonic choir Lisboa Cantat and the vocal quartet In Alma, while freely exploring the instrument in laid-back atmospheres such as folk music jam sessions.
Ana graduated with a bachelor degree in Early Music from Escola Superior de Música e Artes do Espectáculo (Porto), with Xurxo Varela as her professor. She also had the opportunity to study at Hochschüle für Kunste Bremen (Germany) with professor Hille Perl. After completing a post-graduation in Advanced Studies of Polyphony, she is now finishing her Master in Pedagogy and simultaneously taking a Master in Artistic Research, specializing in historical musicology and early music transcription and editing.
Nowadays, Ana plays regularly in Early Music projects - Renaissance Ensembles and Baroque Orchestras - and is a member of historical performance ensembles Ars Luxurians and Capella Invicta. She also performs with Teatro em Caixa – a theater company dedicated to medieval recreation. She is a member of the chamber choir Anonymus where she has the opportunity to sing portuguese contemporary music, a member of the Sephardic World Music ensemble Hadras i Baranas and a co-founder member of B’rbicacho where she explores folk music.
Joana Guinea
Clarinet, Recorder, Voice and Percussion
Joana Guiné was born in 1992, in a quiet city nearby Lisbon. She started studying music at the age of 14, simultaneously studying singing, recorder and clarinet. In 2009, she moved to Lisbon and joined symphonic and chamber semi-professional choirs that explored jazz, contemporary and classical repertoire. While in Lisbon, she obtained a bachelor in Musicology in the NOVA University of Lisbon in 2013, where she developed investigations within the ethnomusicological field, focusing on connections between music and dance, as well as in gender and music studies. Simultaneously, she studied lyrical singing with Manuela de Sá and recorder with Joana Amorim in the National Conservatory of Lisbon.
In 2015, she moved to Amsterdam to study Recorder at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. She graduated in 2020, under the guidance of Jorge Isaac, Maria Ayerza Martinez and Hester Groenleer.
In 2018, she started her studies in Classical singing with Selma Harkink, at the HKU - Utrechts Conservatorium, where she is currently studying.
In parallel to her studies, she continued developing her research skills, focusing mostly on the connections between written western music traditions and music from oral traditions. She co-founded the folk music project B’rbicacho, which focuses mainly on music and dance from traditional portuguese origins. She is also the co-founder of the folk band Hera and the duo Giesta. In 2019, Joana created her youtube channel Joaninha Wanders, focusing on the stories and history behind simple traditional songs of the world.
Stela Silva
Guitar, Cavaquinho, Voice and Percussion
Stela Silva is a musician and multi-instrumentalist and has worked for more than a decade on music teaching and artistic practices through music and dance, two areas intrinsically connected. At 11 years old, she started her musical studies in guitar, at the Regional Conservatory of Almada. Later, she attended the Music School of the National Conservatory of Lisbon, in the cello class. She enrolled in the
Bachelor of Music in the Community, in the Superior School of Music of Lisbon and Superior School of Education of Lisbon, in IPL. At the same time, she has been developing knowledge in Music and Movement, having received certification from the International Dance Council - CID UNESCO. Nowadays, she develops musical projects of community intervention and teaches, having dedicated the last 16 years to teaching music to children and to artistic and pedagogical intervention through music and dance. As a multi-instrumentalist, she participated in several traditional musical projects, namely Sebastião Antunes and Adufe em Lisboa. She is co-founder of the musical projects Correcaminhos and B'rbicacho.
