Lígia Silva

Music started as a teenager’s hobby. In a somewhat random choice I ended up playing flute in Porto’s Conservatory, with Iwona Saiote. The challenge of mastering an instrument and a new artistic expression made me pursue my studies in a Bachelor degree at ESMAE (High School of Music and Performative Arts), 6 years later. Under the ERASMUS program I studied at the Koninklijk Vlaams Conservatorium in Belgium, with Aldo Baerten and Peter Verhoyen. Returning to Portugal I concluded a master degree on Music teaching, at Aveiro University (2011), specialized in flute, and started to work as a teacher. By this time I realized that classical music had been more a challenge than a passion and that jazz music gave me much more pleasure as a listener. So I started learning jazz in a private school and soon wanted to pursue it more seriously. As there was no flute in jazz colleges in Portugal I started learning saxophone, which seemed much easier that it actually was. Some years of hard work enabled me to get a jazz bachelor degree, at ESMAE in 2017, and add not only a new musical language but also a new instrument to my creative and performative options. Along the years I worked with different chamber and jazz groups, a few composers, and made part of some disk record projects. Between 2017 and 2019 I dedicated to a jazz sextet with my own original songs and arrangements and to starting a swing band “The bouncing brothers”. Since September 2019 I’m in a PhD course, in Coimbra University, on Artistic Studies, where I’ve been studying the processes of music perception (how we hear a group of sounds and give a musical meaning to it) and how it affects our time perception.