Ricardo Tachuchian, son of Armenian immigrants, was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1939. He is a celebrated composer, conductor, and scholar in his native Brazil and has received ample praise for his work throughout the United States, Europe, and South America. Among the most
prestigious accolades Tachuchian has received are two Fulbright fellowships and a residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy awarded by the Rockefeller Foundation. His work has been commissioned, published, and commercially recorded in Brazil and the United States and he holds a full professorship at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Tachuchian’s early work followed in the traditional, nationalistic footsteps of Brazilian classical music giant Hector Villa-Lobos, but in the seventies he began to adopt modernist leanings, concentrating on creating atmosphere and ambience. For the last two decades, Tachuchian has been committed to what he calls "the overcoming of extremes," or the development of a post-modern synthesis of the traditional and experimental in which he values texture, density, timbre, and dynamic parameters within a contrasting context of precipitous rhythms, lyric expression, and a cosmopolitan and urban flavor. His development of the "T-System" in the 1980s, a serial form of pitch control, brings his music its characteristic liminal quality between tonal and atonal ambience. Certainly, "His eclectic music projects a strong quality of craftmanship and serious artistry," as Latin American Music Review has described it.