Gilberto Mendes

Mendes was born in Santos. He attended the Santos Conservatory from 1941 to 1948, where he studied harmony with Savino de Benedictis and piano with Antonietta Rudge. He later studied composition under Cláudio Santoro in 1954 and under George Olivier Toni from 1958–1960. In the 1962 and 1968 he attended the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music where he attended classes given by Pierre Boulez, Henri Pousseur, and Karlheinz Stockhausen (Béhague 2001).

Mendes's compositions include cantatas, motets, orchestral music, incidental music, solo and chamber pieces, and some avant-garde works. Most of them are published by Alain Van Kerckhoven Editeur.

In 1965, he founded the Santos New Music Festival. In the 1970s and 1980s, he taught at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the University of Texas (Béhague 2001), then was professor of music at the University of São Paulo (USP).

• Béhague, Gerard. 2001. "Mendes, Gilberto (Ambrósio Garcia)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
• Randel, Don M., The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music. Harvard, 1996, p. 576.