João Luiz Rezende, a two-time Latin Grammy-nominee guitarist, educator, and composer, is bringing his passion for collaboration and mentorship to the Yale School of Music (YSM).
As an associate professor adjunct of guitar, Rezende teaches classical guitar. He replaces Benjamin Verdery, who retired last spring after four decades of teaching at YSM.
A native of Brazil, Rezende is a versatile musician with an extensive repertoire of classical, Brazilian, and world music. His many arrangements and compositions have been widely performed and recorded in the United States, Europe, and Brazil. His most recent work, "Saravá," for string quartet and guitar, was premiered at the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra's concert hall and awarded one of Brazil's most prestigious awards for the arts: the APCA 2024 prize for best new work.
He has recorded more than 20 albums, including a recent solo release, "Os Guardiães da Magia," which features world premieres of guitar works written especially for him by Cuban composer and guitarist Leo Brouwer. In addition, his recording of the Brazilian composer Sérgio Assad's landmark "24 studies for guitar," also dedicated to Rezende, will be released in 2026. Working with these two important composers was a great honor, Rezende said.
Rezende holds a master's degree from Mannes College and a doctoral degree from Manhattan School of Music. He is the director of chamber music at CUNY-Hunter College, and a recipient of the 2023 CUNY Feliks Gross award in recognition of his outstanding scholarship.
He sat down with Yale News to talk about how guitar lured him away from the trumpet, his travels across the U.S. in an award-winning guitar duo, and his aspirations for his time at YSM. The conversation has been condensed and edited.
I read that you began playing music at a very young age. How young were you and what did you play?
João Luiz Rezende: I started learning how to read and write music when I was eight. I learned how to read and write music before I learned how to play an instrument. My first instrument was a trumpet, which I played in a school band mostly because my father was and still is a huge fan of American jazz. He wanted me to play some of the tunes that we enjoyed listening to, like Miles Davis'. But for me as a kid, the trumpet was a hard instrument to play well. I had to work on scales and arpeggios, and it was a very hard thing to do. Meanwhile, my friends from school and from the neighborhood were having fun singing and playing outside with guitars! I was studying theory and solfege and trying to blow my trumpet to sound decent. My friends with guitars didn't have any guitar instruction. They knew two or three chords, and they could entertain everyone, because with those three chords, they could play 30 songs. And that's something about the guitar that is really great. So, I borrowed a guitar from my friend and started learning it on my own. And I happily quit the trumpet.
Your mentor was Henrique Pinto, an influential and much-celebrated guitar instructor in Brazil. Would you talk about that relationship?
Rezende: He was like a second father to me. I started with him when I was a teenager in São Paulo, and I studied with him for 10 years. I would have lessons with him twice a week, sometimes three times a week. It was a very intense relationship. Beautiful. And Henrique was the one who, besides teaching me how to play guitar, inspired me to become a teacher. He had so much passion for teaching and made me see the value of teaching guitar and teaching music. How beautiful that was. I should say also that he was really a master teacher. He taught generations and generations of the greatest Brazilian guitar players.
What aspects of his teaching style have you adopted?
Rezende: The first thing is the interest in the student as a human being. Because when you're a teacher, you're also a role model, hopefully. You want to know your student as a person, not just as a musician. Henrique, instead of imposing all his knowledge upon me, and prescribing some kind of repertoire just because everyone should play it, was more interested at first in knowing things like what I liked to do when I was not playing the guitar. What kind of food did I like? What time did I like to wake up? Did I like sports? What type of movies? Things like that. This would allow him to have a better assessment of what material would work best for me. The second aspect of his teaching that I adopted was his insistence on making the students have a very good tone and playing legato.
Why is knowing your students' other interests important in helping them become better musicians?
Rezende: We know that to be a well-rounded musician it's important to play a lot of things and to cover a lot of ground in terms of styles and techniques. But I think it's important to know the person as a human being because sometimes that might alert you to certain types of music that the student will relate to right away. A style of music or a composer. I really love the pianists, and I have many recordings of Martha Argerich [the Argentine pianist]. The way she plays Prokofiev's piano concerto is just incredible because she relates to the composer on a personal level. So as a teacher when you know the person at a deeper level, you're able to almost tailor the right repertoire to the person's needs.
Tell me about Brasil Guitar Duo, a duo you formed with Douglas Lora. Is it still going?
Rezende: It's not. We retired, after 27 years of playing together. We started playing as a duo when we were teenagers, both studying with Henrique. In 2006 we won the Concert Artist Guild Competition, which is a major competition in the United States, and it changed our lives. Suddenly, two young guitarists from Brazil, who were doing relatively well by Brazilian standards, win this major competition and start touring the U.S. Through Concert Artist Guild, through my work as a performer and a teacher traveling in this country, I got to know the United States better than I know Brazil! We had a very productive and prolific career, concertizing and collaborating with other musicians, such as Paquito D'Rivera and Yo-Yo Ma. We toured with Paquito in the United States, and with Yo-Yo Ma in Cuba. That was one of the highlights of my career.
You've been a prolific composer as well. What styles of music are you especially interested in, and do you plan to further that composition work at Yale?
Rezende: Yes, I do. There's so much opportunity for collaboration and access to incredible musicians, both faculty and students. That's something that excites me and is pushing me to write more. Things that interest me - I like vocal music a lot and I'm obsessed with the madrigals of Carlo Gesualdo. When I was a student, I sang in a madrigal. I more or less know the repertoire. It's interesting to go back to vocal music, understanding the Renaissance repertoire that we play on the guitar with its connection to vocal music. So, there's always a connection with voice.
But of course, as a composer of color who's from Brazil and who lives in the United States, I have my own take when I'm writing music. It's influenced by vocal music, but it's also influenced by a variety of rhythms - African music, Afro-Brazilian music from my country, plus this whole tradition of classical guitar in South America. I try to combine all those influences. You can hear that combination of vocal counterpoint with Afro-Brazilian rhythms in a series of compositions I titled "MadrigAfros."
What are your other aspirations for your time at Yale?
Rezende: I want my students to really understand the value of collaborating with others. There is still a tendency of most students wanting to become the next best soloist. I think there are other paths. You can be a great soloist, you can be a great chamber musician, you can be a great arranger. A longer-term, larger project for me is creating a hub at Yale for multifaceted performers who understand the importance of composing, teaching, and collaborating with others. That's what I have been doing as a musician, and it speaks to me on a very personal level.
