Marco Antonio Santos at Crashbox

Marco Antonio Santos is a guitarist, composer, arranger, and music educator from Minas Gerais, Brazil. Based in Austin, Texas, he specializes in jazz and Brazilian music, improvisation, and composition. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin Butler School of Music (DMA), he maintains a busy calendar arranging, teaching, and performing with various artists.

The instrumentation of About: Silence is modular, allowing for live performance by groups of various sizes and configurations: jazz trio, jazz trio plus woodwind or string quartet, or a full ensemble of 11 musicians. In its most complete format, the performance also includes an improvisational dancer and a voice actor for poetry recitation. The May 10th album release concert will feature the full, multimedia configuration including a visual arts exhibition that dialogues with the thematic content....

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Marco Antonio Santos is a guitarist, composer, arranger, and music educator from Minas Gerais, Brazil. Based in Austin, Texas, he specializes in jazz and Brazilian music, improvisation, and composition. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin Butler School of Music (DMA), he maintains a busy calendar arranging, teaching, and performing with various artists.

The instrumentation of About: Silence is modular, allowing for live performance by groups of various sizes and configurations: jazz trio, jazz trio plus woodwind or string quartet, or a full ensemble of 11 musicians. In its most complete format, the performance also includes an improvisational dancer and a voice actor for poetry recitation. The May 10th album release concert will feature the full, multimedia configuration including a visual arts exhibition that dialogues with the thematic content.

About: Silence, recorded in 2022, is a conceptual album that comprises diverse forms of art and media—visual arts (video, painting, and digital drawing), dance, poetry, and music. As a musical composition, the work consists of 11 audio tracks that can be understood either as a multi-movement work or as free-standing compositions.

The album’s 11 tracks feature a jazz guitar trio—guitar, upright bass, and drums—joined on four tracks by a woodwind quartet and on five tracks by a string quartet. Tracks are supplemented by videos combining improvisational dance, musicians performing in the studio, visual art, and poetry. Taken together, the elements express varied meanings of silence—introspection, grief, oppression, the absence of sound. Only one movement forgoes the chamber quartet element and is written solely for guitar trio. A website unites each of the art forms in one place, bringing the full experience of the album to its listener/viewer.

“There is certainly a paradox about composing music to portray different aspects of silence,” says Santos. “One of the biggest reasons for writing this work was the urge to express thoughts and experiences regarding the idea of silence itself. It was heavily influenced by the months of isolation and the loss of so many lives during the worst of the COVID pandemic; the suppressed voices in recent cases of racial injustice; and my personal experience as an immigrant in a very individualistic culture. In addition, the debut of any work, especially one that involves audio recording, is inherently a ‘break’ in artistic self-silence.”

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