Biography — André de Quadros

Shorter Bio (General - 132 Words)

Shorter Bio (Choral - 167 Words)

Dr. André de Quadros is a professor of music at Boston University with affiliations in African, African American & Black Diaspora, Asian, Jewish, Muslim studies, prison education, and Forced Migration. As a choral conductor, artist, scholar, and human rights activist, he has worked in over 40 countries in the most diverse settings including professional ensembles, projects with prisons, psychosocial rehabilitation, refugees, and victims of sexual violence, torture, and trauma. His work crosses race and mass incarceration, peacebuilding, forced migration, and Islamic culture. He directs Common Ground Voices (Jerusalem), Common Ground Voices / La Frontera (Mexico-US), the Manado State University Choir (Indonesia), the Muslim Choral Ensemble (Sri Lanka), VOICES 21C (USA), and the World Muslim Choral Ensemble (Sri Lanka). He is the creative director of The Choral Commons. In 2019, he was a Distinguished Academic Visitor at the University of Cambridge. He has over 50 choral editions to his credit, and he has received awards from the American Choral Directors Association, Choral Arts New England, and Chorus America.

Longer Bio
Dr. André de Quadros, conductor, ethnomusicologist, music educator, writer, human rights activist, and poet has conducted and undertaken research in over forty countries. His professional work has taken him to the most diverse settings, spanning professional ensembles, and projects with prisons, psychosocial rehabilitation, refugees and asylum-seekers, poverty locations, and victims of sexual violence, torture, and trauma.

Dr. de Quadros leads the following ensembles and projects: Common Ground Voices (Israeli-Palestinian-international), the Manado State University Choir (Indonesia), the Muslim Choral Ensemble (Sri Lanka), Common Ground Voices / La Frontera (Mexico-US border), and Boston’s VOICES 21C. He has co-led the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Countries Youth Choir. His conducting engagements of note include the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Bulgaria with which he toured Spain, the Massachusetts All-State Chorus (USA), the Tanglewood Institute Young Artists Orchestra (USA), the Prokofiev Symphony Orchestra (Ukraine), the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain, the Nusantara Chamber Orchestra (Indonesia), the Moscow State Radio Symphony Orchestra, the New Monash Orchestra (Australia), and the Jauna Muzika choir (Lithuania).

His deep commitment to justice and equity, peacebuilding, and reconciliation is manifested in a variety of projects. During the Iraq war, in 2008 and 2012, he co-directed Aswatuna: Arab Choral Festival in Jordan that brought together community choirs from Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria. He has co-directed the Community Heartsong, a historic project with young Palestinian and Israeli choral musicians in East Jerusalem working to foster understanding between the two communities. Since 2016, he has directed Common Ground Voices, an Israeli-Palestinian peace-seeking and dialogue project.

For more than a decade, André de Quadros has worked in Massachusetts prisons, jails, and detention centers with a focus on empowering people in incarcerated settings to tell their stories through improvised music, song-creation, poetry, movement, and theater. The approach that he created is called Empowering Song.

As a public intellectual, he has given countless international talks, lectures, keynote presentations, and workshops with community groups. Most recently, he co-founded the justice-focused media initiative, The Choral Commons, a media space for podcasts, webinars, educational resources, and choral creations with a focus on social justice projects.

Professor de Quadros was a Distinguished Academic Visitor, Queens’ College, at the University of Cambridge (2019), Visiting Professor, UCSI University, Malaysia (2016-2018), and Visiting Professor, Victoria University, Australia. He is a visiting professor at Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University, China. In 2024 he was the Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He is the artistic director of Conducting 21C: Musical Leadership for a New Century, which he initiated at the Eric Ericson International Choral Centre in Sweden. Through this he is seen as a pioneer in conducting pedagogy through a process of music-making that stretches the boundaries of traditional music-making by developing compassionate, creative performance and engagement, and cross-cultural experimental repertoire. He is the artistic director of the London International Music Festival and a member of Interkultur’s World Choir Council. He has been a faculty member of CHORALSPACE – International Academy for Choral Arts and a member of the steering committee of Conductors Without Borders. Since 2011, he has been the founding director of the Music Research and Composition Network of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), the fourth largest online repository in the world. Additionally, he serves on numerous advisory and editorial boards.

His work in public health has taken him to sites of poverty in Guatemala, India, and Peru, where he has pioneered an arts-based community development (ABCD) approach to discover the power between the arts and public health through narrative community theater.

André de Quadros has edited and contributed to Many Seeds, Different Flowers: The Music Education Legacy of Carl Orff (CIRCME), The Cambridge Companion to Choral Music (Cambridge University Press); co-edited and co-authored Tanglewood II: Summoning the Future of Music Education (GIA Press) and My Body was Left on the Street: Music Education and Displacement (Brill); authored Focus: Choral Music in Global Perspective (Routledge), co-authored Poking the Wasp Nest… (Brill) and Empowering Song: Music Education from the Margins (Routledge). Another co-edited book is under contract, Music Education in South Asia: Context and Practice (Routledge). He is general editor of the Carmina Mundi series of Carus-Verlag; editor of Cantemus, Salamu Aleikum: Choral Music of the Muslim World, and Music of Asia and the Pacific all published by Earthsongs (USA); and Songs of the World published by Hinshaw Music (USA).

André de Quadros is a professor of music at Boston University. He has held a number of leadership positions at Boston University, including Director of the School of Music, Chair of the Music Education Department, Chair of the Department of Music in the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and Artistic Director of the Tanglewood Institute. Professor de Quadros also holds affiliate faculty positions at Boston University in African American Studies, African Studies Center, American & New England Studies Program, Center for Antiracist Research, Center on Forced Displacement, Center for the Study of Asia, Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations, Latin American Studies, Center on Forced Displacement, Prison Education Program, and The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.

Prior to his current positions in the USA, Dr de Quadros was a professor at Monash University in Australia where he was Director of Music Performance, and College Head of Richardson Hall. Before his university career, he taught at Presbyterian Ladies College and Billanook College. His academic qualifications are as follows: BA, University of Bombay; Graduate Diploma of Humanities, La Trobe University; Graduate Diploma in Movement and Dance, University of Melbourne; Graduate Diploma in Music, Victorian College of the Arts; Graduate Certificate of Higher Education, Monash University; MEd, La Trobe University; Doctor of Education, La Trobe University; graduate studies at Universität Mozarteum Salzburg.