João Alexandre Ferreira Mendes Dias

Born in 1998, João Alexandre Ferreira Mendes Dias obtained an 8th Grade Diploma in Classical and Jazz Piano from Trinity College London in 2019. He completed a bachelor’s degree in Musicology at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of Universidade Nova de Lisboa in 2020 and earned an MSc in Historical Musicology at the same institution in 2022. His master’s dissertation consisted of a critical edition of Marcos Portugal’s Missa Piquena (MarP. 01.15, V.1). He is currently a PhD candidate in Musicology, specialising in Historical Musicology, at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

Since 2023, he has been a member of the Group for Historical and Cultural Studies in Music at INET-md and of the Royal Musical Association. His research is grounded in musical philology and focuses on the paleographic and philological study of musical sources and their critical editing, as well as on the historical study and reconstruction of performance practices as documented in pedagogical and theoretical sources, with particular emphasis on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertoires.

His doctoral project, entitled “Práticas Pedagógicas no Ensino dos Instrumentos de Tecla no Real Seminário da Patriarcal (1713–1834)”, investigates pedagogical practices at the Real Seminário da Patriarcal through the analysis of didactic sources such as partimenti and solfejos de acompanhar by Portuguese composers and foreign authors active in Portugal. Within the scope of this project, he has participated in specialised workshops and training in several keyboard instrument disciplines offered by the Early Music Department of the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa.

His academic activity includes advanced training in source criticism, textual transmission, and historical methodologies applied to the musicological study and reconstruction of past musical practices from written sources. In addition to his research activity, he periodically engages in composition, having received several international distinctions.