Fernando Garnero (1976) is an Argentinian-Italian composer, co-director of Swiss ensemble Vortex, Guest Artist by BIFEM (2019-2023), PhD candidate in Artistic Research by Lunds University (Sweden) and currently Resident at the French Academy in Rome (Villa Medici).

Fernando Garnero studied piano, music theory, and composition in Buenos Aires before moving in 1998 to Switzerland. There he took lessons in harpsichord, basso continuo, composition, and Renaissance and Baroque music theory at the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève in Éric Gaudibert’s studio. With Xavier Dayer, Garnero explored orchestration, and with Philippe Alberà, twentieth-century musical aesthetics. In Basel from 1999 to 2001, he studied computer-assisted composition with Thomas Kessler and Hanspeter Kyburz, and in Strasbourg from 2004 until 2007 in Ivan Fedele’s studio. In 2008, he joined IRCAM’s Cursus program for composition and computer music. Among the founding encounters of his formative years were Helmut Lachenmann, Brian Ferneyhough, Georges Aperghis, Gérard Pesson, and Stefano Gervasoni.

At Lund University in Sweden, Garnero wrote his thesis on inductors and augmented instruments. He also deepened his consideration of the process surrounding his compositions. Since 2011, his musical practice has been characterized by hybridization through the systematic use of complex sound objects. The cycle Avoidances, composed of the pieces Ballad (2012), BOP (2014), and Ragtime (2015), takes samples from the work of George Gershwin, Thelonius Monk, and Scott Joplin, providing a rich web of references, quotations, and deconstructed quotations — a result of his aim to make music from music. In Ragtime, Garnero identifies a turning point in his compositional practice. From this moment, he drew as much on sound objects as on multiplying configurations, redefining “‘composable space’ as a playing field of objects’ interactions and operations built on overlaid maps in a multi-locational approach.” Today, Garnero focuses his compositions on complex sound organisms, or meta-timbres, non-rhetoric development typologies, the destructive function of repetition, and creating an aesthetic status for the impasse.

His works have been played by ensembles and soloists such as Vortex, Accroche Note, Contrechamps, Cairn, Sillages, les Solistes de Lyon, Donatienne Michel-Dansac, and Françoise Rivalland, and at festivals including Musica, Archipel, MIA, Voix nouvelles, Voix de Prieuré, Gaudeamus, and Centre Acanthes. He has been commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture, Radio France, the Venice Biennale, the Royaumont Foundation, the Archipel Festival, Pro-Helvetia, and the Nicati Foundation, and he has received grants from the State of Geneva and the Simón I. Patiño Foundation.

He founded and later became artistic co-director of the Vortex Ensemble, based in Geneva, which brings together instrumentalists and composers who have contributed to contemporary artistic production. He was an associate artist at Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (BIFEM) until 2023. From 2020 until 2021, he was resident at Villa Medici in Rome, where he led the project Musique au-delà du Son (Music Beyond Sound), which furthered his exploration of assembling and manipulating complex sound objects and recontextualizing them constantly in a series of audiovisual, mixed, and performative works.