Pedro Lima Wins 2025 ISCM Young Composer Award

Pedro Lima Soares (b. 1994 in Braga, Portugal) has been awarded the 2025 ISCM Young Composer Award for his postmodern composition You Should (Should!) Be Dancing scored for chamber ensemble with electronics which received its world premiere performance by the Remix Ensemble of Porto’s Casa da Música under the direction of Ilan Volkov during the 2025 ISCM World New Music Days in Portugal. The award is a €2500 commission to write a new piece of approximately 4-7 minutes for up to 5 musicians which will be performed at a future ISCM WNMD festival. All composers under the age of 35 years whose works are featured during the festival are eligible for consideration for this award; a jury elected during the ISCM General Assembly listens to all the eligible works and then votes to determine the work they can agree is the most outstanding.

The jury–which consisted of Chia-Lin Pan (ISCM ExCom), Simon Eastwood (New Zealand) and Diana Rotaru (Romania), the first-ever YCA recipient ever to serve on a YCA jury–stated that Lima’s work “stood out for its powerful concept, post-modern approach, great memorability, and masterful execution. The work unmistakably situates itself in the here and now, skillfully balancing contemporary commentary on the uncertainty and anxiety conjured by the current state of our world against an infectious sense of joy, playfulness, and fun.” The jury also acknowledged that there were “many other excellent pieces by young composers in the festival” and wanted to make “a special mention of the string quartet Bleu II by Tsu-Yao Yang from Taipei as a work which displayed particularly impressive technical mastery.”

Pedro Lima Soares‘s music seeks to explore the sound universes of an eclectic milieu, adjacent to someone who grew up listening to electronic music, hip-hop, and was part of a progressive rock band growing up. So-called “classical” composition has turned out to be the perfect blank canvas, where a series of timbral, harmonic and structural “investigations” have taken shape, and unique ideas have manifested themselves in his scores, taking on different forms and expressions that vary according to the context they are intended to exist in. Relationship with the text has always been paramount, whether in collaboration with other writers or as a mere sparking process for any piece of instrumental music. A graduate of the Calouste Gulbenkian Conservatory of Music with his first professor, Paulo Bastos. This was followed by a journey to Lisbon where he furthered his studies in music writing with João Madureira, António Pinho-Vargas and Carlos Caires, but it was with Luís Tinoco that he developed the most in-depth relationship, going on to complete a master’s degree dedicated solely to composition. In 2017, he travelled to London where he completed his master’s degree in Opera Making & Writing with distinction at the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama, under the tutelage of Julian Philips and Julian Anderson. This course gave rise to a Chappy) collaboration with the English librettist Gareth Mattey, with whom he has since written several operatic and musical works.

The ISCM Young Composer Award was established in 2002 and the first winner was Thomas Adès for his string quartet Arcadiana. Subsequent winners of the award include Leilei Tian, Sampo Haapamäki, Helena Tulve, and Stefan Prins. The 2019 YCA recipient Jug Marković’s ISCM commissioned work Gramatik for 15 instruments (2024-25) received its world premiere performance by Porto’s Remix Ensemble on the same concert which featured Pedro Lima Soares’s 2025 ISCM YCA-winning work.