Edgar Barroso

His parents’ and teachers’ well-intentioned encouragement to decide on a specific field early in his studies had the opposite effect on composer Edgar Barroso. When he arrived at Harvard in 2007, with a BA in music composition from Guanajuato University in Mexico and an MA in digital art from Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University, Barroso sat in on classes in as many different fields as time would allow, and talked to students from across the disciplines. He was looking for ways to infuse his PhD studies with the open source, cooperative ethos that had characterized his time in Spain—where he worked in teams alongside architects, musicians, and other designers. Ultimately, a process of collaborative composition with scholars in other disciplines provided a way to have it all.

“The beautiful thing about music is that I found everything I wanted in it,” Barroso says. “Music has math; it has science; it has emotion. It has a lot of psychological elements to explore.”

Recent collaborations have produced original compositions on subjects including tai-chi and ataraxia, the ancient Greek word for “tranquility”; tango and the art of Joan Miró; the often baffling nature of English pronunciation; the expansion of outer space; Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and the unintended consequences of social media. These musical meditations, some of which incorporate words and images as well as sound, have the flavor of Montaigne’s Essays: each represents Barroso’s attempt to get at a new truth about the matter at hand.