In 2007, he wrote the set piece for the 2008 Guitar Foundation of America Competition named 'Valsa de Outono'. His 'Aquarelle' for solo guitar was chosen as the required contemporary work for the 2002 Guitar Foundation of America Competition in Miami. Quartet, Luciana Souza, and Vancouver Cantata Singers.Īs a composer Assad has completed more than fifty works for guitar, many of which have become standards in the guitar repertoire. He has completed over 300 arrangements for different chamber music settings arrangements for Gidon Kremer, Dawn Upshaw, Yo Yo Ma, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, TrioConBrio, Iwao Furusawa, Paquito D'Rivera, Turtle Island String Quartet, L.A. He has extended the possibilities of the two-guitar combination through his arrangements of Latin American music by composers such as Piazzolla, Villa-Lobos, and Ginastera as well as Baroque to Modern music by Scarlatti, Rameau, Soler, Bach, Mompou, Ravel, Debussy, and Gershwin among others. Over the last twenty years Assad has concentrated most of his efforts on building a repertoire for the guitar duo. He is the spouse of the physicist Angela Olinto. Sergio later went on to study conducting and composition at the Escola Nacional de Música in Rio de Janeiro, and worked privately with Brazilian composition teacher, Esther Scliar.

At the age of 17, he and Odair began their studies under the best known classical guitar teacher in Brazil at the time, Monina Tavora, a former disciple of Andrés Segovia. By age 14, he was arranging and writing original compositions for the guitar duo he had formed with his brother, Odair. He learned Brazilian folk melodies from his father. Born into a musical family in Mococa, São Paulo, Brazil, Assad began creating music for the guitar not long after he began playing the instrument.

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