Clotilde Rosa (1930–2017), the crucial Portuguese composer, harpist and pedagogue was educated at the Lisbon Conservatory (1942–1949). She played the harp as a freelancer until 1963, when she went to study in the Netherlands. Rosa’s visit to the Netherlands exposed her to contemporary musical trends that had barely reached Portugal. During the 1960s, Clotilde Rosa belonged to a group of musicians united by Jorge Peixinho, which in 1970 gave origin to the emblematic Lisbon Contemporary Music Group (GMCL). Continuing to be interested in early music at the end of the 1970s, she and Carlos Franco and Luísa de Vasconcelos formed the Antiqua Trio. She also performed with the Porto Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, both from the National Broadcaster, and has worked with the orchestras of the São Carlos National Theatre and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. In 1987, she was appointed a teacher at the Lisbon Conservatory. Between 1987 and 1989, Clotilde Rosa was lecturing on analysis and composition techniques at the Music School of the Lisbon Conservatory and started lecturing for the harp class between 1989 and 2000. In that time, she introduced contemporary music to the harp course programme for the first time in Portugal. Through repeated visits to the Darmstadt Summer New Music Courses and her acquaintance with Jorge Peixinho, she became involved in the performance of avant-garde music scenes. The contact and experience with composers such as Pierre Boulez, Mauricio Kagel, Karlheinz Stockhausen or György Ligeti gave her new perspectives of approaching contemporary music. This led to her inclusion in the Lisbon Contemporary Music Group (GMCL), founded in 1970 by Peixinho. The experiments of the GMCL starting from 1974 (the year of the Portuguese democratic revolution) led Rosa to embrace composition. It was in 1974, a result of Jorge Peixinho’s invitation, when Clotilde Rosa sketched her first musical passage in the collective work “In-con-sub-sequência”, which presents the influences of Karlheinz Stockhausen (intuitive music, collective improvisation). She assumed herself a composer in 1976 with the piece “Encontro”, her first non-collective work, which was distinguished at the International Composers’ Tribune in Paris. Clotilde Rosa emerged as a composer at the age of 45, becoming one of the most important personalities regarding the creation and divulgation of contemporary music – she became “the mum” for many Portuguese contemporary composers. Among her other awards, she won the first National Composition Contest of the Oficina Musical do Porto with her work “Variantes” for flute solo; and the piece “Alternâncias” for flute and piano represented Portugal at ISCM Festival in Athens (1979). The following years established her reputation as a composer and her own personal style. In the early 1980s, she started to adopt pan-chromatic materials with potential tonal associations and concentrated on contrapuntal techniques and textural fluidity. This enabled her to create forceful, dramatic gestures combined with subtle, evocative atmospheres, producing music of profound emotional resonance and cultural thickness. Clotilde Rosa’s catalogue includes around 110 titles: chamber music works, orchestral music, an opera, a ballet and also didactic pieces; some of them are still awaiting their premiere performances. In her musical language where her stances is creative freedom, Clotilde Rosa does not obey any established code but freely uses a symbiosis of different aesthetics – from serialism to repetitive minimalism present in works with aleatoric fragments.