Lívio Tragtenberg

Lívio Romano Tragtenberg (born 1961) is a Brazilian musician, composer, music theorist, professor and record producer. Tragtenberg was born in São Paulo in 1961, to professor and sociologist Maurício Tragtenberg and actress Beatriz Tragtenberg. On his father's side, he is of German-Jewish descent, and has a brother and a sister. When he was 13 years old he learned by himself how to play the drum kit, leading on to other instruments. During his later youth he met and befriended poets Décio Pignatari and siblings Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, who heavily influenced him, later dropping out from high school to follow a career on music. His debut album, Ritual, came out in 1980. Later in the 1980s he composed the operas O. de A. do Brasil and O Inferno de Wall Street, the latter based on a poem by 19th-century author Sousândrade, and was a session musician for the 1988 EP The Early Years, by progressive rock band Violeta de Outono.

Throughout the 1990s to the mid-2000s he continued to release albums, collaborating with Pignatari and Wilson Sukorski, and was a music theory professor for Unicamp from 1990 to 1998. He also taught at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. Around the same time he met and befriended filmmaker Tata Amaral, and subsequently composed the soundtrack of many of her films, such as Um Céu de Estrelas (1996) and Hoje (2011); previously he has also worked with Lúcia Murat in 2000, Joel Pizzini in 2001 and Roberto Moreira in 2004. He also managed the projects Blind Sound Orchestra (which is composed of blind musicians) and the Orquestras de Músicos das Ruas de São Paulo (composed of street musicians of different cultural backgrounds).

In the mid-2010s, Tragtenberg and Rogério Skylab collaborated in a trilogy of albums: Skylab & Tragtenberg, Vol. 1, Vol. 2 and Vol. 3. Skylab once claimed to be a huge fan of Tragtenberg's work, and had previously interviewed him for his talk show Matador de Passarinho. In 2019, Tragtenberg collaborated again with Skylab by pre-mixing and providing samples for the latter's albums Nas Portas do Cu and Crítica da Faculdade do Cu, and once more in 2020 co-authoring his album Os Cosmonautas.

Tragtenberg also authored many books about music theory.