Partitura · January 2026

François Bou, artistic director of Casa da Música, helps us interpret the new season’s programme and discover the fundamentals of his unifying vision for the project. A venue open to the synergies of all artistic languages, where music is both “rooted and universal”.

Who was Frank Zappa (1940-1993)? When he died, the American media called him a rock musician, famous for his elaborate and unconventional songs with daring lyrics, for his criticism of the music industry, the education system and the political scene, for his friction with the Church and the police, and for having been banned from radio stations. But there was much more to him than that, which was not always captured by the media lens. Within that “walking mass of contradictions” (in the words of Ruth Underwood) pulsated a creative vision of a scope that still baffles today, averse to subterfuge, from which sprang a legacy as absolutely free as it was thoughtful, as multifaceted as it was coherent and personal.