“Music as a symbolic gateway to be crossed.”

For Brazilian flutist and composer Victor Somma, music is not a vehicle for narrative certainty but a symbolic field — a threshold where perception deepens and listening precedes interpretation. Based in Belgium since 2012, he has developed an international career at the intersection of performance, composition, and socially engaged practice.

Somma is a composer who performs, and a performer who composes. His works arise from an attentive engagement with sound as environment — where music shapes conditions of encounter. The structural clarity of Western art music, Brazilian popular and ritual traditions, contemporary techniques, improvisation, and live electronics coexist within his language, not as stylistic fusion, but as shared presence. Composition becomes the act of sustaining a field in which intersubjectivity may emerge — where music does not represent something, but allows being itself to suffice.

In 2023, he released Minimal Dreams, a cycle for flutes and live electronics. Drawing from the ancestral sonorities of Afro-Amerindian flutes, he transposes these textures onto modern instruments, creating a dialogue between heritage and contemporaneity. Premiered at Splendor Amsterdam, the project has since been presented across Europe, the United States, and Latin America, including at the National Flute Association Convention (USA), the Austrian Flute Festival, ABRAF (Brazil), and the Adams Low Flutes Festival (Netherlands). Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles and in collaboration with Jeunesses Musicales, the work continues to evolve as a living platform rather than a fixed program.

His compositions are performed internationally. Ide! was selected as the compulsory work for the 43rd James Pappoutsakis International Flute Competition (Boston, 2023), and Elijah and the Wind received the 2024 FUNARTE Contemporary Music Biennial award. His work Nhandesy was presented at the VII International Flute Convention in Paris. He is published by Brotons & Mercadal Edicions Musicals (Spain).
Parallel to the concert stage, Somma develops long-term artistic encounters in educational and social contexts. He founded the Atelier of Musical Creation, creating conditions for collective experimentation in psychiatric institutions, prisons, and community settings in Belgium, while continuing related work in Brazil. For him, teaching is not the transfer of knowledge but the creation of experience. From experience, understanding may emerge.

His artistic sensibility is shaped by a family history marked by exile, cultural crossings, and political engagement.

Born in Brazil to parents who lived political exile during the military dictatorship — his mother having worked alongside educator Paulo Freire, and his father an artist and writer active within the Uruguayan resistance movement — Somma grew up within an environment where art, language, and social consciousness were inseparable. His genealogical roots weave together Indigenous Puri ancestry, Romani heritage, and Southern European lineages, forming a background in which identity is not singular but layered. This condition of multiplicity quietly informs his approach to sound: coexistence rather than hierarchy, listening rather than imposition.

He holds degrees in composition (KU Leuven / LUCA School of Arts) and flute performance (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and currently works within the academies of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, focusing on attentive listening, improvisation, and shared creative processes.
Across all his projects, Victor Somma approaches music as lived presence — where form sustains attention and meaning arises through experience rather than explanation.