Teaching

Pedro Sousa Silva began his teaching career in 1992, at the age of eighteen, working as a recorder teacher at the conservatories of Porto and Aveiro. He joined ESMAE (Escola Superior de Música e Artes do Espectáculo, Polytechnic University of Porto) in 2002 and is currently a full-time Coordinator Professor there, on an exclusive dedication basis.

At ESMAE, he was a co-founder of the Early Music degree (2005) and led the accreditation process before the national agency A3ES. He has served as coordinator of the degree in two separate periods (2013–2017 and 2019–2021), directed the Master's in Music — Artistic Interpretation from 2011 to 2015, and coordinated the Music Department's international relations from 2004 to 2009. In 2018 he founded Polyphonia, a postgraduate programme in Renaissance and Baroque polyphony that has attracted students from Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Canada, and Brazil. Most recently, he became coordinator of the Doctorate in Music — Artistic Practices in the Portuguese Context and director of the ESMAE Doctoral School, both established in 2024. In the area of advanced training, he has supervised more than twenty master's dissertations, one completed doctorate, and is currently supervising a doctoral candidate at the Universidad de La Rioja.

His teaching spans recorder at all levels, historical performance practice, ensemble direction, and research methodology. Central to his pedagogy is the direct encounter with primary sources: students work from sixteenth-century treatises and manuscripts, building interpretive arguments grounded in evidence. Alongside his regular teaching, he has organised numerous extracurricular activities at ESMAE open to both students and the wider public.

He is regularly invited as a guest teacher at conservatories and music academies across Europe and beyond, giving masterclasses in recorder and seminars on Renaissance performance practice. He has taught at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (Basel), the Akademie für Alte Musik Bremen, the Norges musikkhøgskole (Oslo), the Universität für Musik Wien, the Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel, the Hochschule für Musik Trossingen, the Joseph Haydn Konservatorium (Eisenstadt), the Vorarlberger Landeskonservatorium (Feldkirch), the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello (Venice), the Conservatorio di Musica di Cosenza, the Universitatea Națională de Muzică (Bucharest), the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Aragón (Zaragoza), the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Vigo, the Conservatorio Superior de Música da Coruña, and the Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP/GreCo, São Paulo). In Portugal, he has given masterclasses at the Instituto Gregoriano de Lisboa, the Conservatório de Música do Porto, the Conservatório de Música do Funchal, the Conservatório de São Miguel (Azores), the Orfeão de Leiria, and in Loulé.