Rubens Salles is a Brazilian-born composer, pianist, improviser, and educator based in New York. His work moves across contemporary classical music, jazz, free improvisation, electronic music, and Brazilian musical traditions, with a particular interest in the relationship between structure and spontaneity, composition and improvisation, and acoustic and electronic sound.

Drawing on traditions including choro, baião, and bumba-meu-boi, as well as spectralism, microtonality, experimental music, and electronic sound, Salles develops a musical language that connects cultural memory with contemporary compositional practice. His work often begins with spontaneous musical processes that are transformed into structured compositions, allowing improvisation to function not simply as performance practice but as a source of compositional material.

His recent major work, Echoes of Enchantment for orchestra, choir, percussion, and electronics, explores spontaneity, ritual, cultural memory, and musical structure, incorporating elements of the Bumba Meu Boi tradition of Maranhão alongside contemporary approaches to orchestration, microtonality, and electronics. His broader work includes compositions for chamber ensembles, piano and electronics, string quartet, voice, orchestra, and electronic media.

As a performer and collaborator, Salles has worked across contemporary, jazz, and experimental music, presenting performances and recordings in the United States and internationally. His collaborations include musicians from diverse musical backgrounds, including Lukas Ligeti, João Brasil, and French hornist John Clark.

Salles holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition from the University of Miami Frost School of Music and has also studied at the New England Conservatory, Brooklyn College, Berklee College of Music, and New York University. He remains active as a composer, performer, and educator, teaching composition, music theory, improvisation, orchestration, piano, and electronic music.