Deciphering Flavio Pereira’s Reading of Dostoevsky after the The House of the Dead

This article provides a “dechiffrage” of the form, style, compositional techniques, and referential musical meanings employed by the Brazilian composer and pedagogue Flavio Santos Pereira in the composition of a seven-part suite entitled Reading of Dostoevsky, written in 2016 and based on the book The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky. This chamber work is a premonitory work about the present pandemic time, which tests not only the human existential instincts and fears but also the spiritual, philosophical, and moral values upon which a mature and complete personality is built. The author manages to turn the economic structure of a dodecaphonic material into a source of polyphonic, polyrhythmic, stylistic, and timbre diversity. Oscillating and incremental textures, often reaching four-voice overlays, find their counterbalance in the asymmetric movements that synthesize complex subharmonic timbre combinations. The work can be classified as program music, as it employs characteristics of expressionist and impressionist styles mixed with free improvisatory polyphonic techniques. This paper also aims at inducing young performers to consider the paradigmatic model of “dechiffrage” for interpretation supported by stylistic and formal analysis based on classical and modern models. The article includes the full score of Reading of Dostoevsky by Flavio Santos Pereira.

CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES IN CONTEMPORARY MUSIC: THE CASE OF THE COMPOSITION MOVEMENT IN BAHIA-BRAZIL

The focus of interest for this article is the musical composition movement in Bahia, in so far as it enables a reflection on the interweaving of composition and cultural perspectives, not as isolated and autonomous domains, but as something inherent to composition. We will identify and reflect upon strategies to represent distance between distinct cultural poles, showing how they organize the musical form and fabric, in other words, the production of meaning. We start with an exemplary case provided by the piece Uma possível resposta op. 169 (1988) by the Brazilian composer (born in Switzerland), Ernst Widmer (1927-1990), and analyze similar strategies in other pieces, showing how the idea of establishing a distance which functions as a matrix of meaning responds to our interest in the connection between composition and culture, and permits a discussion of decolonization strategies present in the concert music produced in Bahia in recent decades.

Politics of listening

In this work I intend to explore the issue of listening in regards to gender and music by discussing two projects in which I have participated: the collective Sonora: Músicas e Feminismos; and the work on 'conversation' and 'self-listening' conducted in conjunction with Brazilian composer and scholar Valéria Bonafé. In both of them I want to stress the connection between the idea of community as a space for the establishment of differences and the question of listening as an exercise of otherness.

Analysis of sonority in piano pieces

This paper presents an analysis of sonority in selected parts of two performances of a piano piece by the Brazilian composer Almeida Prado, extracted from the first volume of his cycle Cartas Celestes I (1974), and of this piece as a whole. The main goal of this analysis is to present a methodology where the performative decisions are understood as main sources of information, with specific attention to the sonic aspects of the piece. In this context, the musical work is understood as a process, since the score is only one of the elements that will influence the final result (Costa, 2016). The methodology consists of three main steps, and was based on the methodology of analysis of the sonority by Guigue (2009): (1) the first step is the artistic process, which gets up to the construction of two performances of the piece by the same pianist (the first author of this paper), with different and contrasting performative decisions, and their recordings; (2) then, the piece is divided into homogeneous sonic units, always having the performative decisions as guides; and (3) at last, these units are analyzed using the software Spear and Sonic Visualiser for audio files and Open Music for MIDI files. The methodology intends to include the performance in the scope of musical analysis, as performative decisions may lead to dramatic differences in the final perceived sonic layout of a musical work.

Compositionality as Creative Identity Building

In this paper, we examine the concept of Compositionality, proposed by Brazilian composer and scholar Paulo Costa Lima, from the interpenetration of five vectors: inseparability, creation of worlds, criticality, reciprocity and compositional processes. Three of these vectors will be compared with the Theory of Compositional Systems in an attempt to demonstrate that the inseparable flow between theory and practice is essential for the developing of a compositional process that comes with the creation of worlds. The systemic modeling of excerpts of Ponteio Op. 35, by Paulo Costa Lima, will be used as a case study for the compositional planning of a small fragment for flute, clarinet, and bassoon.

J-Analyzer: A Software for Computer-Assisted Analysis of Antônio Carlos Jobims Songs

The present paper describes structure and functioning of J-Analyzer, a computational tool for assistedanalysis. It integrates a research project intended to investigate the complete song collection by Brazilian composer Antônio Carlos Jobim, focusing on the aspect of harmonic transformation. The program is used to determine the nature of transformational relations between any chordal pair of chords present in a song, as well as the structure of the chords themselves.

Nobre, Marlos (1939–)

Marlos Nobre is a Brazilian composer, pianist, and conductor. His music presents a unique characteristic that combines Brazilian features with advanced compositional techniques. His pluralistic musical view went through several phases, from tonal to modal, polytonal, atonal, serial, and aleatoric until he defined his own style, which became a combination of everything he had learned and filtered.

Guerra-Peixe’s Symphony No. 2 Brasília (Part 2)

The present article presents a broad musical analysis of the Symphony No. 2 Brasília by Brazilian composer César Guerra-Peixe, covering formal, melodic, motivic and harmonic aspects. The terminology of the analytical terms was the same used by Peter Brown in his five volume series of all representative symphonies of the symphonic literature. These terms came from Guidelines to Style Analysis by Jan LaRue. The Symphony Brasília was subject of my doctoral project in three principal fronts: production of a performance edition of the full score and parts; performance of the work in the US and Brazil, aiming to correct eventual mistakes and spread the music; and a production of historical and analytical texts. The present article will cover the musical analysis. A previous article covered historical aspects of the work.

From Concrete Poetry to Musical Composition: Narrativity, Intertextuality and Musical Meaning in Motet em Ré Menor, by Gilberto Mendes

This paper intends to construct some reflections on how the use of the poetic text as process of creation of a musical composition can be developed through the rhythmic, sonorous and melodic use of the words, verses and their (possible) musical meaning. Specifically, we use the example of the choral piece Motet em Ré Menor (1966), by the Brazilian composer Gilberto Mendes (1922-2017), a composition based on the concrete poem Beba Coca-Cola (1958) by Décio Pignatari (1927-2012). Some of the problems and issues related to the processes of narrativity and intertextuality, topical meaning and tropification – from the idea of musicking this poem – will be listed and approached in a reflection based on a musical analysis that seeks to depart from the form to the musical meaning relevance.