Rodolfo Caesar – A Arte Dos Sons

Brazilian electroacoustic music composer Rodolfo Caesar was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1950. He studied at Uni-Rio in the 70s and at the Instituto Villa-Lobos in Rio. He moved to France in 1973 to study with Pierre Schaeffer at Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris and work at the GRM. Back in Brazil in the 1980s, he founded his own studio named Estudio da Gloria, or Glory Studio, in Rio. Caesar composed for dance, video, film and theater, worked as a radio producer and teacher at UFRJ school of music. Caesar belongs to the second generation of Brazilian electroacoustic music composers, after the pioneering works of Reginaldo Carvalho (b1932, founder of the first electroacoustic music studio in Rio in the 1960s named “Estúdio de Música Experimental”), Grupo Música Nova (1963) led by Gilberto Mendes (b1922) in São Paulo, Jocy de Oliveira (b1936) and Jorge Antunes (b1942). See Igor Lintz Maués’ essay “Electroacoustic Music in Brazil”, 1989.

♫  The A Arte Dos Sons LP (or The Art of Sounds) collects 3 uncompromising electroacoustic endeavors composed during Caesar’s stay at GRM in 1973-76. The imposing Curare II (completed 1978), with its radical, brooding electronic transformations of low cello sounds, recalls Iancu Dumitrescu’s 1985-86 Harryphonies (for double bass, percussion, prepared piano and Harryphone), with the same kind of claustrophobic, inescapable atmosphere. Tutti Frutti (1976) adds a musique concrète dimension to the same premises, including bell sounds treatment, synthesizer, metallic noises and percussion (especially in the final part). The refined electronic high frequencies of Les Deux Saisons (1976) act as a welcome pause between the 2 previous compositions. However, as the piece progresses, it accumulates energy and sharpness until it sounds like precision diamond shaping between your ears– which is not that relaxing, after all! Note: Check out the monumental Coletânea de Música Eletroacústica Brasileira 5xCD-set on this blog for an overview of Brazilian electroacoustic music.

01 Curare II (7:34)
02 Les Deux Saisons (6:52)
03 Tutti Frutti (a) (4:03)
04 Tutti Frutti (b) (5:43)
05 Tutti Frutti (c) (8:22)

Total time 32:34
LP, private release, ref. RC 8859, Brazil, 1978

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Various – Mec ’70 – Musica do Brasil

Composers Marlos Nobre and Almeida Prado were instrumental in the development of contemporary music in Brazil during the 1960s. The former only is featured on this LP, released in 1970 by national program Radio MEC and founded by Ministério da Educação e Cultura. It was obviously meant to increase the visibility of Brazilian contemporary composers outside the country, thanks to liner notes translation in various languages and to contemporary music on a par with European standard of the time. Conductor and composer Rinaldo Rossi conducted the most important Brazilian contemporary pieces of the 1960s and ’70s. Here, particularly in Nobre’s Mosaico, Rossi raises extraordinary sounds from the Orquestra Sinfônica Nacional do S.R.E.’s horn and percussion sections.

01 Marlos Nobre – Mosaico (14:12)
02 Rinaldo Rossi – Requiem Para O Velho Mundo (10:08)
03 Nicolau Kokron – Maré Em Estrutura De Contôrnos (11:46)

Orquestra Sinfônica Nacional do S.R.E.
Rinaldo Rossi, conductor

Total time 36:06
LP released by Ministério da Educação e Cultura, Brazil, [1970?]

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Below, stalwarts of the Brazilian avantgarde (source)

Above, from l. to r.: Nikolau Kokron, Rinaldo Rossi, Marlos Nobre,
Edino Krieger, Jacequay Lins & Ernst Widmer

Above, from l. to r.: Ernst Widmer, Lindembergue Cardoso,
Rufo Herrera, Milton Gomes, Jamary Oliveira & Walter Smetak

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01 Mosaico

Lelo Nazario – Discurso aos objetos

Paulistano keyboard player and electroacoustic music composer Lelo Nazario, born 1956, was one of the founding members of Grupo Um in 1976, an innovative Brazilian jazz band between Third Stream and jazz-rock in which he played keyboards and percussion. The band was rather successful both at home and abroad, touring Europe several times. Their three LPs were independently released by Utopia Studio, named after Nazario’s own recording facility. Nazario’s solo records focus more on electronic and contemporary music as well as advanced studio techniques, and he still self-releases his own music today.

♫ Discurso aos Objetos, or Speech to Objects, is a brilliant collage of found sounds in the vein of Walter Ruttman’s Weekend. Multifarious electronic and musique concrète sounds are intermingled with innumerable vocal utterances from films and radio plays, including German, Japanese and English speakers, among others. The quasi monophonic nature of the piece also recalls early French musique concrète pieces ca.1950. Actually, Discurso aos Objetos was first written in 1978 in a version for tape, trombone and… flute, but the composer re-configured it for magnetic tape only in 1984. The flip Balada Unidimensional, composed 1982, is a nuanced dialog between acoustic guitar played by Paulo Bellinati and electronic sounds.

01 Discurso aos Objetos (8:16)
02 Balada Unidimensional (6:40)

Total time 14:56
12 inch released by Utopia Studio, ref. UT 17.532, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1984

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Lelo Nazario’s solo discography:
1982 Lagrima/Sursolide Suite, LP Utopia,
1984 Discurso aos Objetos/Balada Unidimensional, LP Utopia,
1989 “Se…”, LP Utopia,
1998 Simples, CD Utopia,
2006 Africasiamerica, CD Editio Princeps / Utopia,

Grupo Um discography (see here):
1979 Marcha Sobre a Cidade
1981 Reflexões Sobre A Crise Do Desejo
1982 A Flor de Plástico Incinerada

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Soares Brandão – Homenagem a Foucault

Brazilian composer Otavio Henrique Soares Brandão was born in 1949 in Rio de Janeiro. He started studying music in Brazil, then moved to France in 1977 to study electroacoustic music with Jacques Lejeune and to attend the IRCAM seminars with Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio, a.o. Since then, he has lived alternatively between Brazil and France. Starting 1995, Soares Brandão led several educational music programs in Rio de Janeiro’s slums, projects he undertook with partner, painter and sociologist Íbis Ferreira Soares Brandão (author of this LP’s cover collage).

♫ Homenagem a Foucault (1985) was the first of a series of piano compositions inspired or dedicated to Pierre Schaeffer (pictured above), whom Soares Brandão had met in 1977, immediately becoming a disciple in the field of music education and composition. Soares Brandão claims his piano music is inspired by Schaeffer in the way it requires the interpret to perform the sonification of the instrument and raise un-notated sonorities on the fly during the performance itself. Hence, the music is partly improvised and focuses on sound more than on a written score. Says Soares Brandão:

La métamorphose de l’œuvre en objet musical a pour conséquence la transfiguration de l’interprète en créateur concret et du compositeur en créateur abstrait.
[When a music piece is transformed into a sound object, the interpret becomes a musique concrète composer and the composer an abstract creator.]

Recorded in Rio de Janeiro in 1985, Homenagem a Foucault is full of semi-improvised traits and resounding, Liszt-ian deluge of notes, yet the music never loses its colorful and provocative Brazilian roots, think Villa-Lobos’ Rudepoêma, for instance. In the liner notes, Soares Brandão calls the piece a caleidoscópio antropofágico, alluding to Oswald de Andrade’s influential Manifesto Antropófago, published 1928. The latter and the Revista de Antropofagia stressed the role of psychoanalysis and sub-conscious in art, the importance of primitivism from Black and Amerindian heritage in Brazilian creativity, and a Marxist political awareness.

01 Homenagem a Foucault – Parte I (17:00)
02 Homenagem a Foucault – Parte II (17:08)

Total time 34:08
Privately released LP, cut and pressed by Polygram do Brasil Ltda, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1985

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