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Music - 2 |
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By the end of the century, Carlos Gomes (1836-1896), born in the town of Campinas in the state of São Paulo, produced a number of operas in the prevailing Italian style, especially il guarany, an opera based on a famous Brazilian novel by José de Alencar about a colonial villain who incites an Indian attack in order to gain a Portuguese nobleman's treasure and his daughter as a bride. Brasílio Itiberê (1848-1913) was the first Brazilian composer to use a popular national motif in erudite music. His 1869 composition, A Sertaneja (The Country Maiden) was played by Franz Liszt and has remained active in piano repertoires.
As in literature and painting, the Week of Modern Art in 1922 revolutionized Brazilian music and brought acceptance to a crop of new composers. Led by Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), they brought avant-garde techniques from Europe and undertook the challenge of transplanting Brazilian folkloric melodies and rhythms to symphonic compositions. Their music often incorporated many popular musical instruments into classical orchestras.
After a time, two principal trends in Brazilian music became identifiable. Writer Mário de Andrade had advocated that composers should seek inspiration in national life with special emphasis on Brazil's musical folklore. Composer Camargo Guarnieri, an adherent of Andrade, heads the musical school known as "Nationalist". Other composers in this group include: Luciano Gallet (1893-1931), Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez (1897-1948), Francisco Mignone (1897-1986), Radamés Gnatalli (1906-1988), and Guerra Peixe (1914-). In widely differing compositions, these composers searched for a national language which would not lose the universal character of musical language. After 1939, another musical school began to assert itself principally as a result of the work carried out by Hans Joachim Koellreutter, the creator of the Live Music Group. This group made up of Cláudio Santoro (1919-1990), Eunice Catunda (1926-), Edino Krieger (1928-), and others based their music on the universality of musical language. They defended the use of atonalism and dodecaphonism as composition resources.
Brazil's popular music developed parallel to its classical music and it also united traditional European instruments - guitar, piano, and flute - with a whole rhythm section of sounds produced by frying pans, small barrels with a membrane and a stick inside (cuícas) that make wheezing sounds, and tambourines. During the 1930's Brazilian popular music played on the radio became a powerful means of mass communication. Three of the best known composers of this period are Noel Rosa, Lamartine Babo, and Ary Barroso (1903-1963). Barroso's principal singer, Carmen Miranda, went on to achieve an international reputation when she appeared in a series of Hollywood films.
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