2nd Part – Contemporary Guitar Music on Books... Béhague and Tarasti

Frequently, the series of 12 Studies for guitar by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) is taken as the greatest transformation that the instrument would go down in posterity. However, this doesn’t happen only by a technical statement, as if the musical ideas could be stagnated. This is the position of Musicology and Ethnomusicology studies: to test the radiation around an object that raises an initial hypothesis. So, to consolidate this technical statement, it must be contextualized.

Therefore, I will discuss two books of referential authors in music area and cultural studies: the French ethnomusicologist Gerard Béhague and Finnish musicologist and semiotician Eero Tarasti. Both authors, in the 90s, questioned  some considerations about Villa-Lobos, so widely repeated. Acting in an academic area that follows the same rigor and reasoning criterion to called "hard sciences", these two authors deepen more in the composition, the resulting sound of Villa-Lobos. Both experienced Brazil, spending part of their time in the country and became connoisseurs of what kind of society would have such composer. Their books give prominence to the guitar in villalobian output. I just will focus on their issues about the 12 Studies creation.

Heitor Villa-Lobos: The Search for Brazil's Musical Soul.

Publisher: Institute of Latin American / University of Texas at Austin Studios, 1994.

Author: Gerard Béhague

The author believes that in 1915 the outline of Villa-Lobos as academic artist begins to take shape – this is the year of his concert at the auditorium of the Jornal do Comércio (a Brazilian newspaper from Rio), angering critics then – and it grows up to 1918-1919, moment of important premieres and continuous attention of critics (some already positive), shaping your figure as anti-establishment one.

Béhague says that because of this situation Villa-Lobos was invited to Semana de 22 (an important artistic Brazilian modernist event in São Paulo city, in 1922), due to his internalized modernity and challenge to canons of composition processes (subordination to the Italian and French parameters, often). It was there that he gave his "modern-national" synthesis, an emblem of "new" country so wanted and, of course, there is no one else compares to him. Thus, his modernity is linked to his previous and challenging poetic, which later will transit naturally by the historical context of the 20s avant-garde, in the centre of the musical world – Paris.

About compositional processes of Villa-Lobos, Béhague questions some “mechanical” or overvalued sound-bites, specially if the folklore experienced in his travels youth would be a source for  works creation or because of his previous potential, he could be immune to the exposure of European modernist experiments. Béhague qualifies those travels (1905-1913) as his desire for freedom and Brazilianness; and if the European vanguard had no effect on his thinking… this would be improbable.

He argues that the second departure to Paris (1927), when Villa-Lobos stayed in the city for three years, until May 1930, with the success of the two concerts at the Salle Gaveau, is the moment when Villa-Lobos consolidates his poetics, and – yes – this will be associated with the Parisian avant-garde. Then, it’s relevant that the 12 Studies are finished in 1929 and this process is already marked in the famous series. The author points out the last three studies as some of the most daring innovations, especially by: dynamic contrast , musical speech and reminiscent aspects of the Afro-Brazilian rhythmic patterns, such as changing accents and ostinato.

Heitor Villa-Lobos: the life and work - 1887-1959.

Publisher: Jefferson, North Carolina, London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 1995.

Author: Eero Tarasti

As a semiotician, Tarasti argues that the weak signs can be considered the verbal material about the composer and strong signs, the compositions. Tarasti brings the vision of Villa-Lobos interested in popular and classical music, but with a real desire to be a composer of classical music. The presence of Arthur Rubinstein in Rio de Janeiro (1918) reinforces this ideal.

About the youth trips of Villa-Lobos in Brazil, Tarasti considers that more important than to establish where/how many places Villa-Lobos really was, is to be aware that he rarely has used a folklore quotation or indigenous theme “collected". And Tarasti thinks he has hardly heard Indian music in places where he passed; it certainly notes that in his childhood he heard the nordestina music (music of the northeast region of Brazil, very characteristic, probably heard in events of migrant friends in Rio). These trips served as to carry beyond the Europeanized context (especially French) of Rio de Janeiro.

In 1913, when he married the pianist Lucilia Guimarães, it is important to emphasize that Lucilia was already from around the serious music world, reinforcing the inclination of Villa-Lobos for this musical context, increasing his production, consequently. Tarasti highlights the years 1917-1918 as resonance of Impressionism and the Russian School, and the relationship with Rubinstein and Darius Milhaud in 1918-1919 as preambles of his genesis. About his travels to Paris, Tarasti believes that the habitué at artistic and cultural environment was open to foreigners – this society really wanted to know their works, even as an objection to academicism.

According Tarasti, the Choros of Villa-Lobos are compositions of a new aesthetic and technically, this would be the greatest innovation that Villa-Lobos brought to classical music of the twentieth century;  however, says that he composed many other works similar to Choros, with the same characteristics.

Tarasti looks at the 12 Studies, completed in 1929, as intonations of Carioca popular music, some relevant musicians that Villa-Lobos had greatly respect for: Quincas Laranjeiras, Anacleto de Medeiros, Sátyro Bilhar and Ernesto Nazareth. On the other hand, Tarasti agrees that the conformation of this work in Studies, it is an approach to the traditional academic collections, similar to Chopin, Paganini, Liszt, Debussy and Bach.

Tarasti concludes that these years, when Villa-Lobos wrote Studies, reveal the polymorphic nature of his musical thought; this is precisely the period of his highest production of avant-garde spirit (configured in the use of dissonance and polyrhythm), but it has small influence in guitar Studies – the process was the same in Chopin, who in his studies expanded the technical possibilities and the sound of the piano while the tonal structure had remained relatively stable (compared to Czerny, Hummel, Weber and all precedent piano literature). Similarly, studies of Villa-Lobos contain references to classical guitar literature, but new possibilities are opened for the use of the instrument.