Music Library
Feature Fridays Heitor Villa-Lobos
For National Hispanic Heritage Month, Music Library Assistant Ryan Jacobs has chosento highlight from the Naxos Music Library. This is part two of a three- part series. These individuals were chosen as some of the premier examples of composers whose work has been shaped heavily by the culture and influence of their native lands and lands where they traveled.
The second composer I wish to highlight in this series is Heitor Villa-Lobos, the foremost Brazilian composer of the 20th century. He traveled extensively throughout Brazil in the formative period of his career, and his works put Brazil on the wider cultural map of classical music. He waslater given charge of the country’s music education after the government was overthrown. He chose to structure the resulting institutions with a particular emphasis on Brazilian folk and popular influences.
Iwant tofirst dive into hiswhich are a series of many pieces with wildly varying ensembles from chamber to full orchestra. They represent an entanglement of Baroque techniques and Brazilian folk idioms.
From his adolescence, Villa-Lobos had been fascinated by Bach, finding in his work analogies withthe traditional music ofBrazil. Thus the present sequence was intended as an explicit homage to Bach, a factor most evident in the designation of almost every movement with twin titles alludingbothto the actual movements of Baroque suite forms andalso tospecific Brazilian popular styles.
Bachianas brasileirasNo. 9,composed in New York during 1945, is in many respects a summation of the whole series. Originally written for an unaccompanied chorus, it sounds equally convincing when played by string orchestra, and might be thought of as a musical paradigm for the synthesis that Villa-Lobos had sought in the previous eight works. Thus the Prelúdio is taken up with a long-breathed melody, unfolding in expansive harmonies that could almost be a composite of those already heard. Only when the Fuga proceeds is the theme revealed as thesubject of thelattermovementwhich ranks among the most impressive of the composer’s such pieces. Although the range of contrapuntal techniques is applied, the most striking factor is the composer’s blurring of the distinction between what is Bachian and what is Brazilian, surely an intentional QED as the work, and the series as a whole,reaches its affirmative close.
Another example of cultural influence in the music of Villa-Lobos is in hischôrosseries, the title of which is a reference toBrazilian street musicians who use a combination ofEuropean andAfrican instrumentation. Villa-Lobos viewed thechôrosseries as an extension of this music.
is widely consideredto bea distilled representation of the larger series, telling the story of the untouched beauty of the Amazon andthe arrival ofhumankind.“The work’s opening imparts impressions of Brazil’s sonorous natural riches with indigenous melodies and birdsongs, providing an extended prelude to the choral section. The mixed chorus functions at the same level of value and distinction as that of the orchestral architecture, singing vocables meant to evoke aboriginal languages.(Béhague,,pp.87-96)
The final piece from Villa-Lobos that I wish to highlight is the balletUirapuru,which originated as a symphonic poem, featuring birdsong as a major compositional theme. “Uirapuru” is a term used to describe various bird families in Brazil with particularly tuneful andmelodioussongs.
is the offspring of international modernism.Villa-Lobos not only displays his constant interest in the richness of texture, tonal expansion, orchestral color, fluidity of form, melodic symmetry,and the rereading of his compositional references (particularly Wagner, Debussy,and Stravinsky), but creates a specifically Brazilian sound, without directly drawing on folkloric elements—precisely what makes him one of the supreme inventors of Brazilian culture.
In the ballet's storyline, indigenous groups find themselves drawn deep into the forest by the magic of the bird's song; there, a young woman hunts the uirapuru and sees it transform into a young male warrior. Finally,when he is killed by anindigenous intruder, he transforms once again into a bird. The story and the music create a very distant echo of Debussy'sPrélude à l'après-midi d'un fauneand Stravinsky'sFirebird.Villa-Lobos,without the interest in real bird song that Messiaen had, transforms the theme of the uirapuru into a model of stylized symmetry, which opens up into a complex network of formal and harmonic growth. Especially after being recorded by Leopold Stokowski,Uirapurudeservedly became a calling card for the modernist Villa-Lobos.
In addition to the three composers highlighted in this series, there are many other hispanic and latinx composers’ works available to listen to via Naxos. We have preparedincluding some of this great music!This list is by no means exhaustive, as there are a myriad of high-quality recordings of incredible works of music by hispanic composers available through Naxos, and further research and listening (either independently or with the assistance of the Music Library) is highly recommended.