O x y m o r o n

C o n c e r t o P o u r
O n d e s M a r t e n o t
E t
Q u a t u o r À C o r d e s

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 29:57] all rights reserved

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The artist Otacílio Melgaço has two official curators in the virtual world. A curator (from Latin: ´curare´, meaning ´to take care´) is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, library or, as the present case: sound archive) is a content specialist charged with an institution's collections and, highlighting the context in force here, involved with the interpretation of personal (heritage) material. Both, Mr. Paz and Mr. Campbell, are, therefore, reviewers of the Melgacian works. To learn more about their missions, tasks, assignments and responsibilities by means of valuable informations regarding the compositional process, the performative rhizomes and other special features, just click the following link: otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/preamblebypsp
(O.M.Team; P r e l u d e)

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"In the first decades of the 20th century, several composers such as Debussy, Schoenberg, Berg, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Bartók started experimenting with ideas that were to have far-reaching consequences for the way music is written and, in some cases, performed. Some of these innovations include a more frequent use of modality, the exploration of non-western scales, the development of atonality, the wider acceptance of dissonances, the invention of the twelve-tone technique of composition and the use of polyrhythms and complex time signatures.

These changes also affected the concerto as a musical form. Beside more or less radical effects on musical language, they led to a redefinition of the concept of virtuosity in order to include new and extended instrumental techniques as well as a focus on aspects of sound that had been neglected or even ignored before such as pitch, timbre and dynamics. In some cases, they also brought about a new approach to the role of the soloist and its relation to the orchestra.

The Brazilian composer and multi-instrumentalist Otacílio Melgaço now presents, through the oracular combination of Martenot waves and string quartet, its historical contribution to this fascinating syntactic 'phonodyssey'.

One aspect that makes quite unique the Melgacian sonic creation in focus is the way he gave birth a - in overlapping layers - particularized language for ondium Martenot. The peculiar instrument (ondes musicales) when it takes the soloist function generally articulates typical mechanisms for this - perspective of successive notes (as scales etc) -. O.M. establishes, in most often, harmonic interlaces - perspective of simultaneous notes - and so it generates magnificent densities & intensities! Just like a kind of private acoustic shell. That brings me to the impactful cover of the disc and its metaphorical cave paintings full of handprints.

Reflexively 'Oxymoron' is a concert that lives up as 'ouverture' to the twenty-first century. And for what is yet to come. At least as a sign of lucid hope.

Apropos, listen to the first few minutes of the second movement. if you not feel an 'epiphanic rapture', we must urgently give new meaning to the terms 'epiphanic' and 'rapture', ladies and gentlemen." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"'The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.' (Soren Kierkegaard)

1- Oxymoron. A figure of speech that

j-u-x-t-a-p-o-s-e-s

elements that appear to be

c-o-n-t-r-a-d-i-c-t-o-r-y.

Literary oxymorons crafted to reveal a

p-a-r-a-d-o-x;

2- Concerto. The etymology is uncertain, but the word seems to have originated from the conjunction of the two Latin words conserere (meaning to tie, to join, to weave) and certamen (competition, fight): the idea is that the two parts in a concerto, the soloist (O.M. opts for Martenot waves), and the orchestra or concert band (O.M. opts for a string quartet),

a-l-t-e-r-n-a-t-e

episodes of

o-p-p-o-s-i-t-i-o-n,

c-o-o-p-e-r-a-t-i-o-n,

and

i-n-d-e-p-e-n-d-e-n-c-e

in the creation of the music

f-l-o-w.

If you intersect the double information above, will have begun to decipher as much as possible the 'aura' that pervades this serpentine work. 'There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive,' once pondered Jack London. 'Oxymoron' suggests to us that yes, the life can increasingly rise. As a complete forgetfulness that one is alive - reminds us of something higher, reminds us (by forgetfulness) who we really are or can we be." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

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I - Oxymoron is derived from the 5th century Latin oxymoron, which is derived from the Ancient Greek: ὀξύς oxus "sharp, keen" and μωρός mōros "dull, stupid", making the word itself an oxymoron. However, the combined Greek form ὀξύμωρον (oxumōron) does not in fact appear in the extant Greek sources.

The most common form of oxymoron involves an adjective–noun combination of two words. For example, the following line from Tennyson's Idylls of the King contains two oxymora:

'And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true';

II - A Concerto (from the Italian: concerto) is a musical composition usually composed in three parts or movements, in which usually (and as already mentioned) one solo instrument (for instance, a piano, violin, cello or flute) is accompanied by an orchestra or concert band. Notwithstanding, the 20th century also witnessed a growth of the concertante repertoire of instruments, some of which had seldom or never been used in this capacity. As a result, almost all classical instruments now have a concertante repertoire;

III - The ondes Martenot ("Martenot waves"), also known as the ondium Martenot, Martenot and ondes musicales, is an early electronic musical instrument invented in 1928 by Maurice Martenot. The original design was similar in sound to the theremin. The sonic capabilities of the instrument were later expanded by the addition of timbral controls and switchable loudspeakers.

The instrument's eerie wavering notes are produced by varying the frequency of oscillation in vacuum tubes. The production of the instrument stopped in 1988, but several conservatories in France still offer tuition to students of the instrument;

IV - The ondes Martenot has been used by many composers, most notably Olivier Messiaen. He first used it in the Fête des Belles Eaux for six ondes, written for the 1937 International World's Fair in Paris and then used it in several of his works, including the Turangalîla-Symphonie and Trois Petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine. His opera Saint-François d'Assise requires three of the instruments. The composer's widow, Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen arranged and edited four unpublished Feuillets inedits for ondes Martenot and piano which were published in 2001. The ondes Martenot has also been used occasionally in transcriptions: Leopold Stokowski used the instrument in his ethereal orchestration of Buxtehude's Sarabande and Courante ("Auf Meinen Lieben Gott").

Other notable composers who have employed the ondes Martenot in their works include Charles Koechlin, Edgard Varèse (as a replacement for two theremin instruments in his work Ecuatorial), Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Cemal Reşit Rey, Maurice Jarre, Sylvano Bussotti, Giacinto Scelsi, Marcel Landowski, Karel Goeyvaerts, Pierre Boulez, Tristan Murail, Miklós Rózsa, Henri Tomasi, and Frank Zappa. André Jolivet wrote a prominent concerto for it in 1947. Bohuslav Martinů authorized the adaptation of his Fantasie to the use of the ondes Martenot when it proved difficult to perform on the Theremin, for which it was originally written.

Estimates of the number of works written for ondes Martenot vary. Hugh Davies reckoned there to be around a thousand works composed for the instrument, although Jeanne Loriod's figures are the more widely quoted: she estimated that there were 15 concertos and 300 pieces of chamber music. Jacques Tchamkerten's provisional catalogue of works for ondes, included in the current reprinting of Loriod's Technique, lists far fewer works than either of these figures.

...for purposes of pragmatism and clear exegesis,
quotes have Wikipedia as a source...

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Between two parentheses...
(Atonalism, Twelve-Tone, Serialism, Musique Concrète... Acousmatic. Eletroacoustic. Magnetic Tape. Expressionism, New Objectivity, Hyperrealism, Abstractionism, Neoclassicism, Neobarbarism, Futurism, Mythic Method. Electronic...Computer Music, Spectral, Polystylism, Neoromanticism, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism...are addressed by Melgaço. Paradoxically New Simplicity and New Complexity also.
Art Rock, Free Jazz, Ethnic Dialects, Street Sounds are occasional syntax elements.
All the possibilities mentioned above and others that were not mentioned are the usual accoutrements of the composer/instrumentalist to establish his ´babelic´ glossary. We can prove this in a short passage of a single composition up along the entirety of a conceptual phonograph album. All distributed over a career and idiosyncratic records. Have we a universe before us and I propose to see it through a telescope, not a microscope.
I propose not handle very specialized topics here. Otherwise would be, with the exception of musicians and scholars, all hostages of a hermetic jargon. Because more important is to present Otacílio Melgaço to the general public and not to a segment of specialists. Faction of experts not need presentations, depart for the enjoyment beforehand. For this reason there is no niche here for intellectual onanism and encrypted musical terminology. The reason for these parentheses is to establish such elucidation. The non-adoption of technicalities leads to more panoramic, amplifier reviews. Are You always welcome. Those who do not dominate contemporary music and are introduced to the world of ubiquitous O.M. [autodidact and independent artist who, being more specific, does not belong to schools or doctrines; artist who makes Music and that´s enough; music devoid of labels or stylistic, chronological, historical paradigms or trends] and Those who belong to the métier and turn to enjoy propositions they know and also delving into advanced Melgacian sound cosmogonies...
I conclude poetically. ´Certeza/Certainty´ by Octavio Paz. ´Si es real la luz blanca De esta lámpara, real La mano que escribe, ¿son reales
Los ojos que miran lo escrito? De una palabra a la otra Lo que digo se desvanece. Yo sé que estoy vivo Entre dos paréntesis.´ If it is real the white light from this lamp, real the writing hand, are they real, the eyes looking at what I write? From one word to the other what I say vanishes. I know that I am alive between two parentheses.
We´re all more and more a-l-i-v-e now.)
- P.S.P.