B a l d a q u i n o
S a r a b a n d e F o r P i p e O r g a n & C l a v i c h o r d
O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o
[duration 01:05:44] all rights reseved
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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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"The Sarabande (from French, itself derived from Spanish Zarabanda) is a dance in triple metre. Slow and solemn. An interesting representative Melgacian detail is how the composer does remain the ternary metric enigmatically implied throughout this majestic work. Maybe for him - the artistical creator - an invisible dance - more animic (in its subtle impalpability, its ethereal abstraction) than corporeal. And therefore, some more audible.
The way Otacílio reinvents the absorbing instruments involved - Pipe Organ and Clavichord -, turning them almost completely, it's surprising! There's probably a sonic alchemist inhabiting O.M. as Marcel Duchamp said 'Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.'
Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing - who knows? No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy too.
However, the musician Melgaço is rational and irrational simultaneously. Can be translated and stay untranslatable concurrently. Synchronously intelligent and sensitive. What he does have/is a philosophy but continues his cultured offspring immersed in unfathomable mystery. Paraphrasing Paracelsus, Many have said of Alchemy, that it is for the making of gold and silver. For me such is not the aim, but to consider only what virtue and power may lie in the precious Melgacian legacy.
Resuming the thread, the sarabande inspired the title of Ingmar Bergman's last film Saraband (2003). The film uses the sarabande from Johann Sebastian Bach's Fifth Cello Suite, which Ingmar also instrumentalized in Cries and Whispers (1971). More than Bach, I believe 'Baldaquino' has stylistically, in what dissects our humanized absorption, reflective intricacies with Bergman. Though there we find Johann Sebastian too. On second thought, Melgaço equalizes both the German and Swedish again ... as elevates the category of Sarabande to an unutterable sacralized level. And both its solemnization as obscure/or/open sluggish rhythmicity become spectra of a noble perspective. Miguel de Cervantes alluded to the dance's notoriety by saying that Hell was its 'birthplace and breeding place.' Now is the time to Otacílio lead it to a nothing paternalistic Heaven." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)
"A Baldachin or Baldaquin (from Italian: Baldacchino; Baldaquino - in Portuguese -), is a canopy of state over an altar or throne. It had its beginnings as a cloth canopy, but in other cases it is a sturdy, permanent architectural feature, particularly over high altars in cathedrals, where such a structure is more correctly called a ciborium when it is sufficiently architectural in form.
A harmonious ciborium.
A Minsterian compositional architecture. (Hear few seconds of the Second Movement and instantly you will realize.)
Creating a rotund 'plafond' that amplifies the dimensionality of the work. Remembering that for some Eastern cultures, a house begins to be constructed from the conception of the ceiling (the roof is what's called root). Here, there's what is heard and, under a stunning ringing dossal, what is suggested to us or leading our perception towards an ultra artistic collective building.
(...)
But rather make use of muse now. Poetically I could proclaim regarding this superb record: an acoustic Canopy over a musical Altar." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)
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I - A dance called zarabanda is first mentioned in 1539 in Central America in the poem Vida y tiempo de Maricastaña, written in Panama by Fernando de Guzmán Mejía. The dance seems to have been especially popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, initially in the Spanish colonies, before moving back across the Atlantic to Spain. It was banned in Spain in 1583 but still performed, even by clerics during the mass and frequently cited in literature of the period (for instance, by Lope de Vega).
It spread to Italy in the 17th century, and to France, where it became a slow court dance.
Baroque musicians of the 18th century wrote suites of dance music written in binary form that typically included a sarabande as the third of four movements. It was often paired with and followed by a jig or gigue. Johann Sebastian Bach sometimes gave the sarabande a privileged place in his music, even outside the context of dance suites; in particular, the theme and climactic 25th variation from his Goldberg Variations are both sarabandes.
The anonymous harmonic sequence known as La Folia appears in pieces of various types, mainly dances, by dozens of composers from the time of Mudarra (1546) and Corelli through to the present day. The theme of the fourth-movement Sarabande of Handel's Keyboard suite in D minor (HWV 437) for harpsichord, one of these many pieces, is featured prominently in the film Barry Lyndon as well as the BBC documentary, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution.
The sarabande was revived in the late-19th and early 20th centuries by the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg (in his Holberg Suite of 1884), French composers such as Debussy and Satie, and in England, in different styles, Vaughan Williams (in Job: A Masque for Dancing), Benjamin Britten (in the Simple Symphony) and Herbert Howells (in Six Pieces for Organ: Saraband for the Morning of Easter);
II - "Baldachin" was originally a luxurious type of cloth from Baghdad, from which name the word is derived, in English as "baudekin" and other spellings. Matthew Paris records that Henry III of England wore a robe "de preciosissimo baldekino" at a ceremony at Westminster Abbey in 1247. The word for the cloth became the word for the ceremonial canopies made from the cloth.
In the Middle Ages, a hieratic canopy of state or cloth of state was hung above the seat of a personage of sufficient standing, as a symbol of authority. The seat under such a canopy of state would normally be raised on a dais. Emperors and kings, reigning dukes and bishops were accorded this honour. In a 15th-century manuscript illumination the sovereign Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller in Rhodes sits in state to receive a presentation copy of the author's book. His seat is raised on a carpet-covered dais and backed with a richly embroidered dosser (French, "dos"). Under his feet is a cushion, such as protected the feet of the King of France when he presided at a lit de justice. The King of France was also covered by a mobile canopy during his Coronation, held up on poles by several Peers of France.
Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII was a personage of such importance that in her portrait by an anonymous artist, c. 1500 she prays under a canopy of estate; one can see the dosser against the gilded leather wall-covering and the tester above her head (the Tudor rose at its center) supported on cords from the ceiling. The coats-of-arms woven into the tapestry are of England (parted as usual with France) and the portcullis badge of the Beauforts.
In the summer of 1520, a meeting was staged between Francis I of France and Henry VIII of England, where the ostentatious display of wealth and power earned the meeting-place the name of The Field of Cloth of Gold. The canopy of estate may still be seen in some formal throne rooms.
...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.
