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Camara Oscura {Otac​í​lio Melga​ç​o} [duration 44​:​21]

by Otacílio Melgaço

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about

C a m a r a O s c u r a

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 44:21] 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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"While the technical principles of the camera obscura have been known since antiquity, the broad use of the technical concept in producing images with a linear perspective in paintings, maps, theatre setups and architectural and later photographic images and movies started in the Western Renaissance and the scientific revolution. Western artists and philosophers used the Arab findings in new frameworks of epistemic relevance. E.g. Leonardo da Vinci used the camera obscura as model of the eye, René Descartes for eye and mind and John Locke started to use the camera obscura as a metaphor of human understanding per se.

Melgaço - inspired by da Vinci - used his Camara Oscura as model of the ear, - inspired by Descartes - for ear and mind, however - as Locke - O.M. starts to use its Camara Oscura also and magnificently as a metaphor of human understanding per se." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

"Otacílio Melgaço, in my opinion, adopts a conceptual diptych in his unlabeled work ´Camara Oscura´.

Pure Geometry and the astronomical event Eclipse decoded more directly as a methodology (or referral) compositional.

[1- Geometry is a branch of mathematics concerned with questions of shape, size, relative position of figures, and the properties of space. The Song Dynasty Chinese scientist Shen Kuo (1031–1095) experimented with a camera obscura, and was the first to apply geometrical (and quantitative) attributes to it; 2- An Eclipse occurs when an astronomical object is temporarily obscured, either by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. In 13th-century England, Roger Bacon described the use of a camera obscura for the safe observation of solar eclipses.]

Through concrete interventions + electronic elements + psychoacoustics et cetera, the Brazilian composer and multi-instrumentalist creates sonic intersections between both perspectives. The result is surprising and even suggests, I think, a mystical content. Chuck Palahniuk claimed that maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down. Otacílio managed to translate it artistically with praise and inspiring authenticity. In a way, life is exploit this ´chamber´ - perhaps blinded by the darkness, but - and now even more - with illuminated ears..." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

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I - A Camara Oscura (Latin: "dark chamber") is an optical device that led to photography and the photographic camera. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside, where it is reproduced, rotated 180 degrees (thus upside-down), but with color and perspective preserved. The image can be projected onto paper, and can then be traced to produce a highly accurate representation. The largest camera obscura in the world is on Constitution Hill in Aberystwyth, Wales.

Using mirrors, as in an 18th-century overhead version, it is possible to project a right-side-up image. Another more portable type is a box with an angled mirror projecting onto tracing paper placed on the glass top, the image being upright as viewed from the back.

As the pinhole is made smaller, the image gets sharper, but the projected image becomes dimmer. With too small a pinhole, however, the sharpness worsens, due to diffraction. Most practical camera obscuras use a lens rather than a pinhole (as in a pinhole camera) because it allows a larger aperture, giving a usable brightness while maintaining focus;

II - The term "camera obscura" itself was first used by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler in 1604. The term is based on the Latin camera, "(vaulted) chamber or room", and obscura, "darkened" (plural: camerae obscurae). The English physician and author Sir Thomas Browne speculated upon the interrelated workings of optics and the camera obscura in his 1658 discourse The Garden of Cyrus thus:

´For at the eye the Pyramidal rayes from the object, receive a decussation, and so strike a second base upon the Retina or hinder coat, the proper organ of Vision; wherein the pictures from objects are represented, answerable to the paper, or wall in the dark chamber; after the decussation of the rayes at the hole of the hornycoat, and their refraction upon the Christalline humour, answering the foramen of the window, and the convex or burning-glasses, which refract the rayes that enter it.´

...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.

credits

released June 6, 2015

Hear more here:
soundcloud.com/otaciliomelgaco

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O t a c í l i o
M e l g a ç o {conception | composition | arrangement | synopsis | instrumentation | orchestration | engineering & sound design | art design [O.M., after Dürer] | production | direction}

Special Guests: Nausícaaa Ensemble

Estúdio Yoknapotawpha/BR + Unidade Euromobile

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Otacílio Melgaço Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Composer, Arranger, Conductor, Multi-
Instrumentalist
from
Minas Gerais,
Brazil.
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Official (English) Site
otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/omenglish
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otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/otaciliomelgaco
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"Music is like a bewitched Mistress." (Paul Klee)
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