C h i a r o s c u r o
- P i e c e F o r S t r i n g O r c h e s t r a -
O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o
[duration 01:25:49] 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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"Chiaroscuro (in Italian; in English: light-dark) is an oil painting technique, developed during the Renaissance, that uses strong tonal contrasts between light and dark to model three-dimensional forms, often to dramatic effect.
The underlying principle is that solidity of form is best achieved by the light falling against it. Artists known for developing the technique include Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt. It´s a mainstay of black and white photography.
Summarized comments about three pilasters quoted from the Melgacian progeny:
´Strong tonal contrasts between light and dark to model three-dimensional forms´:
O.M. draws strength from the contrast (including floating tonalities) to relativize it to the extreme. However, it ´turns inside out´ the very shape that´s now emphasized in its three-dimensionality too, but under a paradoxical internal optics. So, make no mistake: the sonic light that illuminates not more the continent but the content; is inexorably more powerful and so I dare to affirm that it goes beyond a third dimension, many others are suggested, intuited, groped, and into them we´re irresistibly invaginated (it´s worth underlining Mr. Melgaço's ability to mix in so far as he ´alchemically´ works with a string quartet that´s dilated countless times a posteriori);
´Dramatic effect´:
The dramaticity consequently ceases to be an expressionist registry and gains introspective directions, no less dramatic but filtered so that we can attain a quintessentiality instead of a mere effect of punctual and picturesque dichotomy. O.M. shifts the concept of ´drama´ to another axis; if you'll let me, I'd say figuratively: it´s not in the ´wing´ nor in the ´plume´ but it happens to be in the ´air´ itself, ´zephyr´;
´Solidity of form is best achieved by the light falling against it´:
O.M. elevates to a stratospheric degree the solidity of its composition almost approaching his creation of the non-form. And instead of pointing a spotlight to it, (I referred to the air, now I make the same analogy): he turns it into the light itself. Therefore, we can think about ´a solidity in a form transubstantiated into light´. There could not be a prominence so well achieved since subjectivity is even more valued, harnessed, expanded.
In brief: ´The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity´, Emile M. Cioran´s words.
In this sense: we´re facing, without any doubt, one of the most deep works of Otacílio Melgaço.
It´s no surprise that such a pictorial technique was developed in the Renaissance. The Renascence. With this, the present darkandlighter Piece for String Orchestra comes to graces us (like a holy offering): a sweeping rapturous ecstatic kind of Rebirth." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)
"Some terms are common betwixt music and the visual arts. Colour, brightness, texture etc. ´Clair-obscur´ is no exception.
John Constable in a note that comes to our purpose: He [the artist] ought to have 'these powerful organs of expression' - colour and chiaroscuro - entirely at his command, that he may use them in every possible form, as well as that he may do with the most perfect freedom; therefore, whether he wishes to make the subject of a joyous, solemn, or meditative character, by flinging over it the cheerful aspect which the sun bestows, by a proper disposition of shade, or by the appearances that beautify its arising or its setting, a true ´General Effect´ should never be lost sight of.
Not so much here as humors, emotional states or frames of mind but penetrating more heavily into the belly of music itself, reaching a trans territoriality where the contrasts become indescribable because (pay attention to what I am going to say) beyond the commonly human parameters. Mr. Melgaço, as well as artists of great magnitude, creates from his own rules (and iconoclasms).
I´ll mention two aspects that corroborate my reasoning: the Brazilian composer and multi-instrumentist is able to engender such vast audible dimensions (here, through otherworldly layers of strings) that perhaps it´s one of the most significant descriptions made through the sonic universe that achieves a perception of (what we try to define as) the Immeasurable, the Infinity. Both respectively spatially and temporally.
From metaphysics to a structural aspect: I bring to light also the pukka metalanguage present in ´Chiaroscuro´, since from a determined duration of the Piece (I will not reveal which, it´s up to each listener), we can identify, parallel to its monumental backbone, the emergence of a composition within the Composition, in a quite subtle and surprising way. It´s about twenty minutes along which
we´re led to a ´missing link´ that demonstrates how ´powerful organs of expression´ can be exploited with mastery and how much ´General Effect´ snatch us when in the adequate hands.
The simultaneity-of-distinctions is not only one of ´the keys that opens us´ to the title of creation but is a proof of how O.M. directs us to the post-disparity. He leaves aside a naturally Manichean approach (easily found in ´light-dark´ when inhabiting paintings, photographs, films) and in what has come to be endowed with indiscernibility (in unicity) ... Otacílio will seek to highlight flashes, filigranes, watermarks, biases, edges of discernibility. The connotations that Melgaço enlightens in his offspring, are of contrasts in their more atomic, metaphorically indivisible features. Hence, he may be referring, as a starting point (the ambiguous and enigmatic cover of album seals it), to sacred and profane; heaven and hell; good and evil; day and night; pleasure and pain, and son on. Yes, but it's more than that. A lot more. Inasmuch as it´s transcendent. It´s about a perfect conjunction between diachrony and synchrony. Paradigm and syntagma. Signifier and signified. Everything culminates in a womb in terms of what´s revealed as a unique Sign.
´A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.´ (Ferdinand de Saussure)
´I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.´ (Charles Sanders Peirce)
´In poetic language, in which the Sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.´ (Roman Jakobson)
Few, rare as Otacílio captured the subtile and pervasive difference amid ´chiaro e scuro´ and ´chiaroscuro´. In Melgacian poeticity, the autonomies complement each other until the summit of an altisonant symbolism of the intersections; light and dark metamorphose themselves into same (if I describe physically) vibrations that travel through the air; in other words, through the light (if I metaphysically depict); nay: into (if I portray, Ladies and Gentlemen, O.M. himself) dazzling S o u n d." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)
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I - Chiaroscuro originated during the Renaissance as drawing on coloured paper, where the artist worked from the paper's base tone toward light using white gouache, and toward dark using ink, bodycolour or watercolour. These in turn drew on traditions in illuminated manuscripts going back to late Roman Imperial manuscripts on purple-dyed vellum. Such works used to be called "chiaroscuro drawings", but are more often described in modern museum terminology by such formulae as "pen on prepared paper, heightened with white bodycolour". Chiaroscuro woodcuts began as imitations of this technique. When discussing Italian art, the term sometimes is used to mean painted images in monochrome or two colours, more generally known in English by the French equivalent, grisaille. The term broadened in meaning early on to cover all strong contrasts in illumination between light and dark areas in art, which is now the primary meaning;
II - Chiaroscuro also is used in cinematography to indicate extreme low-key and high-contrast lighting to create distinct areas of light and darkness in films, especially in black and white films. Classic examples are The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), Metropolis (1927) The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), and the black and white scenes in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979).
For example, in Metropolis, chiaroscuro lighting is used to create contrast between light and dark mise-en-scene and figures. The effect of this is primarily to highlight the differences between the capitalist elite and the workers.
In photography, chiaroscuro can be achieved with the use of "Rembrandt lighting". In more highly developed photographic processes, this technique also may be termed "ambient/natural lighting", although when done so for the effect, the look is artificial and not generally documentary in nature. In particular, Bill Henson along with others, such as W. Eugene Smith, Josef Koudelka, Garry Winogrand, Lothar Wolleh, Annie Leibovitz, Floria Sigismondi, and Ralph Gibson may be considered some of the modern masters of chiaroscuro in documentary photography.
Perhaps the most direct intended use of chiaroscuro in filmmaking would be Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. When informed that no lens currently had a wide enough aperture to shoot a costume drama set in grand palaces using only candlelight, Kubrick bought and retrofitted a special lens for these purposes: a modified Mitchell BNC camera and a Zeiss lens manufactured for the rigors of space photography, with a maximum aperture of f/.7. The naturally unaugmented lighting situations in the film exemplified low-key, natural lighting in filmwork at its most extreme outside of the Eastern European/Soviet filmmaking tradition (itself exemplified by the harsh low-key lighting style employed by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein).
Sven Nykvist, the longtime collaborator of Ingmar Bergman, also informed much of his photography with chiaroscuro realism, as did Gregg Toland, who influenced such cinematographers as László Kovács, Vilmos Zsigmond, and Vittorio Storaro with his use of deep and selective focus augmented with strong horizon-level key lighting penetrating through windows and doorways. Much of the celebrated film noir tradition relies on techniques Toland perfected in the early thirties that are related to chiaroscuro (though high-key lighting, stage lighting, frontal lighting, and other effects are interspersed in ways that diminish the chiaroscuro claim).
...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.
