C o u p D e . . . M a î t r e

- T o m b e a u P o u r
P i e r r e B o u l e z -

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 49:13] 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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"´It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed.´

´More and more I find that in order to create effectively one has to consider delirium and, yes, organize it.´

´Creation exists only in the unforeseen made necessary.´

´Music is a labyrinth with no beginning and no end,
full of new paths to discover,
where mystery remains eternal.´

Impactful quotes uttered by the honored.

It makes me wonder. Boulez's music will be - one day - considered an art of the past? [He has described Duchamp as ‘a pompous bore’, Cage as ‘a performing monkey’, and Stockhausen, ‘a hippie’.] But what about Pierre himself? A kind of musical Stalinist, as Schaeffer said? Will he be - one day - the Gioconda (La Joconde) to be destroyed? [Or just as Boulez was a destroyer, Pierre had already been destroyed long ago?] Can the spell turn against the magician? We do not have those answers as well as Boulez, in effect, did not have.

But what´s really at stake now is another matter. Where the mystery remains in fact eternal? How the (new) paths of discovery always will keep open? Can you avoid getting lost in the bowels of a labyrinth (and what´s inexorable: with no beginning and no end) and knowing that you´re a musician and such maze is the ... Music?

But there are some clues left by the ´enfant terrible´ gone: first delirium, then the organizing. [Organization as duct to a rave
that´s fertile creation source or part of the own creation simultaneously.] First the unforeseen, then the necessity. [The need for unexpected itself as a fountain of creation.]

Those were the coordinates Mr. Melgaço absorbed in order to give birth to ´Le Cygne´. [Otacílio used to call Boulez: ´The Swan´. Partly fluxuous admiration sign, partly fecund and constructive provocation (?)] This sound Piece - ´Le Cygne´ - already existed and was dedicated to Pierre. Created and recorded with quite antecedence. But with the demise of the composer/conductor/writer/pianist born in Montbrison, Loire: was embalmed (and now launched) in the texture of a Tombeau. [A Tombeau is a musical composition (earlier, in the early 16th century, a poem) commemorating the death of a notable individual. The term derives from the French word for ´tomb´ or ´tombstone´.]

Of course - sometimes more direct, sometimes less - some Melgacian mentions of serialism, mobile form, controlled chance, pitch multiplication, randomness, improvisation, abstractionism, cosmopolitanism, ... , and - why not ? - ´explosante-fixe´. Sure, a way to abandon the past.

´I must abandon the past.´ — Boulez, Newsweek Magazine

´With Pierre music has to do with ideas. His is a very literary point of view. He even speaks of parentheses. All of it has nothing to do with sound. Pierre has the mind of an expert. With that kind of mind you can only deal with the past. You can't be an expert in the unknown. His work is understandable only in relation to the past.´ — Cage, quoted in ´To Boulez and Beyond´

Yes - controversy aside, deserved elegy - he was, undeniably, one of the most prominent personalities of experimental music in the second half of the twentieth century. So we can denominate this intriguing (daedal; emanating metaphysical funereal paradoxical senses of no beginning and no end; full of paths - paths to be anew & afresh discovered -; mysterious; and, dare I say, eternal) discographic album: ´From Boulez to Beyond´. Oui, Mesdames et Messieurs: un ´Coup De...Maître!´" (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"Le Cygne (The Swan).

The English word 'swan', akin to the German ´schwan´, Dutch ´zwaan´ and Swedish ´svan´, is derived from Indo-European root ´swen´ (to sound, to sing). Swans feature strongly in mythology. Other references include the belief that upon death the otherwise-silent mute swan would sing beautifully—hence the phrase ´swan song´; the mute swan is also one of the sacred birds of Apollo, whose associations stem both from the nature of the bird as a symbol of light as well as the notion of a ´swan song´. The god is often depicted riding a chariot pulled by or composed of swans in his ascension from Delos.

In perception and sensitivity of the composer and multi-instrumentalist Melgaço, The Swan (Le Cygne) is revealed one of the more appropriate icons to symbolize a Tombeau. And this conception rises to heights the tribute paid to Mr. Boulez, who died recently.

Plus - Otacílio, in literary terms, makes use of three references here: Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles-Pierre Baudelaire and René-François Sully Prudhomme. By the way, through these names (especially the first two), the universes of both musicians, at least here and now, are even more intertwined. Fascinatingly.

We are facing a complex work but compact. Innovative but that fulfills a ceremonial mission. ´The aim of music is not to express feelings but to express music´, once said Pierre. ´Coup De...Maître´: O.M. learned to respect and, iconoclastic, evolve (deconstructing and reinventing - starting from scratch) such appointment!" (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

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I - In Latin American literature, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867–1916) consecrated the swan as a symbol of artistic inspiration by drawing attention to the constancy of swan imagery in Western culture, beginning with the rape of Leda and ending with Wagner's Lohengrin;

II - "Swan:

1- (...) It´s native to parts of Europe and has been artificially introduced to North America as somewhat of a ´decorative bird.´ If geese mess with it, it will chase them away. If you mess with it, it will chase you away;

2- Slang term for a female who was once unattractive but somehow became very attractive - referencing the ´Ugly Duckling´ story -."

(Urban Dictionary);

III - Pierre Boulez (1925 – 2016) was a French composer, conductor, writer and pianist. He was also the founder and director of the Paris-based Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM).

In his early career, Boulez played a key role in the development of integral serialism, controlled chance and electronic music. This, coupled with his highly polemical views on the evolution of music, gained him the reputation as an enfant terrible.

As a conductor, Boulez was known mainly for his performances of Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, Anton Bruckner, Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, Maurice Ravel, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Edgard Varèse, Richard Wagner and Anton Webern, as well as conducting the work of his contemporaries such as Elliott Carter and György Ligeti. He received a total of 26 Grammy Awards during his career;

IV - About a possible quibble on the title of the Melgacian work.

Boulez's strongest achievement in serialism is Le marteau sans maître (The Hammer without a Master) for ensemble and voice, from 1953 to 1957, a "keystone of 20th-century music". Le marteau was a surprising and revolutionary synthesis of many different streams in modern music, as well as seeming to encompass the sound worlds of modern jazz, the Balinese Gamelan, as well as traditional African and Japanese musics;

V - Pli selon pli (Fold by Fold) is a piece of classical music by Boulez. It carries the subtitle Portrait de Mallarmé (Portrait of Mallarmé). The composition is in five movements, the first and last using a line from a Mallarmé poem, the three middle movements using the entire text of a Mallarmé sonnet. The movements and their associated poems are:

1- "Don" – "Don du poème"
2- "Improvisation I on Mallarmé" – "Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui"
3- "Improvisation II on Mallarmé" – "Une dentelle s'abolit"
4- "Improvisation III on Mallarmé" – "A la nue accablante tu"
5- "Tombeau" – the poem of the same name

The date of writing this sonnet - one of the most famous poems of its author - published in 1885, is not known.

Most commentators see in The Swan (Le Cygne) a image of the poet struggling against "winter" of infertility.

"Improvisation I" contains the full text of this poem:

"Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d'aile ivre
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui !
Un cygne d'autrefois se souvient que c'est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
Pour n'avoir pas chanté la région où vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l'ennui.
Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie
Par l'espace infligée à l'oiseau qui le nie,
Mais non l'horreur du sol où le plumage est pris.
Fantôme qu'à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne,
Il s'immobilise au songe froid de mépris
Que vêt parmi l'exil inutile le Cygne."

...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.