D e f e a t e d B y S i l e n c e,
H e r e I s A P l a c e
W h e r e T h e S i l e n c e I s M o r e S u b t l e

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 06:06:00] 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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"Coronachs!

Exactly one year ago, David Bowie died. And Mr. Melgaço has graced us with an impressive homage to him.

melgacootacilio.bandcamp.com/album/omfug-other-music-for-uplifting-gormandizers-a-tribute-to-david-bowie-otac-lio-melga-o-duration-01-02-18

Today - on January 10, 2017 - the composer and multi-instrumentalist presents to us again a renewed expression of what could be called one of the deepest faces of a contemporary Requiem. Now, in memory of a triumvirate: Ferreira Gullar, Leonard Cohen and Zygmunt Bauman. Inventive progenies given to light with relative antecedence to the death of the illustrious three but here gathered as in a strikingly ritualistic Tribute, in a resonant Trinity from the almost synchronicity of its deceases.

Monumental six hours and six minutes (!) of Music & Non-Music. Notably, they are Odes to Silence. ´Silence is one of the great arts of conversation´, uttered Marcus Tullius Cicero. Mainly among those who remain here and those who are gone and thus Melgaço subtly breaks, with his art & immeasurable sensitivity, the boundaries between one and another.

In an interview I did with such Brazilian Sphinx, taking into consideration how much the music of Otacílio Melgaço is linked to the present, to contemporaneity and also to Becoming because it´s equally visionary, I asked O.M. about the supposedly paradoxical reasons for so many works dedicated to dead people. Declared elegies, declared commendations. Artists of all areas, thinkers, universal characters, ... infinite persona(litie)s. He answered me: ´My most thought provoking dialogues, the greatest challenges put to me - right after myself - are made by them. Aeschylus, Éric Alfred Leslie Satie, Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry, Carlos Paredes, Antônio Carlos Gomes, Antônio Francisco Lisboa, Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern, Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky, Johan August Strindberg, Jheronimus van Aken, Zaha Mohammad Hadid, Hilda de Almeida Prado Hilst, Luíza Gustavovna Salomé, Benedito de Espinosa, Mercier Philip Cunningham, Zygmunt Bauman, Leonard Norman Cohen, José Ribamar Ferreira and more´n´more others´n´others. When it comes to them and me: time is on our side, yes it is. I ceremonially agree with Rilke, the Artist is Eternity jutting out over the Present. In addition to several norths that are petals of my wind rose, I also hope and wish that everyone (of those who are yet respiring) can feel and be inspired by the breath of my statuaries.´ However, after a brief hiatus, Tchekovian, he inseminates always fertilizing reticences: ´Albeit ... that is just ... one ... of the vertices ... of the ... arcanum ...´.

I call, apropos, the attention of the Ladies and Gentlemen to the perspective that Otacílio has adopted regarding the relationship amidst Sound and Non-Sound. It´s undeniable the peculiarity not only of the emphasis on the ´gaps´ (establishing a surprising duality: hearable presences & absences, or rather, the existence of sonic perception & the perceptibility of non-existence) as well as the conformity assumed by the still as relevant as the audible interventions (in vocalic, electronic silhouettes ... full of mesmerizing effects). Rarely does a cultural expression require us so much. In terms of the qualitative and quantitative profusion of the intervals and also of the reactions that we have before this spasmodic muteness so naked and that inevitably undresses us. Just as death undoes, thread by thread, the garments of life, or how, in reality, the ´eternal rest´ brings us new, lighter costumes. Silent, first and last." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"The title of this Melgacian masterpiece is a psalm phrase written by Leonard Cohen. It´s contained in the Book of Mercy.

´Not knowing where to go, I go to you.
Not knowing where to turn, I turn to you.
Not knowing how to speak, I speak to you.
Not knowing what to hold, I bind myself to you.

Having lost my way, I make my way to you.
Having soiled my heart, I lift my heart to you.
Having wasted my days, I bring the heap to you.

The great highway covered with debris, I travel on a hair to you.
The wall smeared with filth, I go through a pinhole of light.
Blocked by every thought, I fly on the wisp of a remembrance.
Defeated by silence, here is a place where the silence is more subtle.

And here is the opening in defeat.
And here is the clasp of the will.
And here is the fear of you.
And here is the fastening of mercy.

Blessed are you, in this man’s moment.
Blessed are you, whose presence illuminates outrageous evil.
Blessed are you who brings chains out of the darkness.
Blessed are you, who waits in the world.
Blessed are you, whose name is in the world.´

[As Allan Showalter explains: Book of Mercy is Cohen’s most deeply personal. He told Robert Sward in a 1984 interview, ´Is a secret book for me.´ It was written during an intense moment of reassessment of his life and art and remains his sole effort to publish a book of psalms. Allows us to witness the struggle of a soul engaged in what Cohen described as ´a sacred kind of conversation.´ The reputation of this meditative collection has grown steadily, and the volume is now widely considered one of the finest compilations of confession and spiritual longing ever written. This quote from Rabbi Mordecai Findley is definitive:

´I think Leonard Cohen is actually the greatest linguist alive today. I read his poems aloud at high holidays, from Book of Mercy. I think Book of Mercy should be in our prayer book.´

If one reads it superficially, it is easy to miss some of its most exquisite nuances. Most assume that the entire book is addressed to a male deity, the Judaic God of the Hebrew Bible and the Torah. That reading is an important one and has obvious validity. A deeper meditation reveals that many passages are also addressed to what appears to be the Shekinah, the feminine presence of God; a variation on Cohen’s lifelong conversation with the Muse. Furthermore, there are many mentions of the esoteric symbolism of Kabbalah, such as ´kingdom´ and ´crown.´]

Inter alia, it´s very interesting and touching to interweave this reference and Edna St. Vincent Millay´s Ode to Silence, recited in the first part of the Trilogy (that O.M. elevates to maximum metaphoricity). Every Piece has its fascinating specificities: from the idiosyncratic elements of each mysterious Particle [the decisive option for the vox as an adequate ´glorification´ of the Brazilian poet; the intermittent citation to Zen Buddhism - practiced by the Canadian bard -; in a punctual passage, water sounds to mirror the legacy of the creator of liquid concepts as was the case of the Polish philosopher] until general captivating characteristics of the whole Work [for example: the original and initiatory approach to silence: both 1 inviting us to an inner retreat due to the Praise to those who passed away and 2 allowing, through an unusual duration of the pauses themselves, that the ambient noises - that surround us while we´re listening - are an important part of all the experience. At the same time we surrender ourselves to our interiority and remain open to everything that encircles us, in a physical and metaphysical interaction. O.M. and its adorable paradoxes - typical of great artists -. I dare to conjecture the following: if we were plunged into ninety nine percent of outer silence (if in an anechoic chamber and with only one source to reproduce in headphones the work of Melgaço in focus), the silences here (in the Otacilian place where they are more subtle), the endogenous and the exogenous, would have distinct substantialities, pulps, textures, carats, whitenesses. And would be enigmatically confluent, convergent, complementary. Because, under these conditions, we would hear our breathing, stomach and the heartbeat too. We can deduce that the practically absolute ´non-soundability´ (whether by an artifice such the mentioned chamber produced on planet earth or simply if we were in sidereal space), from the extrapolation of a certain temporal limit of supportability, ... could be reason to lunacy (term that reinforces the cosmos when locus), ... could be reason to insanity of a human being. Prospective conclusion: this character of entirety only if through madness? (may be one way: let Melgaço's music drive you crazy - as a superior pellucidity -), or, if with us lucid: it becomes a concept, justly (with the connotation of ´intellectual´ for some, or ´spiritual´ for others) a ´mental´ construction, or/and, as here/now, a unique Work of Art. Replete with substantiality, pulps, textures, carats, whitenesses. I can not forget to point to the way the white color was used on the cover: there, the sole figurativeness are words and in explicit mutation to ... blank, to ... invisibility (such as a distant horizon, ceasing to exist), (beyond that!) to ... inaudibility; (wherefore): to ... the most abyssal and simultaneously elevated Silencing].

I believe this is the overtone given to Requiem by Otacílio Melgaço. Religiosity, from ´ligare´ (bind, connect), therefore, from a prefixed ´re-ligare´, i.e. re (again) + ´ligare´ or to reconnect. In short,
it´s not a conjecture of a religious nature in the strict sense but rather of the experience of connections & reconnections (as I have already suggested above, in various dimensions: whether sensorial, sentimental, emotional, intellectual, ... and even animic, spiritual - for those who consider ´these possible levels´ - but, above all, in the name of an expansive, libertarian - and aggregating - Humanism. Humanism, this noble outlook or system of thought is enough to amalgamate the three decorated by Otacílio: men who have deserved and always will deserve laurels because of their distinctnesses, awarenesses, warnings, audacities and clairvoyances. O.M. is included, his - I reiterate - ´subtle place´ is guaranteed in such ´pantheon´). I turn to William Wordsworth if I imagine the voice of each of the honorees, anon under the transcendent mantle (of Melgacian bonds), in a clamor:

´STAY, little cheerful Robin! stay,
And at my casement sing,
Though it should prove a farewell lay
And this our parting spring.

(...)

The promise in thy song;
A charm, 'that' thought can not destroy,
Doth to thy strain belong.

Methinks that in my dying hour
Thy song would still be dear,
And with a more than earthly power
My passing Spirit cheer.

Then, little Bird, this boon confer,
Come, and my requiem sing,
Nor fail to be the harbinger
Of everlasting Spring.´

... and in ethic reverberation, poetic echo, aesthetic response: ´Defeated By Silence, Here Is A Place Where The Silence Is More Subtle´, The Harbinger Of Everlasting Spring ..." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

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I - José Ribamar Ferreira (1930 – 2016), known by his pen name Ferreira Gullar, was a a Brazilian poet, playwright, essayist, art critic, and television writer. In 1959, he was instrumental in the formation of the Neo-Concrete Movement. Gullar was considered one of the most influential Brazilians of the 20th century;

II - Leonard Cohen (1934 – 2016) was a Canadian singer, songwriter, musician, poet, novelist, and painter. His work mostly explored religion, politics, isolation, sexuality, and personal relationships. Cohen was inducted into both the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame as well as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honor. In 2011, Cohen received one of the Prince of Asturias Awards for literature and the ninth Glenn Gould Prize.

Cohen pursued a career as a poet and novelist during the 1950s and early 1960s, and did not launch a music career until 1967, at the age of 33. His first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967), was followed by three more albums of folk music: Songs from a Room (1969), Songs of Love and Hate (1971) and New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974). His 1977 record Death of a Ladies' Man was co-written and produced by Phil Spector, which was a move away from Cohen's previous minimalist sound. In 1979, Cohen returned with the more traditional Recent Songs, which blended his acoustic style with jazz and Oriental and Mediterranean influences. "Hallelujah" was first released on Cohen's studio album Various Positions in 1984. I'm Your Man in 1988 marked Cohen's turn to synthesized productions and remains his most popular album. In 1992, Cohen released its follow-up, The Future, which had dark lyrics and references to political and social unrest.

Cohen returned to music in 2001 with the release of Ten New Songs, which was a major hit in Canada and Europe. His eleventh album, Dear Heather, followed in 2004. After a successful string of tours between 2008 and 2010, Cohen released three albums in the final four years of his life: Old Ideas (2012), Popular Problems (2014) and You Want It Darker (2016), the last of which was released three weeks before his death;

III - Zygmunt Bauman (1925 – 2017) was a Polish military officer, sociologist and philosopher. He resided in England from 1971. After World War II he became one of the Polish Army's youngest majors. He was driven out of Poland by a political purge in 1968 engineered by the Communist government of the Polish People's Republic. He became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, later Emeritus. Bauman was one of the world's most eminent social theorists writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity;

IV - "AYE, but she?
Your other sister and my other soul
Grave Silence, lovelier
Than the three loveliest maidens, what of her?
Clio, not you,
Not you, Calliope,
Nor all your wanton line,
Not Beauty's perfect self shall comfort me
For Silence once departed,
For her the cool-tongued, her the tranquil-hearted,
Whom evermore I follow wistfully,

Wandering Heaven and Earth and Hell and the four seasons through;
Thalia, not you,
Not you, Melpomene,
Not your incomparable feet, O thin Terpsichore,
I seek in this great hall,
But one more pale, more pensive, most beloved of you all.

I seek her from afar.
I come from temples where her altars are,
From groves that bear her name,
Noisy with stricken victims now and sacrificial flame,
And cymbals struck on high and strident faces
Obstreperous in her praise

They neither love nor know,
A goddess of gone days,
Departed long ago,
Abandoning the invaded shrines and fanes
Of her old sanctuary,
A deity obscure and legendary,
Of whom there now remains,
For sages to decipher and priests to garble,
Only and for a little while her letters wedged in marble,
Which even now, behold, the friendly mumbling rain erases,
And the inarticulate snow,
Leaving at last of her least signs and traces
None whatsoever, nor whither she is vanished from these places.

"She will love well," I said,
"If love be of that heart inhabiter,
The flowers of the dead;
The red anemone that with no sound
Moves in the wind, and from another wound
That sprang, the heavily-sweet blue hyacinth,
That blossoms underground,
And sallow poppies, will be dear to her.
And will not Silence know
In the black shade of what obsidian steep
Stiffens the white narcissus numb with sleep?
(Seed which Demeter's daughter bore from home,
Uptorn by desperate fingers long ago,
Reluctant even as she,
Undone Persephone,
An! even as she set out again to grow

In twilight, in perdition's lean and inauspicious loam).
She will love well," I said,
"The flowers of the dead;
Where dark Persephone the winter round,
Uncomforted for home, uncomforted,
Lacking a sunny southern slope in northern Sicily,
With sullen pupils focussed on a dream,
Stares on the stagnant stream
That moats the unequivocable battlements of Hell,
There, there will she be found,
She that is Beauty veiled from men and Music in a swound."

"I long for Silence as they long for breath

Whose helpless nostrils drink the bitter sea;
What thing can be
So stout, what so redoubtable, in Death
What fury, what considerable rage, if only she,
Upon whose icy breast,
Unquestioned, uncaressed,
One time I lay,
And whom always I lack,
Even to this day,
Being by no means from that frigid bosom weaned away,
If only she therewith be given me back?"

I sought her down that dolorous labyrinth,
Wherein no shaft of sunlight ever fell,
And in among the bloodless everywhere

I sought her, but the air,
Breathed many times and spent,
Was fretful with a whispering discontent,
And questioning me, importuning me to tell
Some slightest tidings of the light of day they know no more,
Plucking my sleeve, the eager shades were with me where I went.
I paused at every grievous door,
And harked a moment, holding up my hand,– and for a space
A hush was on them, while they watched my face;
And then they fell a-whispering as before;
So that I smiled at them and left them, seeing she was not there.

I sought her, too,
Among the upper gods, although I knew
She was not like to be where feasting is,
Nor near to Heaven's lord,
Being a thing abhorred
And shunned of him, although a child of his,
(Not yours, not yours; to you she owes not breath,
Mother of Song, being sown of Zeus upon a dream of Death).
Fearing to pass unvisited some place
And later learn, too late, how all the while,
With her still face,
She had been standing there and seen me pass, without a smile,
I sought her even to the sagging board whereat

The stout immortals sat;
But such a laughter shook the mighty hall
No one could hear me say:
Had she been seen upon the Hill that day?
And no one knew at all
How long I stood, or when at last I sighed and went away.

There is a garden lying in a lull
Between the mountains and the mountainous sea,
I know not where, but which a dream diurnal
Paints on my lids a moment till the hull
Be lifted from the kernel
And Slumber fed to me.
Your foot-print is not there, Mnemosene,
Though it would seem a ruined place and after

Your lichenous heart, being full
Of broken columns, caryatides
Thrown to the earth and fallen forward on their jointless knees,
And urns funereal altered into dust
Minuter than the ashes of the dead,
And Psyche's lamp out of the earth up-thrust,
Dripping itself in marble wax on what was once the bed
Of Love, and his young body asleep, but now is dust instead.

There twists the bitter-sweet, the white wisteria
Fastens its fingers in the strangling wall,
And the wide crannies quicken with bright weeds;

There dumbly like a worm all day the still white orchid feeds;
But never an echo of your daughters' laughter
Is there, nor any sign of you at all
Swells fungous from the rotten bough, grey mother of Pieria!

Only her shadow once upon a stone
I saw,–and, lo, the shadow and the garden, too, were gone.

I tell you you have done her body an ill,
You chatterers, you noisy crew !
She is not anywhere!
I sought her in deep Hell;
And through the world as well;
I thought of Heaven and I sought her there;

Above nor under ground
Is Silence to be found,
That was the very warp and woof of you,
Lovely before your songs began and after they were through !
Oh, say if on this hill
Somewhere your sister's body lies in death,
So I may follow there, and make a wreath
Of my locked hands, that on her quiet breast
Shall lie till age has withered them!

(Ah, sweetly from the rest
I see
Turn and consider me
Compassionate Euterpe!)
"There is a gate beyond the gate of Death,

Beyond the gate of everlasting Life,
Beyond the gates of Heaven and Hell", she saith,
"Whereon but to believe is horror !
Whereon to meditate engendereth
Even in deathless spirits such as I
A tumult in the breath,
A chilling of the inexhaustible blood
Even in my veins that never will be dry,
And in the austere, divine monotony
That is my being, the madness of an unaccustomed mood.

This is her province whom you lack and seek;
And seek her not elsewhere.
Hell is a thoroughfare

For pilgrims,–Herakles,
And he that loved Euridice too well,
Have walked therein; and many more than these;
And witnessed the desire and the despair
Of souls that passed reluctantly and sicken for the air;
You, too, have entered Hell,
And issued thence; but thence whereof I speak
None has returned,–for thither fury brings
Only the driven ghosts of them that flee before all things.
Oblivion is the name of this abode: and she is there."

Oh, radiant Song! Oh, gracious Memory!
Be long upon this height

I shall not climb again !
I know the way you mean,–the little night,
And the long empty day,–never to see
Again the angry light,
Or hear the hungry noises cry my brain !

Ah, but she,
Your other sister and my other soul,
She shall again be mine;
And I shall drink her from a silver bowl,
A chilly thin green wine,
Not bitter to the taste,
Not sweet,
Not of your press, oh, restless, clamorous nine,–
To foam beneath the frantic hoofs of mirth–
But savoring faintly of the acid earth,

And trod by pensive feet
From perfect clusters ripened without haste
Out of the urgent heat
In some clear glimmering vaulted twilight under the odorous vine.

Lift up your lyres ! Sing on!
But as for me, I seek your sister whither she is gone."

- Ode to Silence by Edna St. Vincent Millay -

...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.