D E L P H I C
D E L P H I N U S
(M E L G A C I A N_V A R I A T I O N S
O N_ A_T H E M E_O F_B A R B E R)

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 33:00] 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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"[I, I wish you could swim
Like the dolphins, like dolphins can swim...]

LE GRAND BLEU

For many years this French film has been the subject of abysmal allure on the part of Otacílio Melgaço. Nevertheless, allow me to be more verisimilarly specific. Such dazed admiration (and even innermost identification, innate mirroring) is not exactly for ´the´ motion picture. Not punctually because of the interplay between reality & fiction in terms of a screenplay purely and simply; not especially by Besson, the director; despite the ´fellow feeling´ for some of the actors who star in this audio-visual and for certain passages of the soundtrack (signed by Eric Serra), the true Melgacian fascination is in how the character of Jacques Mayol (played by Jean-Marc Barr) is portrayed there. A transferal that inevitably takes us back to ´Homo Delphinus: The Dolphin within Man´. For Otacílio, this attunement, such ´Existential Dial´ - as O.M. likes to say -
is like a ´film-within-a-film´ and so,

DELPHIC DELPHINUS

is not promptly a tribute to Mayol (the diver) or Barr (the actor) but - not forgetting a well-conceived script, of course - an Obeisance to a third and unprecedented Persona: the One that came to the surface through how, in that timespace, (that) Jacques inspired Jean-Marc / (that) Jean-Marc transcreated Jacques in The Big Blue.

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i - The Big Blue (released in some countries under the French title Le Grand Bleu) is a 1988 drama film in the French Cinéma du look visual style, made by French director Luc Besson. It is a heavily fictionalized and dramatized story of the friendship and sporting rivalry between two leading contemporary champion free divers in the 20th century: as already mentioned, Jacques Mayol (played by Barr), Enzo Maiorca (renamed ´Enzo Molinari´, by Jean Reno), and Mayol's fictionalized relationship with his girlfriend Johana Baker (by Rosanna Arquette).

In real life, Jacques lived from 1927 to 2001 and Maiorca retired from diving to politics in the 1980s. Both set no-limits category deep diving records below 100 metres, and Mayol was indeed involved in scientific research into human aquatic potential, but neither reached 400 feet (120 metres) as portrayed in the film, and they were not direct competitors. Mayol was indeed fascinated by dolphins, and was recorded as having a heartbeat that slowed from 60 to 27 beats per minute when diving. After a bout of depression, he killed himself in 2001, long after the film's release;

ii - Jacques Mayol was a French diver and the holder of many world records in free diving. Mayol's dazzle with dolphins started in 1955 when he was working as a commercial diver at an aquarium in Miami, Florida. There he met a female dolphin called Clown and formed a close bond with her. Imitating Clown, he learned how to hold his breath longer and how to behave and integrate himself underwater. It is the dolphins that became the foundation of Mayol's life philosophy of ´Homo Delphinus´. Throughout his book L'Homo Delphinus (2000 published in English as Homo Delphinus: The Dolphin within Man by Idelson Gnocchi Publishers Ltd.) Jacques expounds his theories about man's relationship with the sea, and explores the aquatic ape hypothesis of human origins. He felt man could reawaken his dormant mental and spiritual faculties and the physiological mechanisms from the depths of his psyche and genetic make-up to develop the potential of his aquatic origins, to become a Homo delphinus. Jacques Mayol predicted that within a couple of generations, some people would be able to dive to 300 metres (980 ft) and hold their breath for up to ten minutes. Today the no-limits record stands at 253 m (Herbert Nitsch, June 2012). Serbian Branko Petrović holds the record for Static Apnea at 11 minutes and 54 seconds (October 2014). Croatian Goran Čolak holds the record for static apnea on pure oxygen at 23 minutes 1 second (June 2014). Mayol was the subject of the 2017 documentary film Dolphin Man (L'Homme dauphin, sur les traces de Jacques Mayol), directed by Lefteris Charitos. On 22 December 2001 at the age of 74, suffering depression, Mayol committed suicide by hanging himself at his villa in Elba, Italy. His ashes were spread over the Tuscany coast. Friends have erected a monument to him in the southeast of Elba at 16 metres (52 ft) depth;

iii - Jean-Marc Barr (born September 27, 1960) is a French-American film actor and director. He is best known for working on several productions from Danish ´réalisateur de cinéma´ and frequent collaborator Lars von Trier since Europa (1991).

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"Quando Ismália enlouqueceu,
Pôs-se na torre a sonhar…
Viu uma lua no céu,
Viu outra lua no mar.

No sonho em que se perdeu,
Banhou-se toda em luar…
Queria subir ao céu,
Queria descer ao mar…

E, no desvario seu,
Na torre pôs-se a cantar…
Estava perto do céu,
Estava longe do mar…

E como um anjo pendeu
As asas para voar…
Queria a lua do céu,
Queria a lua do mar…

As asas que Deus lhe deu
Ruflaram de par em par…
Sua alma subiu ao céu,
Seu corpo desceu ao mar…" (Alphonsus de Guimaraens)

In my opinion and based on given testimonies, the core that deserved to be highlighted by the Brazilian composer and instrumentalist Otacílio Melgaço, to the point of finally creating ´un (incontournablement océanique) Chef-d'Œuvre´ alluding to this, is a ´Meta-Reality´ in which, the character Mayol-Barr (in such a particular rhythmicity, frequency, diapason) lives, breathes, moves, transits, levitates, dives. Barr-Mayol plunges into water plus ´into air, into earth, into fire, into ether´ and, superhumanly (or, I might say, dolphinly) into himself. Ergo, having himself as the remotest gateway, ...into the...´Omnipresence´. What treasure was discovered at the bottom of these seven seas that flow into such submersive (and so ascending!) sound Offspring by Otacílio? DELPHIC DELPHINUS. MELGACIAN Variations on a Theme of BARBER, full of cathartic passion and ´pathos´ (here, quality in musicalization and artistic representation that stimulates in the listener's experience, the deep-Self immersion, with the power to touch the sentiment of own constructive insulation with tenderness, emphasizing the compassion or empathy).

It is important to state that Jacques himself was a screenwriter for the film, and Mayol's search for love, family, ´wholeness´ and the meaning of life and death, and the conflict and tension between his yearning for the deep and his relationship with his girlfriend are also major elements of the latter part of the movie. The original ending was intentionally ambiguous, though considering the depth Jacques has swum to, it would seem he is unlikely to regain the surface alive, and he dies. In the American adaptation, the finish is extended with an additional scene: after swimming away with the dolphin, Jacques is returned to the superficies.

O.M., here, diverges from both outcomes. He finds the North American solution banal (indeed, moronic) and, while retaining his enchantment by the final scenes of the primordial European version, to assume that death is contemplated would be ´logically predictable´ - and, in the film, mesmerizingly poetic (de facto - propitiously - double-barrelled) - but still not is an answer that satisfies Melgaço. For Otacílio, everything dilates to a condition of irresistible Transcendence. In this sense, if demise can - yet - be glimpsed, it would be like a thalassic bridge to, as O.M. refers to, an Eternalized State of the character. Therefore, actually, there is no finiteness. In short, Melgaço suggests that the ultimate dive, far beyond (biological) dying itself, symbolizes crossing the limits of finitude; it´s the overwhelming|overpowering affirmation of a Life that verily expands and approaches the threshold of Aeon. Penetrating it and inseminating it Life-givingly (and vice versa). That human being irrefutably ´becomes´ a dolphin (´the dolphin within man´), and thus will ´become´ the own Ocean (which represents a figure of speech for - polysemous - borderless Immensity), The Big Perpetuated Blue.

La Grande Ubiquité Bleue!

I repeat the analogy and, in my understanding, this is one of the most magnificent silhouettes of an immeasurable artistic ´spawn´ (and, a precious key!, the oracular term 'Delphic' in its title has every reason to exist): the more O.M. takes us musically to the bottom of the bottom of the seven (or seven thousand and one) seas, we are more and more in an ascensional Process [it seems that we are on a countdown to take off (note the cutting transitions that explore the course of bass fields gradually leading to the treble) or that we've already taken off and each second we feel viscerally how much we´re going up to the humanly Inconceivable. I accentuate the pulp that makes an Odyssey from 13:50 to 21:50, it is nothing less than breathtaking, wondrous, out of this world; it is divinizing in sweeping elevation] and the proof of this is that the initial noises of the Opus are Marine (sonars, and, how not to conjecture - since we are facing an abduction into a trance -, a metaphor of hypnotic heartbeats? Or even the hearable punctuation of a zero count? -), but the last ones come from Outer Space! In the end(less), this is a transubstantiating constant for Melgaço: the deeper we go, the higher we rise.

Debout! Dans l’ère successive!
Brisez, mon corps, cette forme pensive!
Buvez, mon sein, la naissance du vent!
Une fraîcheur, de la mer exhalée,
Me rend mon âme… Ô puissance salée!
Courons à l’onde en rejaillir vivant!
Oui! Grande mer de délires douée,
Peau de panthère et chlamyde trouée
De mille et mille idoles du soleil,
Hydre absolue, ivre de ta chair bleue,
Qui te remords l’étincelante queue
Dans un tumulte au silence pareil,
Le vent se lève!… Il faut tenter de vivre!
Courons à l’onde en rejaillir vivant!
Ô puissance salée de la mer exhalée,
Ivre de ta chair bleue!" (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

"Samuel Osmond Barber II (March 9, 1910 – January 23, 1981) was an American composer, pianist, conductor, baritone, and music educator, and one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century. The music critic Donal Henahan said, ´Probably no other American composer has ever enjoyed such early, such persistent and such long-lasting acclaim.´ Principally influenced by nine years' composition studies with Rosario Scalero at the Curtis Institute and more than 25 years' study with his uncle, the composer Sidney Homer, Barber's music usually eschewed the experimental trends of musical modernism in favor of traditional 19th-century harmonic language and formal structure embracing lyricism and emotional expression. However, he adopted elements of modernism after 1940 in some of his compositions, such as an increased use of dissonance and chromaticism in the Cello Concerto (1945) and Medea's Dance of Vengeance (1955); and the use of tonal ambiguity and a narrow use of serialism in his Piano Sonata (1949), Prayers of Kierkegaard (1954), and Nocturne (1959).

Samuel was adept at both instrumental and vocal music. His works became successful on the international stage and many of its compositions enjoyed rapid adoption into the classical performance canon. In particular, the Adagio for Strings (1936) has earned a permanent place in the orchestral concert repertory. Alexander J. Morin, author of ´Classical Music: The Listener's Companion´, writing that Adagio for Strings is ´full of pathos and cathartic passion´.

Otacílio Melgaço adds another gem to his series of Variations. Merging references known to the general audience (as a much more complex reinvention challenge than, depending on other choices, dealing, for the majority, with hermetic sound pieces) and the bewitchment that such handpicked selections have always caused in its artistic imaginary and human affections. Making use of synthesizers [simulating sublime sustained strings] and some ultra atmospheric noisy effects, Melgaço seeks to bring to light the most
d-e-s-p-e-r-a-t-e Beauty out of it.

´Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.´ (Andre Breton, Nadja)

We can decode ´convulsive´ as ´producing or consisting of convulsions; spasmodic, uncontrollable, paroxysmal´. So elegantly cathartic, so crystallinely passionate (& passionatable), so patently empathetic, DELPHIC DELPHINUS effusively confirms the Bretonian proposition. And Otacílio goes much further cause, quoting another figure of French culture (one of Melgaço's favorites), Paul Valéry, [fabulous mention to our pelagic context here] in the epigraph of ´Le Cimetière Marin´ there is the presence of the Greek poet Pindar: 'O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible'. For O.M. goes deeper: he sonically exhausts the limits of the possible and, voilà!, aspires to an audible Immortality!" (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

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I - Barber's Adagio for Strings was originally the second movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11, composed in 1936 while he was spending a summer in Europe with Gian Carlo Menotti, an Italian composer and Barber's partner since their student years at the Curtis Institute of Music. Barber was inspired by Virgil's didactic poem Georgics. In the quartet, the Adagio follows a violently contrasting first movement (Molto allegro e appassionato) and is succeeded by a third movement that opens with a brief reprise of the music from the first movement (marked Molto allegro (come prima) – Presto).

In January 1938, Barber sent an orchestrated version of the Adagio for Strings to Arturo Toscanini. The conductor returned the score without comment, which annoyed Barber. Toscanini sent word through Menotti that he was planning to perform the piece and had returned it simply because he had already memorized it. It was reported that Toscanini did not look at the music again until the day before the premiere. On November 5, 1938, a selected audience was invited to Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center to watch Toscanini conduct the first performance; it was broadcast on radio and also recorded. Initially, the critical reception was mixed. The New York Times' Olin Downes praised the piece, but he was reproached by other critics who claimed that he overrated it.

Toscanini conducted Adagio for Strings in South America and Europe, the first performances of the work on both continents. Over April 16–19, 1942, the piece had public performances by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy at Carnegie Hall. Like the original 1938 performance, these were broadcast on radio and recorded;

II - Alexander J. Morin also said that it "rarely leaves a dry eye". Reviewing the premiere performance in 1938, Olin Downes noted that with the piece, Barber "achieved something as perfect in mass and detail as his craftsmanship permits."

In an edition of A Conductor's Analysis of Selected Works, John William Mueller devoted over 20 pages to Adagio for Strings. Wayne Clifford Wentzel, author of Samuel Barber: A Research and Information Guide (Composer Resource Manuals), said that it was a piece usually selected for a closing act because it was moderately famous. Roy Brewer, writer for AllMusic, said that it was one of the most recognizable pieces of American concert music. The musicologist Bill McGlaughlin compares its role in American music to the role that Edward Elgar's "Nimrod" holds for the British.

As part of a musical retrospective in 2000, NPR named Adagio for Strings one of the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century, calling it "standard repertoire for today's orchestras, and Barber's best-known work."

In 2004, listeners of the BBC Radio's Today program voted Adagio for Strings the "saddest classical" work ever, ahead of "Dido's Lament" from Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell, the Adagietto from Gustav Mahler's 5th symphony, Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss, and Gloomy Sunday as sung by Billie Holiday;

III - The Big Blue, PLOT

Two children, Jacques Mayol and Enzo Molinari, have grown up on the Greek island of Amorgos in the 1960s. Enzo challenges Jacques to collect a coin on the sea floor but Jacques refuses. Later, Jacques' father — who harvests shellfish from the seabed using a pump-supplied air hose and helmet — goes diving. His breathing apparatus and rope gets caught and punctured by rocks on the reef and weighed down by water, he drowns. Jacques and Enzo can do nothing but watch in horror as he is killed.

By the 1980s, both are well known freedivers, swimmers who can remain underwater for great times and at great depths. Enzo is in Sicily now, where he rescues a trapped diver from a shipwreck. He is a world champion freediver with a brash and strong personality, and now wishes to find Jacques and persuade him to return to no limits freediving in order to prove he is still the better of the two, in a friendly sports rivalry. Jacques himself works extensively with scientific research as a human research subject, and with dolphins, and is temporarily participating in research into human physiology in the iced-over lakes of the Peruvian Andes, where his remarkable and dolphin-like bodily responses to cold water immersion are being recorded. Insurance broker Johana Baker visits the station for work purposes and is introduced to Jacques. She secretly falls in love with him. When she hears that Jacques will be at the World Diving Championships in Taormina, Sicily, she fabricates an insurance problem that requires her presence there, in order to meet him again. She and Jacques fall in love. However, none of them realize the extent of Jacques' allurement with the depths. Jacques beats Enzo by 1 meter, and Enzo offers him a crystal dolphin as a gift, and a tape measure to show the small difference between Jacques' and Enzo's records. Johana goes back home to New York but is fired after her deception is discovered; she leaves New York and begins to live with Jacques. She hears the story that if one truly loves the deep sea, then a mermaid will appear at the depths of the sea, and will lead a diver to an enchanted place.

At the next World Diving Championships, Enzo beats Jacques' record. The depths at which the divers are competing enter new territory and the dive doctor suggests they should cease competing, but the divers decide to continue. Jacques is asked to look at a local dolphinarium where a new dolphin has been placed, and where the dolphins are no longer performing; surmising that the new dolphin is homesick, the three of them break in at night to liberate the dolphin and transport her to the sea again. Back at the competition, other divers attempt to break Enzo's new record but all fail. Jacques then attempts his next dive and reaches 400 ft (120 m) breaking Enzo's world record. Angered by this, Enzo prepares to break Jacques' new world record. The doctor supervising the dive warns that the competitors must not go deeper - based upon Jacques' bodily reactions, at around 400 ft, conditions, and in particular the pressure, will become lethal and divers will be killed if they persist in attempting such depths. Enzo dismisses the advice and attempts the dive anyway, but is unable to make his way back to the surface. Jacques dives down to rescue him. Enzo, dying, tells Jacques that he was right and that it is better down there, and begs Jacques to help him back down to the depths, where he belongs. Jacques is grief-stricken and refuses, but after Enzo dies in his arms, finally honors his dying wish and takes Enzo's body back down to 400 ft, leaving him to drift to the ocean floor. Jacques - himself suffering from cardiac arrest after the dive - is rescued and brought back to the surface by supervising scuba divers and requires his heart to be restarted with a defibrillator before being placed in medical quarters to recover.

Jacques appears to be recovering from the diving accident, but later experiences a strange hallucinatory dream in which the ceiling collapses and the room fills with water, and he finds himself in the ocean depths surrounded by dolphins. Johana, who has just discovered she is pregnant, returns to check up on Jacques in the middle of the night, but finds him lying awake yet unresponsive in his bed with bloody ears and a bloody nose. Johana attempts to help him, but Jacques begins to get up and walk to the empty diving boat and gets suited up for one final dive. Desperately, Johana begs Jacques not to go, saying she is alive but whatever has happened at the depths is not, but he says he has to. She tells Jacques that she is pregnant, and sorrowfully begs him to stay, but finally understands he feels he must go. The two embrace and Johana breaks down crying. Jacques then places the release cord for the dive ballast in her hand, and - still sobbing - she pulls it, sending him down to the depths he loves. Jacques descends and floats for a brief moment staring into the darkness. A dolphin then appears and Jacques lets go of his harness and swims away with it into the darkness;

IV - Afonso Henrique da Costa Guimarães, known as Alphonsus de Guimaraens; (July 24, 1870 in Ouro Preto – July 15, 1921 in Mariana) was a Brazilian poet.

The poetry of Alphonsus de Guimaraes is substantially mystical and involved with Catholicism. His sonnets display a classical structure, and are profoundly religious. They become increasingly sensitive as he explores the meaning of death, of the impossible love, of solitude and of his inadequacy regarding the world. However, the mystical tone marks in his works a feeling of acceptance and of resignation towards life, suffering and pain. Another characteristic aspect of his work ids the use of spirituality in relation to the feminine figure, which is considered to be an angel, or a celestial being. As a result of that, Guimaraes shows himself not one as a Symbolist but also a follower of Neo-romanticism.

His works, predominantly poetic, made him one of the main Symbolist authors in Brazil. In reference to the city he spent most of his life in, he is also called the "loner of Mariana", his "ivory tower of Symbolism" ("o solitário de Mariana" and "torre de marfim do Simbolismo", respectively, in Portuguese);

V - Note by Caio Campbell: "Otacílio Melgaço also comments that there are orbital cinematographic works that approach the same epicenter that enchants him when he refers to The Big Blue, being able to mention, among others, ´Undine´ by Christian Petzold and ´Mulher Oceano´ by Djin Sganzerla. With direct or heterodox collateral parallels, the metaphor is stressed (in analogy) between Transcendence and the Deep Waters / Human Being magnet."

...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.