e n t a r t e t e K u n s t
O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o
[duration 01:06:22] all rights reserved
#
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)
+
"´Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...´ (Jean Arp)
... ´entartete Kunst´ (English: ´degenerate Art´): perchance of all Melgacian albums titles, the most sarcastic. And when Otacílio does experiments with computer music, he establishes an intersection set quite interesting. First, there´s the overwhelming irony to exhume the term 'degenerate' linked to Art. Just a quick historical background and the mischievousness of Melgaço is already explained by itself. Second, the persiflage is doubled because it serves as title to a work entirely dedicated to digital music. Ultimately, digital music was being dubbed ´degenerate art´. It´s clear, including the names of the seven Pieces: Melgaço actually sprinkles causticity to the extent that proposes the connection between these concepts.
Clarified this, what could be behind this satire? Perhaps questions focused on crescent - and inevitable? - human robotization? The artistic creation, if increasingly becoming an automaton, could be in process of degeneration (ie decline - a gradual and continuous loss of strength, quality or value - and deterioration - the process of becoming progressively ´worse´ -)? ´Mechanization best serves mediocrity...´ - a thought architected by Frank Lloyd Wright. It would be a mere nonsense? Away from sectarianism or nostalgia, as can we parallelize (thinking solely on - for instance - musical issues) the masterwork of Johann Sebastian Bach and (whereas some are really well done) video game soundtracks? I am here mainly referring to future generations.
´It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity...´ - words spoken by Albert Einstein. Would be true? ´Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense...´ - conspicuously uttered Gertrude Stein. Do you agree? ´Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards...´ - ponders Aldous Huxley. In humanistic terms, is he right? ´Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons...´ - R. Buckminster Fuller considerations. Review with detailed criteria, make sense? ´Technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn't help us know what to say...´ - said once Jonathan Sacks. Yes, I am still here worryingly referring to future generations. Ever more and more and more information but fewer formation (´from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...´ and everything beyond). What are the consequences of a global education increasingly based on liquidity of digital culture and less in The Goldberg Variations, Brandenburg Concertos and St Matthew Passion? This comparison - in addition to already be undeniably tangible - is a metaphor, of course. Metaphor to something still much more massive, irreversible and that the same above-mentioned future holds. This is auspicious? Or the opposite? Or neither?
Besides ´entartete Kunst´ be another proof of Melgacian chameleonic sonic power (used masterfully) and diversity (cot for aggregation and inclusion); proposes, without doubt, a profound reflection on the fate of Mankind - more through the talented and insightful and intencional and serious circuits of ´ein Witz´." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)
"´Computer music is the applications of computing technology in music composition. It includes the theory and application of new and existing technologies and basic aspects of music, such as sound synthesis, digital signal processing, sound design, sonic diffusion, acoustics, and psychoacoustics. The field of computer music can trace its roots back to the origins of electronic music, and the very first experiments and innovations with electronic instruments at the turn of the 20th century.´
Otacílio Melgaço has an unlabeled vast Work. I always ask myself ´What will be the next card up his sleeve?´ and the Brazilian composer and multi-instrumentalist shows me a different answer to the same question evermore. Is ´entartete Kunst´ an unexpected, surprising recording!
[About the controversial title: Sealing how much O.M. transforms ´degenerate Art´ (its unfortunate historical connotations) into a rapturous and sagacious lampoon, if we hear carefully - we´ll find intended modernist traces distributed in all tracks. More explicit sometimes, implicit here and there... I put in alphabetical order some spectra detected by me: Concretism, Constructivism, Cubism, Dada, Expressionism, Fauvism, Futurism, Geometric Abstraction, Luminism, Magic Realism, Neo-primitivism, Objective Abstraction, Orphism, Metafisica, Precisionism, Rayonism, Suprematism, Surrealism, Synchromism, Vorticism... Melgaço, with his illuminist acridity, slaps the kid-glove in the face of the wrong (and truly degenerate) side of history. And he does the right thing so. Both conceptually and aesthetically.]
A surprising and unexpected recording! All the music contained therein is computeristic! Ladies and gentlemen, we´re witnessing a sound approach from deliberate typical tools of digital mass culture but under thought-provoking direction. Mentions of Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen, Marcel Duchamp, Herbert Marshall McLuhan, Karlheinz Stockhausen and even Kraftwerk are explicit evidence of that. Citing three examples of several possible, each listener can attest such as a Piece like (and I have the intuition that if Bach were alive, would not do something very different) ´Meditations on The Mystery of the Cyberspace OR The Transubstantiation of Our Integrated Circuits´ is so cybernetic & mysteriously liturgical at the same time! Or ´Mechanical Bride´, as electronic & exuberantly fey! Or ´Digital Detox´, that technological & almost tribal! (...) Steve Jobs believed that technology is nothing. For him, ´what's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them.´ Musically ´entartete Kunst´ is a bright sign that perhaps Jobs, if we base ourselves in this statement, deserves a vote of confidence yet." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)
&
I - Degenerate art (German: entartete Kunst) was a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany to describe virtually all modern art. Such art was banned on the grounds that it was un-German, Jewish, or Communist in nature, and those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions. These included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art.
Degenerate Art also was the title of an exhibition, held by the Nazis in Munich in 1937, consisting of modernist artworks chaotically hung and accompanied by text labels deriding the art. Designed to inflame public opinion against modernism, the exhibition subsequently traveled to several other cities in Germany and Austria.
While modern styles of art were prohibited, the Nazis promoted paintings and sculptures that were traditional in manner and that exalted the "blood and soil" values of racial purity, militarism, and obedience. Similar restrictions were placed upon music, which was expected to be tonal and free of any jazz influences; disapproved music was termed degenerate music, likewise, films and plays also were censored;
II - More recently, with the advent of personal computing, and the growth of home recording, the term computer music is sometimes used to describe music that has been created using computing technology.
...for purposes of pragmatism and clear exegesis,
quotes have Wikipedia as a source...
\|/
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.
