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Hy​-​Brazil {Otac​í​lio Melga​ç​o} [duration 50​:​06]

by Otacílio Melgaço

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about

H y - B r a z i l

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 50:06] 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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"A short introductory alert: For those who think I'm being too didactic ..., please, skip the next three paragraphs.

{1- An elucidation for all around the orb who do not know, Brazil (officially, the Federative Republic of Brazil) is the largest country in South and Latin American regions. It is the world's fifth-largest nation, both by geographical area and by population. It is the bigger Portuguese-speaking state in the planet, and the only one in the Americas. Apropos, in motherland language: BRASIL;

2- Nevertheless, one of the collateral effects of the Melgacian work is to break stereotypes. We know how much people are biasedly linked to labels. So, clichés. All countries and their cultures are subjected to the scrutiny of others and so are forcibly molded in shapes of a viewpoint that offers ´domain´ to those who observe them. In fact, oftentimes, the futile attempt to slight transferal and the poor conditioning of suspects paradigms. Frequently, We Fear (or we become hostile to) What We Do Not Know. It´s a truism. Those who do not realize how much fall into the trap of stereotyping, are certainly alienated or they see only a few inches away from themselves. But if you're reading this review, you are seeking to expand yourself (references, perceptions, borders). Being here may mean either be in such all-embracing quest or already reaping mature fruits about that. Both situations point to the deconstruction of preconceptions. Starting with the cross-cultural (and artistic). Focusing from an angle in the best ´Tristes Tropiques´ genre: Brazil, for example, by some (those who have hackneyed ideas as comfort zones) can be seen - reductively - as the land of Amazon jungle, carnival, samba, soccer, ´caipirinha´ ... [plus sex tourism?]. Or, symptomatically, as usual in idiotic movies, a refuge to whom fraud the law - of the ´irreproachable´ (sic) countries of origin - and need to escape. Sure, in a commonwealth so interbred, if you are satisfied with pre-made imported (xenophobic) ideas, it would be believed that´s easy for anyone (in this caricaturesque case, cheaters and profiteers) to mingle with the population. The final take is on the beach / on a sunny day ... in Rio de Janeiro, probably. Between naked women, pickpockets, monkeys and snakes (who knows also ground sloths and smilodons?) and so the living wheel that turns around the farcical commonplace wins another movement. The vicious cycle perpetuates itself.

Sorry.

Not here, not anymore;

3- Under the wings of a prep virtuous cycle, the best portrait of a nation is in its most auratic Offspring. Choosing inventive areas at random (noticeably countless), there are Brazilian great figures in music, literature, cinema, drama, painting, architecture, design, intellectuality, science, etc (some alive, many already are part of the History) that will only be accessed when the look and the magnifying glass that come from abroad are open to getting close to and metabolize other cultures; all of us being free from any ethnocentrism. Their legacies are so important as the bequest of pertinent / appurtenant names of universal ´pantheon´; it is sufficient to quote a brief prodromal Index, suffice to cite João Guimarães Rosa, Machado de Assis, Matias Aires, Raymundo de Farias Britto, Mário Ferreira dos Santos, Henrique Cláudio de Lima Vaz, Maria do Carmo Tavares de Miranda, Sônia Viegas, Manoel Dias de Oliveira, Lobo de Mesquita, Carlos Gomes, Alberto Nepomuceno, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Gilberto Mendes, Livio Tragtenberg, Aleijadinho (Antônio Francisco Lisboa), Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Vilanova Artigas, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Sérgio Bernardes, Gustavo Penna, Burle Marx, Lota de Macedo Soares, Tarsila do Amaral, Anita Malfatti, Maria Martins, Ismael Nery, Cícero Dias, Di Cavalcanti, Candido Portinari, Iberê Camargo, Oswaldo Goeldi, Francisco Brennand, Farnese de Andrade, Abraham Palatnik, Athos Bulcão, Frans Krajcberg, Tunga, Mario Cravo Neto, German Lorca, Boris Kossoy, Sebastião Salgado, Claudio Edinger, Humberto Mauro, Mário Peixoto, Glauber Rocha, Rogério Sganzerla, Neville d'Almeida, Luiz Fernando Carvalho, Eduardo Coutinho, Cruz e Sousa, Gregório de Matos, Augusto dos Anjos, Álvares de Azevedo, Alphonsus de Guimaraens, Jorge de Lima, Lima Barreto, Euclides da Cunha, Raul Bopp, Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Manuel Bandeira, Graciliano Ramos, Nelson Rodrigues, Sérgio Rodrigues, Milton Santos, César Lattes, Luiz Gama, Sobral Pinto, Dalmo Dallari, Celso Furtado, Gilberto Freyre, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Caio Prado Júnior, Florestan Fernandes, Roberto DaMatta, Maria Nilde Mascellani, Paulo (Reglus Neves) Freire, José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, Tiradentes (Joaquim José da Silva Xavier), Hipólita Jacinta, Juscelino Kubitschek, Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco, Angelo Oswaldo de Araújo Santos, Darcy Ribeiro, Cândido Rondon, Sapaim Kamayurá, Raoni Metuktire, Ailton Krenak, Kaká Werá Jecupé, Marcos Terena, Uakti, Ruy Barbosa, Aracy Moebius de Carvalho, Luís Martins de Sousa Dantas, San Tiago Dantas, Frei Caneca, Francisco Cândido Xavier, Mãe Menininha do Gantois, Dom Hélder Câmara, Dom Um Romão, Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Hélio Pellegrino, Nise da Silveira, José Ângelo Gaiarsa, Mário Schenberg, Ronaldo Rogério de Freitas Mourão, Ivo Pitanguy, Miguel Nicolelis, Sidarta Ribeiro, Niède Guidon, Antônio Candido, Antônio Houaiss, Antônio Callado, Otto Lara Resende, Alberto Dines, Rubem Braga, Jayme Ovalle, Paulo César Pinheiro, Aldir Blanc, José Miguel Wisnik, Torquato Neto, Waly Salomão, José Agrippino de Paula, Zuza Homem de Mello, Chiquinha Gonzaga, Ernesto Nazareth, Radamés Gnattali, Luís Gonzaga Melgaço, Eleazar de Carvalho, Jocy de Oliveira, Nelson Freire, Guiomar Novaes, Magda Tagliaferro, Arthur Moreira Lima, Antônio Meneses, Bidu Sayão, Pixinguinha, Cartola, Nelson Cavaquinho, Noel Rosa, Paulinho da Viola, Moreira da Silva, Adoniran Barbosa, Demônios da Garoa, Ary Barroso, Dorival Caymmi, Luiz Gonzaga, Sivuca, Dominguinhos, Quinteto Armorial, Elomar Figueira Mello, Hermeto Pascoal, Egberto Gismonti, Naná Vasconcelos, Airto Moreira, Laércio Vilar, Robertinho Silva, Barrosinho (José Carlos Barroso), Cláudio Roditi, Raul de Souza, Bocato, Nivaldo Ornelas, Victor Assis Brasil, Ivo Perelman, Carlos Malta, Luiz Alves, Zeca Assumpção, Itamar Assumpção, Arrigo Barnabé, Grupo Rumo, Grupo Um, Duo Assad, Milton Nascimento, Lô Borges, Beto Guedes, Wagner Tiso, Flávio Venturini, Toninho Horta, Nelson Angelo, Arthur Verocai, Letieres Leite, Jorge Ben, Cassiano, Tim Maia, Hyldon, Djavan, Alceu Valença, Zé Ramalho, Edu Lobo, Francis Hime, João Donato, João Bosco, Johnny Alf, João Gilberto, Tom Jobim, Vinícius de Moraes, Baden Powell, Toquinho, Garoto (Aníbal Augusto Sardinha), Raphael Rabello, Yamandú Costa, Heraldo do Monte, Hélio Delmiro, Arismar do Espírito Santo, Itiberê Zwarg, Lia de Itamaracá, Clementina de Jesus, Alaíde Costa, Dolores Duran, Elizeth Cardoso, Elis Regina, Gal Costa, Maria Bethânia, Nara Leão, Rosa Passos, Virgínia Rodrigues, Jorge Mautner, Jards Macalé, Tom Zé, Eumir Deodato, Secos & Molhados, Novos Baianos, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque, Chico Science, Chico Mendes, Murilo Mendes, Mário Quintana, Érico Veríssimo, Manoel de Barros, Ariano Suassuna, Ferreira Gullar, Raduan Nassar, Lúcio Cardoso, Clarice Lispector, Cora Coralina, Cecília Meireles, Henriqueta Lisboa, Lygia Fagundes Telles, Hilda Hilst, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Conceição Evaristo, Cacilda Becker, Fernanda Montenegro, Bibi Ferreira, Ruth de Souza, Odete Lara, Darlene Glória, Norma Bengell, Nathalia Timberg, Zezé Motta, Bruna Linzmeyer, Abdias do Nascimento, Grande Otelo, Sérgio Cardoso, Paulo Autran, Othon Bastos, Leonardo Villar, Jardel Filho, Lima Duarte, Raul Cortez, Juca de Oliveira, Matheus Nachtergaele, Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes, Sábato Magaldi, Antunes Filho, José Celso Martinez Corrêa, Augusto Boal, Antônio Abujamra, Amir Haddad, Plínio Marcos, Gerald Thomas, Joãosinho Trinta, Millôr Fernandes, Henfil, Lourenço Mutarelli, Ziraldo, Paulo Francis, Paulo Mendes Campos, Klauss Vianna, Márcia Haydée, Ana Botafogo, Ismael Ivo, Grupo Corpo, Quasar Cia de Dança, Grupo Giramundo, Banda de Pífanos de Caruaru, Mestre Vitalino, João Martins de Athayde, Cego Aderaldo, Otacílio Batista, Zé Coco do Riachão, Tião Carreiro, Renato Andrade, Rolando Boldrin, Jararaca & Ratinho, Alvarenga & Ranchinho, Tavinho Moura, Paulo (de Oliveira) Freire, Renato Teixeira, Almir Sater, J. Borges, Sousândrade, Décio Pignatari, Irmãos Campos, Irmãos Campana, Irmãos Villas-Bôas, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Zuzu Angel, Jum Nakao, Flávio de Carvalho, Juarez Machado, Denise Stoklos, Alberto Santos Dumont, Amyr Klink, Guto Lacaz, Alex Atala, OsGemeos, Os Mulheres Negras, O Terno, Os Mutantes, Lanny Gordin, Rogério Duprat, Júlio Medaglia, Adhemar Ferreira da Silva, Maria Esther Bueno, Garrincha, Pelé ...; ... if serve as mere prolusion.}

Otacílio Melgaço is Brazilian. And its music magnanimously contributes to mutual discovery and debunking when it comes to his roots and the global webs. His satellites and the planetary parabolics. [As we are orbiting around this theme, the preamble done seemed to me appropriate and fruitful.]

Picking up the thread, beyond the cartography, there´s a mystery surrounding the name ´Brazil´.

Something that few are aware, legendarily ´Brasil´ - also known as ´Hy-Brazil´ or several other variants - is a phantom island said to lie in the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland. Irish myths described it as cloaked in mist except for one day every seven years, when it became visible but still could not be reached.

Even it´s a useful metaphor to think about the Brazil of today, toward such ghost isle O.M. points his potent spotlight. With colossal accent of electronic elements. I think it's a complex work purposely because a rite of passage. And, as can now be understood, there are those who survive and those who not. However, each of them ends up tasted by the Sphinx. The letting yourself be devoured is an expression of permission to proceed. Bilaterally. Multilaterally. In ´Hy-Brazil´, nothing escapes from an expansionary stance of anthropophagy. In spectacular apotheosis. Endo & Exogenous.

´No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main ...´ Or in ´olde English´ version: ´No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine ...´, wrote John Donne. And when not a man but an entire country is an islet? And spectral? In a way, it´s one of the conundrums that Otacílio proposes. However, I take one step forward: undoubtedly, through his distinctive music Melgaço offers us all the answers. From energetic critical citizenship (manifesting regarding the political, economic, social, ethical, moral, cultural ... caos - or if you prefer, damagement - which appears to reduce a country of continental proportions to a lost island) until the most fantastic surreality (making us go on a sonic expedition in search of an intriguing misty Piece of Land embraced by the Irish green of an inscrutable sea. Emerald or, if we look at the mappable cover and the expansion of the whole context, would be more to the ruby, claret, wine-coloured, the color of blood).

Finding resonance throughout the insulated ´mystique´ involved, instead of years: every seven days (or hours?), one hearing seems exuberantly providential. Because we´ll experience exciting metamorphoses from a vertiginous polyrhythmic grid to a metaphysical centripetal aridity of creative electronic landscapes. And vice versa. Inexorably is an innermost interpretation of Brazil's bold features that few people around the planet have had the pleasure or the challenge of knowing and metabolize. Perhaps - primarily through consumer and alienating use of a phrenetic technology - before a global village which tends to be homogenized and pasteurized (or, on the other hand, sectarian and intolerant), some of us must even becoming
I-s-l-a-n-d-e-r-s.

Still focusing on the technology: we know that´s uncontrollable, irreversible; that can not be seen more as something external to man (ie humanity); that therefore we´re in the making of a new
´humanism´. But for the less optimistic, perhaps ´humanism´ is not the right word. My notes above may seem to emphasize less auspicious aspects of this ´spirit of historical time´. But my concern is: do not allow myself to be invaded by this spirit without a critical position because we´re the constituent elements of it all; like it or not. More than elements, Subjects. Must we assert ourselves: always be the Subjects. Here again comes Mr. Melgaço.
Some of us must even becoming
I-s-l-a-n-d-e-r-s.
Some of us must even becoming
S-u-b-j-e-c-t-s.
One of the analogies I do.

Maybe that way, still breathing the constructive fragrances of mythology, we will conquer (reinvent?) a ´lost paradise´ - yet day-to-day insistently lost. I´m not alluding to a retrograde, reactionary, paternalistic or proselytist ´Eden´. I bring to light a territoriality for absorption, learning, awakening. As a kind of Greek Agora isle-shaped. Niche for new allies (to join forces; to exert dialectics; to know that the genesis of legitimate and legitimizing prospects begins microcosmically on behalf of the sum of these microcosms). Niche so that the destinations are determined by our own hands. At least every small act - every little day of our lives. Acting locally, with a view to a more autarkic global change. In Melgacian ´Hy-Brazil´
there´s nothing conducive to puppets and puppeteers. Yes, over again: a rite of passage; not always easy but necessary if we want to push boundaries. That's my reading of this audible record. It seems to me that Mr. Melgaço announces the longitudes and latitudes. The rapturous difference is that we can not guide ourselves by the vaulted sky or maps but by ... Sound! Bíodh turas maith agat!" (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

"Anthropophagite Manifesto
by Oswald De Andrade
May 1928

´Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.

The world's only law. The masked expression of all individualisms, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties.

Tupy, or not tupy that is the question. (1)

Against all catechisms. And against the mother of the Gracchi.

The only things that interest me are those that are not mine. Law of man. Law of the anthropophagite.

We are tired of all the suspicious catholic husbands put in drama. Freud put an end to the woman enigma and to other frights of printed psychology.

What hindered truth was clothing, the impermeable element between the interior world and the exterior world. The reaction against the dressed man. American movies will inform.

Sons of the sun, mother of the living. Found and loved ferociously, with all the hypocrisy of nostalgia, by the immigrants, by the slaves and by the touristes. In the country of the big snake.

It was because we never had grammars, nor collections of old plants. And we never knew what was urban, suburban, boundary and continental. Lazy men on the world map of Brazil. A participating consciousness, a religious rhythm.

Against all importers of canned consciousness. The palpable existence of life. And the pre-logical mentality for Mr. Levi Bruhl to study.

We want the Carahiba revolution. Bigger than the French Revolution. The unification of all efficacious rebellions in the direction of man. Without us Europe would not even have its poor declaration of the rights of man. The golden age proclaimed by America. The golden age. And all the girls. (2)

Descent. The contact with Carahiban Brazil. Oú Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. The natural man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the surrealist Revolution and Keyserling's technicized barbarian. We walk.

We were never catechized. We live through a somnambular law. We made Christ be born in Bahia. Or in Belém do Pará.But we never admitted the birth of logic among us. Against Father Vieira. Author of our first loan, to gain his commission. The illiterate king had told him: put this in paper but don't be too wordy. The loan was made. Brazilian sugar was recorded. Vieira left the money in Portugal and brought us wordiness.

The spirit refuses to conceive the spirit without body. Anthropomorphism. The need for an anthropophagical vaccine. For the equilibrium against the religions of the meridian. And foreign inquisitions.

We can only attend to the oracular world.

We had justice codification of vengeance. And science codification of Magic. Anthropophagy. The permanent transformation of Taboo into totem.

Against the reversible world and objectivized ideas. Cadaverized. The stop of thought which is dynamic. The individual victim of the system. The source of classical injustices. Of the romantic injustices. And the forgetting of interior conquests.

Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes.

The Carahiban instinct.

Life and death of hypotheses. From the equation I part of the Kosmos to the axiom Kosmos part of I. Subsistence. Knowledge. Anthropophagy.

Against plant elites. In communication with the soil.

We were never catechized. What we really did was Carnival. The Indian dressed as a Senator of the Empire. Pretending to be Pitt. Or featuring in Alencar's operas full of good Portuguese feelings.

We already had communism. We already had the surrealist language. The golden age.
Catiti Catiti
Imara Notiá
Notiá Imara
Ipejú.

Magic and life. We had the relation and the distribution of physical goods, of moral goods, and the goods of dignity. And we knew how to transpose mystery and death with the aid of some grammatical forms. I asked a man what Law was. He replied it was the guarantee of the exercise of possibility. That man was called Galli Matias. I ate him.

Determinism is only absent where there is mystery. But what do we have to do with this?

Against the stories of man, which begin at Cape Finisterra. The undated world. Unsigned. Without Napoleon. Without Caesar.

The fixation of progress through catalogues and television sets. Only machinery. And the blood transfusors.

Against the antagonical sublimations. Brought in caravels.

Against the truth of missionary peoples, defined by the sagacity of an anthropophagite, the Viscount of Cairu:-It is the often repeated lie.

But they who came were not crusaders. They were fugitives from a civilization that we are eating, because we are strong and vengeful as a Jabuti.

If God is the consciousness of the Uncreated Universe, Guaraci is the mother of the living. Jaci is the mother of plants.

We did not have speculation. But we had the power of guessing. We had Politics which is the science of distribution. And a planetary-social system.

The migrations. The escape from tedious states. Against urban sclerosis. Against Conservatories, and tedious speculation.

From William James to Voronoff. The transfiguration of Taboo in totem. Anthropophagy.

The pater families and the creation of the Moral of the Stork: Real ignorance of things + lack of imagination + sentiment of authority before the pro-curious (sic).

It is necessary to depart from a profound atheism to arrive at the idea of God. But the Carahiba did not need. Because he had Guaraci.

The created objective reacts as the Fallen Angels. After Moses wanders. What have we got to do with this?

Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness.

Against the Indian with the torch. The Indian son of Mary, godson of Catherine de Médici and son-in-law of Don Antônio de Mariz.

Happiness is the proof of the pudding.

In the matriarchy of Pindorama.

Against the Memory source of custom. Personal experience renewed.

We are concretists. Ideas take hold, react, burn people in public squares. Let us suppress ideas and other paralyses. Through the routes. To believe in signs, to believe in the instruments and the stars.

Against Goethe, the mother of the Gracchi, and the Court of Don João VI.

Happiness is the proof of the pudding.

The struggle between what one would call the Uncreated and the Creature illustrated by the permanent contradiction between man and his Taboo. The quotidian love and the capitalist modus vivendi. Anthropophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into totem. The human adventure. The mundane finality. However, only the pure elites managed to realize carnal anthropophagy, which brings the highest sense of life, and avoids all the evils identified by Freud, catechist evils. What happens is not a sublimation of the sexual instinct. It is the thermometric scale of the anthropophagic instinct. From carnal, it becomes elective and creates friendship. Affectionate, love. Speculative, science. It deviates and transfers itself. We reach vilification. Low anthropophagy agglomerated in the sins of catechism-envy, usury, calumny, assassination. Plague of the so-called cultured and christianized peoples, it is against it that we are acting. Anthropophagi.

Against Anchieta singing the eleven thousand virgins of the sky, in the land of Iracema- the patriarch João Ramalho founder of São Paulo.

Our independence has not yet been proclaimed. Typical phrase of Don João VI:-My son, put this crown on your head, before some adventurer does! We expelled the dynasty. It is necessary to expel the spirit of Bragança, the law and the snuff of Maria da Fonte.

Against social reality, dressed and oppressive, registered by Freud-reality without complexes, without madness, without prostitutions and without the prisons of the matriarchy of Pindorama.´

O s w a l d D e A n d r a d e

(In Piratininga
Year 374 of the swallowing of the Bishop Sardinha.)

1 Original in English [T.N.].
2 Girls: Original in English [T.N.].

Originally published in Revista de Antropofagia, n.1, year 1, May 1928, São Paulo. Translated from the Portuguese by Adriano Pedrosa and Veronica Cordeiro.

*

Above, one example among various possible.

It turns out that each ´Hy-Sound-Piece´ makes mention of a Brazilian artistic movement or manifesto. Mainly linked to the twentieth century. All possessing an iconoclastic character - in respective decades. And how O.M. made the ´goldsmithing´ of lexicons represents an adjectivity, a predication. An anthropophagic island, an avant-garde island, and so on. This gives to the Melgacian discographic album a pulp quite polysemic. There´s a historical vertex, there´s a transcultural, mythological, scathing metaphorical, eclectic, sometimes folkloric, aesthetic iconoclastic etc.

Some quotes from previous compositions are present. Always under refreshed spectra. Also unpublished experiments, as is typical of a creator so restless.

Ferreira Gullar - one of those who signed the - also mentioned by Melgaço - Neo-concrete manifesto (late 1950) - has the following maxim: ´Art exists because life is not enough.´ ´Hy-Brazil´ is an effervescent, authentic and definitive evidence of this." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

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I - The etymology of the names Brasil and Hy-Brasil is unknown, but in Irish tradition it is thought to come from the Irish Uí Breasail (meaning "descendants (i.e., clan) of Breasal"), one of the ancient clans of northeastern Ireland. cf. Old Irish: Í: island; bres: beauty, worth, great, mighty.

Despite the similarity, the name of the country Brazil has no connection to the mythical islands. The South American country was at first named Ilha de Vera Cruz (Island of the True Cross) and later Terra de Santa Cruz (Land of the Holy Cross) by the Portuguese navigators who discovered the land. After some decades, it started to be called "Brazil" (Brasil, in Portuguese) due to the exploitation of native Brazilwood, at that time the only export of the land. In Portuguese, brazilwood is called pau-brasil, with the word brasil commonly given the etymology "red like an ember", formed from Latin brasa ("ember") and the suffix -il (from -iculum or -ilium). [Nevertheless, only a Brazilian would today be able to take ownership of this analogy and expand it with wit as in the present resonant example];

II - Nautical charts identified an island called "Bracile" west of Ireland in the Atlantic Ocean as far back as 1325, in a portolan chart by Angelino Dulcert. Later it appeared as Insula de Brasil in the Venetian map of Andrea Bianco (1436), attached to one of the larger islands of a group of islands in the Atlantic. This was identified for a time with the modern island of Terceira in the Azores.

A Catalan chart of about 1480 labels two islands "Illa de brasil", one to the south west of Ireland (where the mythical place was supposed to be) and one south of "Illa verde" or Greenland.

On maps the island was shown as being circular, often with a central strait or river running east-west across its diameter. Despite the failure of attempts to find it, this appeared regularly on maps lying south west of Galway Bay until 1865, by which time it was called Brasil Rock;

III - Expeditions left Bristol in 1480 and 1481 to search for the island; and a letter written by Pedro de Ayala, shortly after the return of John Cabot (from his expedition in 1497), reports that land found by Cabot had been "discovered in the past by the men from Bristol who found Brasil".

In 1674 a Captain John Nisbet claimed to have seen the island when on a journey from France to Ireland, stating that the island was inhabited by large black rabbits and a magician who lived alone in a stone castle, yet the character and the story were a literary invention by Irish author Richard Head. Roderick O’Flaherty in A Chorographical Description of West or H-Iar Connaught (1684) tells us "There is now living, Morogh O'Ley (Murrough Ó Laoí), who imagines he was personally on O'Brasil for two days, and saw out of it the iles of Aran, Golamhead [by Lettermullen], Irrosbeghill, and other places of the west continent he was acquainted with."

Hy-Brasil has also been identified with Porcupine Bank, a shoal in the Atlantic Ocean about 200 kilometres (120 mi) west of Ireland and discovered in 1862. As early as 1870 a paper was read to the Geological Society of Ireland suggesting this identification. The suggestion has since appeared more than once, e.g., in an 1883 edition of Notes and Queries and in various twentieth-century publications, one of the more recent being Graham Hancock's book Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization;

IV - José Oswald de Souza Andrade (1890 – 1954) was a Brazilian poet and polemicist. He was born and spent most of his life in São Paulo.

Andrade was one of the founders of Brazilian modernism and a member of the Group of Five, along with Mário de Andrade, Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral and Menotti del Picchia. He participated in the Week of Modern Art (Semana de Arte Moderna).

Andrade is very important too for his manifesto of critical Brazilian nationalism, Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto), published in 1928. Its argument is that Brazil's history of "cannibalizing" other cultures is its greatest strength, while playing on the modernists' primitivist interest in cannibalism as an alleged tribal rite. Cannibalism becomes a way for Brazil to assert itself against European postcolonial cultural domination. The Manifesto's iconic line is "Tupi or not Tupi: that is the question." The line is simultaneously a celebration of the Tupi, who had been at times accused of cannibalism (most notoriously by Hans Staden), and an instance of cannibalism: it eats Shakespeare. On the other hand, some critics argue that Antropofagia, as a movement) was too heterogeneous to extract overarching arguments from it and that often it had little to do with a post-colonial cultural politics (Jauregui 2018, 2012)

Born into a wealthy bourgeois family, Andrade used his money and connections to support numerous modernist artists and projects. He sponsored the publication of several major novels of the period, produced a number of experimental plays, and supported several painters, including Tarsila do Amaral, with whom he had a long affair, and Lasar Segall. His role in the modernist community was made somewhat awkward, however, by his feud with Mário de Andrade, which lasted from 1929 (after Oswald de Andrade published a pseudonymous essay mocking Mário for effeminacy) until Mário de Andrade's untimely death in 1945;

V - Ferreira Gullar is the pen name for José Ribamar Ferreira (September 10, 1930 – December 4, 2016), a Brazilian poet, playwright, essayist, art critic, and television writer. Was considered one of the most influential Brazilians of the 20th century by Época magazine, and was awarded the Jabuti Prize for best fiction book in 2007. In October 9, 2014, Gullar was elected as a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

...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.

credits

released January 31, 2016

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M e l g a ç o {conception | composition | arrangement | synopsis | instrumentation | orchestration | engineering & sound design | art design | production | direction}

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Estúdio Yoknapotawpha/BR + Unidade Euromobile

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Otacílio Melgaço Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Composer, Arranger, Conductor, Multi-
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