L u c i ( m p h ) o ( n y )
O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o
[duration 41:38] 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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"Mr. Melgaço brought to light a Series of Nine Symphonies called ´Brasilianas´. All pay homage to a Brazilian consecrated Personality and characterized by certain global penetration. ´Luci(mph)o(ny)´ is part of that Cycle.
He's the culmination of this ninefold labor of Hercules. With a golden key (or fleece). Certainly Lúcio Cardoso has no such planetary ballast in respective niche, but deserve. At least because of all he brought up about the underground of Brazilianness. Being also from Minas Gerais, it seems to me a choice of 'the prodigal son'; O.M. returns from the world to the land where was given to the light. And does his part (contributes its unmatched share) in terms of revealing it for the sake of testimony and appreciation/delight of the remaining parts of all mankind.
Background: Recently, the composer and multi-instrumentalist was hired to create a soundtrack for a role-playing game. As the partnership was interrupted by bureaucratic reasons, he held a metamorphosis: its creation now under a startling symphonic perspective. Like sound atmosphere´n´acclimatization was quite similar, the contextualization from the life and work of Cardoso must have been a natural Melgacian leap and surely endowed with thrilling genius.
Lúcio once mused: ´Love is a monologue caught in the shade.´ In the same shade, ´Luci(mph)o(ny)´ is a dialogue. Unlike the other eight symphonies belonging to ´Brasilianas´, this consists of fascinating fragments. Fragments d'un discours amoureux. Interconnecting fragments. The sagacious orthography of the title of this musical maze is proof of that.
We found an opaque varnish throughout the composition. The volume (every nuance) is usually subterraneous. An music full of folding screens, blinds. There fantasmatic air all the time because the L.C. literature sought to reveal the other side of his people and culture (from the same O.M. birth state, Minas Gerais). The dark side, veiled, hidden, unconscious. The life of the one who receives this sonic honor was uniquely controversial and walked the tightrope between gloom and radiance. The rich range of details of this Piece is stupendous and brings, in my opinion, challenging surprises like magical realism or even science fiction spectra in timbres and intricacies. The parallel is not as surreal because we´re talking about unexplored areas of human condition. A dorsal addendum: Originally Otacílio was linked to a proposal (Cosmicism) inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. This information makes it easier to understand why justifiably we´re fantastically abducted during the act of hearing... To quote just one example, the references to the perception of Time being elapsed - by Mr. M. - are chilling! [If we imagine this work as a sound approach to the whole Lovecraftian universe, such terrific invention readily would have to be placed on the Olympus of synesthetic adaptations related to Howard Phillips.]
Still regarding ´sides´, ´The Nothingness is just another side of the Absolute of which could believe in God´, Cardoso also wrote. Melgaço walks between God and The Nothingness - in ´Luci(mph)o(ny)´. Both leading to the same (Artistic) sense: the ABSOLUTE!" (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)
"Recently, I made analogies among titles of Clarice Lispector books and the Melgacian Symphony dedicated to her.
melgacootacilio.bandcamp.com/album/lispector-symphony-otac-lio-melga-o-duration-47-11
Lispector was in love with Lúcio Cardoso and despite not having been carried out in specific direction (he assumed himself gay), their relationship was always very deep. In honor of this bright connection, I will do the same and so suggest to you possible connotations for vertiginous ´Luci(mph)o(ny)´:
The Pillow Willow;
The Audible Light on the Underground;
Empty-Hands Clapping;
The Unknown Under the Dark Sky;
Lost Days, Meetings;
The Amphitheater of the Absurd;
The Bewitched Listener;
Chronicle of the Murdered Sweet Home;
The Mystery of MMMelgaço;
Four Stories of the Province and the City;
The Travel(er) to the End of the Night..." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)
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I - Joaquim Lúcio Cardoso Filho, known as Lúcio Cardoso (1912 - 1968) was a Brazilian novelist, playwright, and poet.
The son of an impoverished but prominent family in Minas Gerais, Lúcio Cardoso was the brother of Adauto Lúcio Cardoso, a congressman for the center-right União Democrática Nacional and later justice of the Supreme Federal Court; and of Maria Helena Cardoso, who became a respected writer herself as a memorialist, including the editing of the posthumous memoirs of her brother Lúcio (Por onde andou meu coração, 1967; Vida-vida, 1973; and Sonata perdida: Anotações de uma velha dama digna, 1979).
At an early age, after attending school in Belo Horizonte, Cardoso moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he got a job in the Equitativa insurance company. He soon came to the notice of the group of writers around the wealthy industrialist (and a poet himself) Augusto Frederico Schmidt, who published his first works. Many of these writers, including Octávio de Faria and Cornélio Penna, were, like Cardoso, Catholic - and, in the twin case of Cardoso and Octávio de Faria, both Catholic and homosexual. In a time when Brazilian literature was dominated by leftist, regionalist themes, these writers were less interested in the then-dominant political concerns of Brazilian writing than in inner experience and themes of human redemption and personal tragedy. This paramount value placed upon the subjective character of writing was a characteristic Cardoso shared also with his younger contemporary Clarice Lispector, who fell in love with Cardoso when she was a young woman, and who remained a close friend until his death.
Cardoso's first novel, Maleita (Malaria) - the story of an engineer stranded in a backwater in Minas Gerais - did not stray far from the dominant regionalist themes, which, however, he forsook after 1936, with his third novel Luz no Subsolo, in favour of psychological introspection;
II - Cardoso was enormously prolific in several genres, including the theater, where, together with the Afro-Brazilian activist Abdias do Nascimento, he started the Teatro Experimental do Negro, Brazil's first black theater company. With Paulo César Saraceni, he was responsible for the first feature-length film of the nascent Cinema Novo, Porto das caixas - based on a true story about a crime in the municipality of Itaboraí, then a backwater rural community in the State of Rio de Janeiro. Perhaps his most famous novel is Crônica da casa assassinada (Chronicle of the Murdered House), 1959, a Faulknerian saga of a decaying patriarchal family in Minas Gerais. In this novel, one of the chief characters, Timóteo, is the family's gay scion, who lives secluded in the ancestral mansion, always dressed in his mother's old clothes, and who stands for the unravelling of the traditional order embodied in the mansion;
III - A famous figure in the bohemian milieu of Rio de Janeiro--"Ipanema should be called Lúcio Cardoso," according to one friend—his health deteriorated because of his alcoholism and dependence on prescription drugs. On December 7, 1962, at the height of his creativity, he suffered a debilitating stroke that left him partially paralyzed. He struggled unsuccessfully to recover his ability to speak and write, and when that failed he turned to painting.
On September 22, 1968, following another stroke, he died in Rio de Janeiro.
...for purposes of pragmatism and clear exegesis,
Wikipedia was the main 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.
