M o n a d

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 54:30] 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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"Generales inquisitiones de analysi notionum et veritatum.

Once Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz said ´Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.´ Keeping and leveraging the pleasure, Otacílio Melgaço - in a way, uncountably aware - contradicts that. De Arte Combinatoria.

His ´Monad´ is a electroacoustic kaleidoscope ´absolutely perfect, since perfection is nothing but magnitude of - positive - reality, in the strict sense, setting aside the limits or bounds in things which are limited.´ Confessio philosophi.

His ´Monad´, nova Methodus pro maximis et minimis.
Sometimes reports me to the same Webernian conception and instrumentation of Silence. ´To communicate through Silence is a link between the thoughts of man´, thought Marcel Marceau.
Sometimes the titles of sound Pieces could have been suggested by Salvador Dali.

His ´Monad´, the elements of things with being aware that it is, after all, genuine and transmuting Unity." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"To understand the concept of this album, we have to delve into Monadology. Before, I´ll make an observation: Otacílio Melgaço does not usually take or defend a specific issue that can become a leitmotif of this or that work. For all I know, are opportunities to address interesting questions that make us reflect and thus extend and amplify our ability to be, in all humanistic facets, authentically dialectical.

The Monadology (French: La Monadologie, 1714) is one of Gottfried Leibniz’s best known works representing his later philosophy. It is a short text which sketches in some 90 paragraphs a metaphysics of simple substances, or monads.

When it was written, the Monadology tried to put an end from a monist point of view to the main question of what is reality, and particularly to the problem of communication of substances, both studied by Descartes called mind-body dualism. Thus, Leibniz offered a new solution to mind and matter interaction by means of a pre-established harmony expressed as the Best of all possible worlds form of optimism; in other words, he drew the relationship between ´the kingdom of final causes´, or teleological ones, and ´the kingdom of efficient causes´, or mechanical ones, which was not causal, but synchronous. So, monads and matter are only apparently linked, and there is not even any communication between different monads, as far as they act according to their degree of distinction only, as they were influenced by bodies, and vice versa.

Leibniz fought against the Cartesian dualist system in his Monadology and tried to surpass it through a metaphysical system considered at the same time monist (since only the unextended is substantial) and pluralist (as far as substances are disseminated in the world in an infinite number). For that reason the monad is an irreducible force, which makes it possible for the bodies to have the characteristics of inertia and impenetrability, and which contains in itself the source of all its actions. Monads are the first elements of every composed thing.
Monads are manifest, since they are everywhere, and there is no extension without monads. They are, then, the plenum, that is to say, the condition of an infinitely dense universe, but nevertheless they are unextended. However, this doesn’t mean that they lack of any function (as far as they project and reflect force), matter (since they come with it) or that they are extended (considering that they don’t interact with anything in the world).

Extended matter would be the impenetrable quality of the unextended—the monad, without any doors or windows—as passively transmitted according to movements which, together with perception and apperception, compose action. In spite of that, a monad cannot remain placed in matter, which follows the monad itself, previously to the generation of matter in time. So, extension and monads coexist acausally by the means of a timeless creation, although they are reciprocally bound according to the appearances.

This theory leads to:

1. Idealism, since it denies things in themselves (besides monads) and multiplies them in different points of view. Monads are ´perpetual living mirrors of the universe.´

2. Metaphysical optimism, through the principle of sufficient reason, developed as follows:

a) Everything exists according to a reason (by the axiom ´Nothing arises from nothing´);

b) Everything which exists has a sufficient reason to exist;

c) Everything which exists is better than anything non-existent (by the first point: since it is more rational, it also has more reality), and, consequently, it is the best possible being in the best of all possible worlds (by the axiom: ´That which contains more reality is better than that which contains less reality´).

I conclude by stating that in the five bases (incidentally, all compositions have quintuplets structural focus) adopted by Leibniz - Mathematics, Physics, Biological, Psychological and Metaphysics -, O.M. anchors his phonograph record. In subtle friction of apetition and perception, everything becomes metaphorical. Besides all the aforementioned possible, a fantastic example: As each monad has in itself the representation of the whole universe and the relationship between all monads, an absolute spirit - God - can, according to Gottfried, from what is happening in each, inferred by mere calculation that goes, what happened or will be going on all over the universe. Translate ´monad´ as ´each musical note´ and ´God´ as ´The Composer´ and recontextualize the notation above.

Ultimately, the more we hear this intriguing Melgacian sonic after-light, the more we find fascinating intricacies full of potential prisms and so the revelation of the sky-rocketing carat than we can call ingenious genius." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

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I- Monad (from Greek μονάς monas, "unit" in turn from μόνος monos, "alone"), conceived reportedly by the Pythagoreans meant divinity, the first being, or the totality of all beings, referring in cosmogony (creation theories) variously to source acting alone and/or an indivisible origin. It had a geometric counterpart, which was debated and discussed contemporaneously by the same groups of people.
According to Hippolytus, the worldview was inspired by the Pythagoreans, who called the first thing that came into existence the "monad", which begat (bore) the dyad (from the greek word for two), which begat the numbers, which begat the point, begetting lines or finiteness, etc. It meant divinity, the first being, or the totality of all beings, referring in cosmogony (creation theories) variously to source acting alone and/or an indivisible origin and equivalent comparators. Pythagorean and Platonic philosophers like Plotinus and Porphyry condemned Gnosticism (see Neoplatonism and Gnosticism) for their treatment of the monad.
For the Pythagoreans, the generation of number series was related to objects of geometry as well as cosmogony. According to Diogenes Laertius, from the monad evolved the dyad; from it numbers; from numbers, points; then lines, two-dimensional entities, three-dimensional entities, bodies, culminating in the four elements earth, water, fire and air, from which the rest of our world is built up.
The term monad was later adopted from Greek philosophy by Giordano Bruno, Leibniz (Monadology), and others;

II- In some gnostic systems the Supreme Being is known as the Monad, the One, The Absolute Aiōn teleos (The Perfect Aeon, αἰών τέλεος), Bythos (Depth or Profundity, Βυθός), Proarchē (Before the Beginning, προαρχή), and Hē Archē (The Beginning, ἡ ἀρχή) and The ineffable parent. The One is the high source of the pleroma, the region of light. The various emanations of The One are called Aeons.

According to Theodoret's book on heresies (Haereticarum Fabularum Compendium i.18) the Arab Christian Monoimus (150-210) used the term Monad to mean the highest god which created lesser gods, or elements (similar to Aeons). In some versions of Christian gnosticism, especially those deriving from Valentinius, a lesser deity known as the Demiurge had a role in the creation of the material world in addition to the role of the Monad. In these forms of gnosticism, the God of the Old Testament is often considered to have been the Demiurge, not the Monad, or sometimes different passages are interpreted as referring to each.

...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.