We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Musicophilia or Seeing Voices: A Journey Into The Land Of The Deaf (Entr'Act To Oliver Wolf Sacks) {Otac​í​lio Melga​ç​o} [duration 26​:​26]

by Otacílio Melgaço

/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $5 USD  or more

     

1.

about

M u s i c o p h i l i a
O r
S e e i n g V o i c e s:
A J o u r n e y I n t o T h e L a n d O f T h e D e a f

E n t r' A c t T o O l i v e r W o l f S a c k s

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 26:26] 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)

+

"'Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.' (O.S.)

The only proper mediation here is represented by a memorable gap or, if you prefer, laurelled Intermezzo.

In Memoriam. I am aware that for some time Otacílio Melgaço had composed this sound Piece to be dedicated to Mr. Sacks. Probably carrying the hope that the life of Briton neurologist and writer would be perpetuated more - even publicly knowing Oliver fought for years against a disease that unfortunately became fatal in 2015. More specifically: yesterday, 30 August. The choice to post such daedal tribute today became unpostponable. In Memoriam.

I suppose a Requiem or Tombeau would not do justice to the iconoclastic spirit of the honoree. Too solemn. So there was the O.M.'s insight: an (eclectic) Entr'acte!

Interlude between life and death.
Intermission between death and life.

[I believe that specific selected spelling
E-n-t-r'-a-c-t (without the culminating 'e')
is related to a closer expression with the English language - Wolf's source tongue. A subtle and justifiable distancing from the original Frenchness of the lexicon.]

Ergo an Entr'act can take 'the action from one part of a large-scale drama to the next by completing the missing links'. Do figuratively the decoding, estimated NetCitizens, and behold one of many facets possible. Seeing celebrants voices, vocalizing cerebrating music. Thus there's the implementation of an engaging polysemy passing to embrace this 'spectacular Interval', making it exuberantly metaphorical.

********************************************************************************

Entr'act - Enter, Act - Interact.

Entr'act - A journey, a saga, an odyssey...suggesting what content filled the hiatus (time-spacialized) between nativity and passing of Oliver Sacks. (A reverberating biography, in short);

Entr'act - A chasm - and a bridge - among hearing and deafness, sound and silence. (Sounds of silence, especially);

Entr'act - A kinesthetic spectrum of absorbable

M-u-s-i-c-o-p-h-i-l-i-a-l-a-n-d!

(Notes and noises and halts must be heard, and seen, breathed, touched, smelled, eaten! In other words, the whole body - and what we customarily call brain and mind and heart and skin and sex |even, whether or not, soul| ... - can be a vehicle of resonant fecundation; cross-pollination);

Entr'act - A proposed Piece of music performed between acts of an artistic event. Under this purely musical lens, rescuing the touchstone mainly thrown by Erik Satie, who Melgaço greatly admires;

And so on...

********************************************************************************

'Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.' (O.S.)

At my point of view, the Melgacian creations establish a third interactive way. Luxuriously and necessarily balsamic for everyone. 'Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear' of any patients (still with reference to the Sacksian context) as well. Even the deaf because they can feel the sound vibrations. As well as those considered 'healthy', is a constant metamorphic access - in varying degrees - 'to movement, to speech, to life'.

'The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace. Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.' (O.S.)

In Memoriam. Otacílio evokes Oliver. And for us and our privilege, this is an act (or |entr'|act?) of deep emotion, grace, blessing, spontaneity, surprise, catharsis and rejoicing." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

"The first publicly performed furniture music composed by Erik Satie was premiered as entr'acte music (1920 – the play for which it was written fell into oblivion), with this variation that it was intended as background music to the sounds the public would usually produce at intermission, walking around and talking. Allegedly, the public did not obey Satie's intention: they kept silently in their places and listened, trained by a habit of incidental music, much to the frustration of the avant-garde musicians, who tried to save their idea by inciting the public to get up, talk, and walk around.

Originally entr'actes resulted from stage curtains being closed for set or costume changes: to fill time as not to halt the dramatic action, to make a transition from the mood of one act to the next, or to prevent the public from becoming restless. In front of the closed curtains, the action could be continued during these entr'actes, albeit involving only players with no scenery other than the curtain, and a minimum of props.

Opening the curtains of poly connotative evolutionism, Oliver Sacks once wrote 'Darwin speculated that music tones and rhythms were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited not only by love, but by strong passions of jealousy, rivalry, and triumph and that speech arose, secondarily, from this primal music.'

Fitting the three pieces of the Melgacian puzzle (between Satie and Wolf):

1- 'It was intended as background music to the sounds the public would usually produce at intermission, walking around and talking';
2- 'The avant-garde musicians, who tried to save their idea by inciting the public to get up, talk, and walk around';
3- 'And that speech arose, secondarily, from this primal music'.

Genesiac tearing hallucinatory strings of a quartet, frantic - on the move - rhythms of free jazz, multidimensional electroacousticity, white and pink and brownish noises, industrial punk beat, 3D sound poetry, exotically ceremonial organ, conciliatory colourful harmonizations, simulation of orchestra tuning...: 'Musicophilia or Seeing Voices: A Journey Into The Land Of The Deaf' - and here I mention the legacy of the brave man that this adventurous work honors - is a deafening shout (or an elegiac whisper) in praise to cathartic expression and emancipatory movement. Whether on behalf of achievement and edification of a humanistic legitimizing speech or in any other subjectiviting direction.

Awakenings." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

&

I - Oliver Wolf Sacks, CBE (1933 – 2015) was an English neurologist and author, famous for writing best-selling case histories of his patients' disorders, with many of his books adapted for film and stage.

After receiving his medical degree from The Queen's College, Oxford in 1960, he moved to the U.S. for his internship at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco. He relocated to New York in 1965 where he became professor of Neurology at New York University School of Medicine. Between 2007 and 2012, he was professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University, where he also held the position of "Columbia Artist", which recognized his contributions to art and science. He had also been on the faculty of Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine and had been a visiting professor at the University of Warwick.

Sacks was the author of numerous best-selling books, including collections of case studies of people with neurological disorders. His writings have been featured in a wider range of media than any other contemporary medical author, with The New York Times referring to him as a "poet laureate of contemporary medicine". His books describe cases with a wealth of narrative detail about the experiences of patients and how they coped, often illuminating how the normal brain deals with perception, memory and individuality.

His 1973 book Awakenings, an autobiographical account of his efforts to help people with encephalitis lethargica regain proper neurological function, was adapted into the Academy Award-nominated film of the same name in 1990 starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. He and his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain were the subject of "Musical Minds", an episode of the PBS series Nova. In 2008 Sacks was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours for services to literature;

II - Entr'acte (French entracte), means "between the acts" (German: Zwischenspiel and Zwischenakt, Italian: Intermezzo, Spanish: Intermedio). It can mean a pause between two parts of a stage production, synonymous to an intermission (this is nowadays the more common meaning in French), but it more often (in English) indicates a piece of music performed between acts of a theatrical production. In the case of stage musicals, the entr'acte serves as the overture of act 2 (and sometimes acts 3 and 4, as in Carmen). In films that were meant to be shown with an intermission, there was frequently a specially recorded entr'acte on the soundtrack between the first and second half of the film, although this practice has died out in recent years.

...for purposes of pragmatism and clear exegesis,
Wikipedia was the main 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 August 31, 2015

Hear more here:
soundcloud.com/otaciliomelgaco

>>

O t a c í l i o
M e l g a ç o {conception | composition | arrangement | synopsis | instrumentation | orchestration | engineering & sound design | art design [O.M., after Cabane] | production | direction}

Special Guests: Nausícaaa Ensemble | Zycluz Quartett

Estúdio Yoknapotawpha/BR + Unidade Euromobile

<<

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Otacílio Melgaço Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Composer, Arranger, Conductor, Multi-
Instrumentalist
from
Minas Gerais,
Brazil.
+
Official (English) Site
otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/omenglish
+
PORTAL O|M
(Portuguese)
otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/otaciliomelgaco
+
Site to be viewed exclusively on Mobile Devices (smartphones, etc.)
otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/mobileom
&
"Music is like a bewitched Mistress." (Paul Klee)
... more

contact / help

Contact Otacílio Melgaço

Streaming and
Download help

Report this album or account

Otacílio Melgaço recommends:

If you like Otacílio Melgaço, you may also like: