O n C o n t r a p u n t a l G l e n n S t r e e t

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 01:01:16] 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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"Here - everything is raw material for the composer:

radio emanations from around the globe;

sound poetry;

street music;

sonic bricolage;

concretisms;

tape variations;

surreal fugues;

incidental quotes from Melgacian works etc.

Definitive tribute to one of the references of Otacílio,
the Canadian Glenn Gould.

I will focus a particular passage of life of the great pianist:

´As the result of Gould's association with CBC Records, he made numerous television and radio programs for CBC Television and CBC Radio. Notable productions include his music-concrète Solitude Trilogy, which consists of The Idea of North, a meditation on Northern Canada and its people, The Latecomers about Newfoundland, and The Quiet in the Land, about Mennonites in Manitoba.

All three use a radiophonic electronic-music technique that Gould called CONTRAPUNTAL RADIO, in which several people are heard speaking at once—much like the voices in a fugue—manipulated through the use of tape.

Gould's experience of driving across northern Ontario while listening to Top 40 radio in 1967 provided the inspiration for one of his most unusual CBC radio pieces, The Search for Petula Clark, a witty and eloquent dissertation on the recordings of the renowned British pop singer, who was then at the peak of her international success.´

Melgaço rises to the heights the aleatoryness of his urban Radio Clash counterpoints? Or, indeed, all we hear is carefully composed and orderly and purposely concealed under an anarchic mantle? Both hypotheses simultaneously? O.M. is an expert in undoing/disentangle the knots of exciting paradoxes ... and so he proposes others! More luxuriant/lush, magnetic and transcendent.

So You, Elizabethan Gaiety, want to write a Fugue? Regal atmosphere? Our gifts? Whimsical surreality? A merry Melgacian Thought... In ´On Contrapuntal Glenn Street´,
we are a Thought thought by O.M.
And so do not counterpose ourself. We, phono pointed, simply counterpunctuate what worth go(u)ld." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"´Grandes são os desertos, e tudo é deserto.
Não são algumas toneladas de pedras ou tijolos ao alto
Que disfarçam o solo, o tal solo que é tudo.
Grandes são os desertos e as almas desertas e grandes
Desertas porque não passa por elas senão elas mesmas,
Grandes porque de ali se vê tudo, e tudo morreu.

Grandes são os desertos, minha alma!
Grandes são os desertos.

Não tirei bilhete para a vida,
Errei a porta do sentimento,
Não houve vontade ou ocasião que eu não perdesse.
Hoje não me resta, em vésperas de viagem,
Com a mala aberta esperando a arrumação adiada,
Sentado na cadeira em companhia com as camisas que não cabem,
Hoje não me resta (à parte o incômodo de estar assim sentado)
Senão saber isto:
Grandes são os desertos, e tudo é deserto.
Grande é a vida, e não vale a pena haver vida,

Arrumo melhor a mala com os olhos de pensar em arrumar
Que com arrumação das mãos factícias (e creio que digo bem)
Acendo o cigarro para adiar a viagem,
Para adiar todas as viagens.
Para adiar o universo inteiro.

Volta amanhã, realidade!
Basta por hoje, gentes!
Adia-te, presente absoluto!
Mais vale não ser que ser assim.

Comprem chocolates à criança a quem sucedi por erro,
E tirem a tabuleta porque amanhã é infinito.

Mas tenho que arrumar mala,
Tenho por força que arrumar a mala,
A mala.

Não posso levar as camisas na hipótese e a mala na razão.
Sim, toda a vida tenho tido que arrumar a mala.
Mas também, toda a vida, tenho ficado sentado sobre o canto das camisas empilhadas,
A ruminar, como um boi que não chegou a Ápis, destino.

Tenho que arrumar a mala de ser.
Tenho que existir a arrumar malas.
A cinza do cigarro cai sobre a camisa de cima do monte.
Olho para o lado, verifico que estou a dormir.
Sei só que tenho que arrumar a mala,
E que os desertos são grandes e tudo é deserto,
E qualquer parábola a respeito disto, mas dessa é que já me esqueci.

Ergo-me de repente todos os Césares.
Vou definitivamente arrumar a mala.
Arre, hei de arrumá-la e fechá-la;
Hei de vê-la levar de aqui,
Hei de existir independentemente dela.

Grandes são os desertos e tudo é deserto,
Salvo erro, naturalmente.
Pobre da alma humana com oásis só no deserto ao lado!

Mais vale arrumar a mala.
Fim.´ (Álvaro de Campos, in ´Poemas´ -
Heterônimo de Fernando Pessoa)

Alvarian Melgaço. ´On Contrapuntal Glenn Street´, a priori - exists as an independent ultra aesthetic expression. First, must be absorbed itself as an intricate audio creation; voices and noises and frequencies and silence - all act as instruments in the hands of an Expert emanating deeply interactive structures. Rhizomes of symphonic character, certainly.

Alvarian or/and Joycean Melgaço. Maybe a day in the life of Mr. Gould. Strolling (´de telle sorte qu'une flâneur´) through the roads-and-routes of Toronto, his hometown; one morning - an afternoon - one night (the three sonic creations) and each of us absorbing all the tangle of audible manifestations that surround us: eager, like children who discover a new magical and rare ringing toy. The world, nay, the cosmos becomes that plaything.
A rite of passage. Are we willing to revive our hearing? A rite of (auricular) p-a-s-s-a-g-e-s. Until return to the starting point (eternal return?): the Melgacian Glenn Street. The backbone of a modern Ithaca or erratic course of an Odyssey without end? Greek to French, just like in one of the wondrous current disc Pieces: ´Cinq, quatre, trois, deux, un, zéro´ et on y va!" (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

P.S.: ´When I see the album cover and the gray flood, I am led to think. As a neutral and monochrome ´gris noise´, the image becomes a backdrop for all the deafening multiplicity of sounds & colors & (...) transaudible information present in each of the three contemporaneously epic compositions. The street - still visible in the same cover - is seen under specific semiopaque lens; this means that our ears are our guides, the mapping is sonic!

Can not call attention to only one or another detail of a thousand and one contained herein. Are well balanced constructions, alternating more tangled and other clean passages. Randomly I could point a faction of the first part flirting with the stylistic consecrated by Laurie Anderson; the use of the theremin acclimated, chameleonic, to radio audio frequencies in the second and contextually the providential (in the end of the third - time to pack up!) ´ralentada´ recitation a Fernando Pessoa's poem - after a long fascinating instrumental intervention!

Finally, it´s still brilliant the collateral proposal perpetrated by O.M.: observe and enjoy the complexion of a burgh - starting with ways and arteries - as if contrapuntal! Understanding a town just like a musical fugue! Mixing Melgacian addenda on Gouldian source: wandering on the dial; the dial = the city. Our sin´n´sound Me(l)gacity.´ (C.C.)

Be sure to check also
melgacootacilio.bandcamp.com/album/when-blue-turns-gould-otac-lio-melga-o-duration-01-07-22

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I - Glenn Herbert Gould (1932 – 1982) was a Canadian pianist who became one of the best-known and most celebrated classical pianists of the 20th century. He was particularly renowned as an interpreter of the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach. His playing was distinguished by remarkable technical proficiency and capacity to articulate the polyphonic texture of Bach's music.

After his adolescence, Gould rejected most of the standard Romantic piano literature including Liszt, Schumann, and Chopin. Although his recordings were dominated by Bach, Gould's repertoire was diverse, including works by Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Brahms, pre-Baroque composers such as Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, Orlando Gibbons and William Byrd, and such 20th-century composers as Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss. Gould was well known for various eccentricities, from his unorthodox musical interpretations and mannerisms at the keyboard to aspects of his lifestyle and personal behaviour. He stopped giving concerts at the age of 31 to concentrate on studio recording and other projects. Gould was the first pianist to record any of Liszt's piano transcriptions of Beethoven's symphonies (beginning with the Fifth Symphony, in 1967).

Gould was also known as a writer, composer, conductor, and broadcaster. He was a prolific contributor to musical journals, in which he discussed music theory and outlined his musical philosophy. His career as a composer was less distinguished. His output was minimal and many projects were left unfinished. There is evidence that, had he lived beyond 50, he intended to abandon the piano and devote the remainder of his career to conducting and other projects. As a broadcaster, Gould was prolific. His output ranged from television and radio broadcasts of studio performances to musique concrète radio documentaries about life in the Canadian wilderness.

...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.