P i n h o l e

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 38:48] 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 Pinhole is a small hole, usually made by pressing a thin, pointed object such as a pin through an easily penetrated material such as a fabric or a very thin layer of metal. Similar holes made by other means are also often called pinholes. Pinholes may be intentionally made for various reasons. For example, in optics pinholes are used as apertures to select certain rays of light. This is used in pinhole cameras to form an image without the use of a lens.

This enigmatic sound Work is full of pizzicati. Otacílio Melgaço brilliantly makes a rhizomatic web of parallels between the holes that allow light to enter (metaphorically and physically) and such playing technique.

Pizzicato (translated as pinched, and sometimes roughly as plucked) involves plucking the strings of a string instrument. The exact technique varies somewhat depending on the type of stringed instrument. On bowed string instruments it is a method of playing by plucking the strings with the fingers, rather than using the bow. This produces a very different sound from bowing, short and percussive rather than sustained. On a keyboard string instrument, such as the piano, pizzicato may be employed (although rarely seen) as one of the variety of techniques involving direct manipulation of the strings known collectively as ´string piano´.

I propose an analogy that will transform our bodies in obscure cameras. Think of your organism replete with orifices and each of them being flooded by rays, but not made of light, I refer to Sonic Rays.

Sonic Rays. That's what means to me this Melgacian ´Pinhole´." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"´The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest shared hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality.´

´Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.´

´For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.´ (Roland Barthes)

A Pinhole camera, a variation of camera obscura, is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture, a pinhole – effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box. Exposures can typically range from five seconds up to as much as several hours. The effect was noted in the 5th century BC in China and has been refined over the centuries.

Unlike Photograph, quoting again monsieur Barthes ´Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often ´chimeras´.
By the way, I'm fascinated by ´chimeras´. In Painting, the Pointillism. There are six ´Pinhole´ tracks. Are pointillist Pieces. So piercing points that can drill. Giving to light: holes.

[It´s added to this - other phenomenon: in such neo-impressionist dialect, the eye of the viewer seems to mix the colors optically, however, the colors themselves seem to oscillate or vibrate creating a type of shimmer. Make the transposition into the auricular universe and take into account the sound coloratura!]

Therefore I invite you to hear how Mr. Melgaço paints with musical notes. And as musical notes are able to stick. And so the light can get in. Audible light." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

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I - The camera obscura was not so much an invention as a discovery and development. Works on a naturally occurring phenomenon (the rectilinear propagation of light) and can, for example, often be observed when sunlight filters through dense leaves. Over the centuries many people made contributions to the design of camera obscura as we know it but all are based on the underlying optical laws that apply in nature.

In the 5th century BC, the Mohist philosopher Mozi (墨子) in ancient China mentioned the effect of an inverted image forming through a pinhole. The image of an inverted Chinese pagoda is mentioned in Duan Chengshi's (d. 863) book Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang written during the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Along with experimenting with the pinhole camera and the burning mirror of the ancient Mohists, the Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE) Chinese scientist Shen Kuo (1031–1095) experimented with the camera obscura and was the first to establish geometrical and quantitative attributes for it.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle observed the phenomenon in the fourth century BC. In his book Problems, he wrote:

"Why is it that when the sun passes through quadri-laterals, as for instance in wickerwork, it does not produce a figure rectangular in shape but circular?” and further "Why is it that an eclipse of the sun, if one looks at it through a sieve or through leaves, such as a plane-tree or other broadleaved tree, or if one joins the fingers of one hand over the fingers of the other, the rays are crescent-shaped where they reach the earth? Is it for the same reason as that when light shines through a rectangular peep-hole, it appears circular in the form of a cone?”

A description was given early in the eleventh century Alhazen in his work The Shape of the Eclipse.

This treatise is of special interest because of what it reveals about Ibn al-Haytham’s knowledge of the important subject of the camera obscura. The exact Arabic equivalent of that Latin phrase, al-bayt al-muzlim, occurs in book I, chapter 3 of the Optics;19 and indeed dark chambers are frequently used in this book for the study of such various properties of light as its rectilinear propagation and the fact that shining bodies radiate their light and color on neighboring objects. But such images as those produced by a pinhole camera are totally absent from the Optics. The nearest that Ibn al-Haytham gets to such an image is the passage in which he describes the patches of light cast on the inside wall of a “dark place” by candle flames set up at various points opposite a small aperture that leads into the dark place; the order of the images on the inside wall is the reverse of the order of the candles outside.

The experiment was designed to show that the light from one candle is not mingled with the light from another as a result of their meeting at the aperture, and in general that lights and colors are not affected by crossing one another. Although this passage occurs in book I in the context of the theory of vision,20 the eye does not in Ibn al-Haytham’s explanation act as a pinhole camera and it is expressly denied the role of a lens camera. In the present treatise, however, he approached the question, already posed in the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, of why the image of a crescent moon, cast through a small circular aperture, appears circular, whereas the same aperture will cast a crescent-shaped image of the partially eclipsed sun. Although his answer is not wholly satisfactory, and although he failed to solve the general problem of the pinhole camera, his attempted explanation of the image of a solar crescent clearly shows that he possessed the principles of the working of the camera. He formulated the condition for obtaining a distinct image of an object through a circular aperture as that when: where ma, ms are the diameters of the aperture and of the object respectively, and da, ds the distances of the screen from the aperture and from the object respectively.

In the 13th century, Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon commented on the pinhole camera. Between 1000 and 1600, men such as Ibn al-Haytham, Gemma Frisius, and Giambattista della Porta wrote on the pinhole camera, explaining why the images are upside down.

Around 1600, Giambattista della Porta added a lens to the pinhole camera. It was not until 1850 that a Scottish scientist by the name of Sir David Brewster actually took the first photograph with a pinhole camera. Up until recently it was believed that Brewster himself coined the term "Pinhole" in "The Stereoscope". The earliest reference to the term "Pinhole" has been traced back to almost a century before Brewster to James Ferguson's Lectures on select Subjects. Sir William Crookes and William de Wiveleslie Abney were other early photographers to try the pinhole technique;

II - Pieces in classical music that are played entirely pizzicato include:
J. S. Bach: the ninth movement of the Magnificat (1723–1733)
Franz Schubert: the first movement of the The String Quintet in C major (1828)
Josef Strauss: Pizzicato Polka (1869).
Johann Strauss II: Neue Pizzicato Polka (1892).
Edvard Grieg : Act IV – Anitra's Dance in Peer Gynt (1874)
Léo Delibes: the "Divertissement: Pizzicati" from Act 3 of the ballet Sylvia (1876)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: the third movement of the 4th symphony (1877–78)
Jean Sibelius: the second movement of his 5th symphony (1919)
Béla Bartók: the fourth movement of the String Quartet No. 4 (1927)
Benjamin Britten: the second movement of the Simple Symphony (1934)
Leroy Anderson: Plink, Plank, Plunk! (1951).

Antonio Vivaldi, in the "Ah Ch'Infelice Sempre" section of his cantata Cessate, omai cessate, combined both pizzicato and bowed instruments to create a unique sound. He also included pizzicato in the second movement of "Winter" from The Four Seasons;

III - Roland Gérard Barthes (1915 – 1980) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, design theory, anthropology and post-structuralism;

IV - In fine art, the term "pointillism" (from the French word "point" meaning "dot") describes a technique of Neo-Impressionism painting, in which hundreds of small dots or dashes of pure colour are applied to the canvas, or other ground, in order to create maximum luminosity. That is, instead of mixing colour pigments on a palette and then applying the mixture onto the painting, the Pointillist applies small dots of pure unmixed colour directly onto the picture and relies on the eye of the viewer to mix the colours optically. Viewed at the right distance, (supposedly three times the diagonal measurement) the dots of colour give a richer and more subtle effect than can be achieved by conventional techniques. Pointillism (actually an offshoot of Divisionism) was the most influential style of Post-Impressionist painting (1880-95) and was practised by Post-Impressionist painters from a number of different schools. Italian Divisionism, led by Vittore Grubicy De Dragon (1851-1920), was especially active.

The founder of Pointillism was Georges Seurat (1859-91).

...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.