S p e c t r a l

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 44:53] 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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"This album belongs to a series that Otacílio Melgaço baptized as
´E c l i p s a l´. Themes that at first appear shadowy, occultists but which point to different perspectives, in unexpected spiraling polysemic movements. Of the same selection, I can cite, for example, ´Vathek´, ´Train Fantôme´, ´Doppelgänger´,
´Madame Satã´, and ´青木ヶ原´.

Apropos, I promptly ask you to turn your attention to the Spectral cover. Under Melgaço's interference, an image of Mr. Hope. William Hope (1863 – 1933) was a pioneer of so-called ´spirit photography´. Based in Crewe, England, he was a member of the well known esoteric group, the Crewe Circle. [Some time later, it was discovered that his photos were forged - and this curious and even risible information makes purposely all the difference here in our context -.]

Therefore, O.M. explores a musical technicality (S-p-e-c-t-r-a-l-i-s-m), relating it to S-p-e-c-t-r-u-m (specter, spirit, spook) and directing his vision to a ludic and ingenious complexion (its glossy, illusionist aspects). Note that all these ´ingredients´ also belong to the artistic universe and coexist in simultaneous harmony.

That being said, I´ll elucidate the relationship between the references above and the four honorees: Yayoi Kusama, Xico Stockinger, Sérgio Bernardes and João das Alagoas.

There´s the strictly musical question (check out Mr. Paz's review below), nevertheless in terms of conception, the most relevant, according to O.M., would be to emphasize the presence of a ´spectral subjectivity´ in the biography of each one of them:

1- Kusama | The traumatic disapproval of the avant-garde acts she underwent, returning from the USA to, at the time, a retrograde Japan + Its schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder and hallucinations;
2- Stockinger | The advent of deafness + Due to the stature of his work, a considerable recognition that he deserved in comparison to what he actually had (living away from the axis Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo);
3- Bernardes | Despite his prestige, has been ´silently´ condemned to ostracism (by his professional class, the academic milieu, the media etc.) ever since he accepted (being neither a leftist nor a rightist, that is, maintaining a position of independence) to make projects for military governments (Brazil suffered a military coup that lasted from 1964 to 1984) + After the effects of singular rites of passage in his life (as was the contact with Buckminster Fuller), the incomprehension (by most of the possible interlocutors) of the heterodox philosophical discourse he had when older;
4- das Alagoas | Unlike the previous specificities, in this case: an archetype, I would say. He suffered a drama that the most popular artists (linked to the roots of their culture) of real value (ie, non-opportunist or nickel-hunter) pass: a period of Homeric difficulties in surviving by workforce + The Brazilian tendency to maintain a posture of a country that was colonized when it does not value folkloric art as it should (so much that it persists to this day a certain prejudice that binds determinated type of creation as if it were made for a foreign public; undervalued by the compatriots).

Joining the ends of the threads of the skeins, Melgaço throws a spotlight on the fact that, each in respective idiosyncrasy, they all lived (or still lives if I think of the Japanese figure at - it's 2017 - the height of her 88 years) ´phantasmatic spasms´. To emphasize this is a way of both humanizing the artist and perhaps conjecture, with enough determination, that the human being is always
the-human-being-and-its-circumstances. The list of quoted in the cultural environment would be endless. I randomly choose one somber topic from several: the Insanity (which, for many, insole hand in hand with Genius ... Nor will I enter here into fields as explicit as those of names like John Nash or Bobby Fischer).

Antonin Artaud would have been the one without the said
´madness´? In fact, the same ´lunacy´ that he questioned and subverted. And Vincent van Gogh? And Richard Dadd, Maurice Utrillo, Alfred Jarry, Arthur Bispo do Rosário

>> to whom Melgaço already dedicated a Tombeau

melgacootacilio.bandcamp.com/album/r-o-s-r-i-o-tombeau-d-arthur-bispo-otac-lio-melga-o-duration-01-02-12 <<

or ... Yayoi Kusama?

Exactly on this ´ghostly face/phase´, Otacílio throws his sonorous tentacles. A fantastic example is the parallel that the Brazilian composer and multi-instrumentalist performs amid the polka dots (which are the ´trademark´ of the Nipponese lady) and the pointillistic initial Koto notes of the ´Spectral <<Movement I>>´.

A spectrum is a condition that is not limited to a specific set of values but can vary, without steps, across a continuum. The word was first used scientifically in optics to describe the rainbow of colors in visible light after passing through a prism (a band of colors, as seen in a rainbow, produced by separation of the components of light by their different degrees of refraction according to wavelength). As scientific understanding of light advanced, it came to apply to the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Spectrum has since been applied by analogy to topics outside of optics. Thus, one might talk about the ´spectrum of political opinion´, or the ´spectrum of activity´ of a drug, or the ´autism spectrum´. In these uses, values within a spectrum may not be associated with precisely quantifiable numbers or definitions. Such uses imply a broad range of conditions or behaviors grouped together and studied under a single title for ease of discussion. Nonscientific uses of the term spectrum are sometimes misleading. For instance, a single left–right spectrum of political opinion does not capture the full range of people's political beliefs. Political scientists use a variety of biaxial and multiaxial systems to more accurately characterize political opinion. In most modern usages of spectrum there is a unifying theme between the extremes at either end.

In Latin spectrum means ´image´ or ´apparition´, including the meaning ´spectre´. Spectral evidence is testimony about what,

in the popular phantasy,

was done by ´spectres of persons not present physically´, or hearsay evidence about what

(I repeat) in the ordinary imaginary,

´ghosts´ or, apparitions of ´Satan´ (in other words, by superstition or religious mythology: some personification of Evil) said. It was used to convict a number of persons of witchcraft at Salem, Massachusetts in the late 17th century. The word ´spectrum´ [Spektrum] was strictly used to designate a ghostly optical afterimage by Goethe in his Theory of Colors and Schopenhauer in On Vision and Colors.

Spectrum, spectre, spectral. In short, Otacílio Melgaço brings to light this whole multidimensional range and again mixes contemporaneity and extraordinary timeless focuses that encompass innumerable sources (artistic, physical, metaphysical, metaphorical and so on).

´Night is brushed aside like so much cobweb. The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral (...) residues ...´ (Gregory Maguire, After Alice)

Such Melgacian ´phantasmal residues´, (from Carroll´s or Blake's point of view) Auguries of after Innocence? To see a World in a Grain of Sand. And a Heaven in a Wild Flower. Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand. And Eternity in ... forty-four minutes and fifty-three seconds." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

"It seems providential to start with a retrospect(ral).

Spectral music (or spectralism) is a compositional technique developed in the 1970s, using computer analysis of the quality of timbre in acoustic music or artificial timbres derived from synthesis. Defined in technical language, spectral music is an acoustic musical practice where compositional decisions are often informed by sonographic representations and mathematical analysis of sound spectra, or by mathematically generated spectra. The spectral approach focuses on manipulating the spectral features, interconnecting them, and transforming them. In this formulation, computer-based sound analysis and representations of audio signals are treated as being analogous to a timbral representation of sound.

The (acoustic-composition) spectral approach originated in France in the early 1970s, and techniques were developed, and later refined, primarily at IRCAM, Paris, with the Ensemble l'Itinéraire, by composers such as Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail. Murail has described spectral music as an aesthetic rather than a style, not so much a set of techniques as an attitude; as Joshua Fineberg puts it, a recognition that ´music is ultimately sound evolving in time´. Julian Anderson indicates that a number of major composers associated with spectralism consider the term inappropriate, misleading, and reductive. The Istanbul Spectral Music Conference of 2003 suggested a redefinition of the term ´spectral music´ to encompass any music that foregrounds timbre as an important element of structure or language.

Proto-spectral composers include Claude Debussy, Edgard Varèse, Giacinto Scelsi, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Theoretical predecessors include some of the composers mentioned and Harry Partch, Henry Cowell, and Paul Hindemith. Romanian folk music, as collected by Béla Bartók (1904–1918), with its acoustic scales derived directly from resonance and natural wind instruments like ´buciume´, ´tulnice´, and ´cimpoi´ inspired several spectral composers: Vieru, Stroe, Niculescu, Dumitrescu and Nemescu.

Spectral music represented an alternative to the prestige of the serialists and post-serialists as the vanguard of serious musical composition and compositional technique. Julian Anderson considers Danish composer Per Nørgård's Voyage into the Golden Screen for chamber orchestra (1968) to be the first ´properly instrumental piece of spectral composition´. A further development is the emergence of hyper-spectralism in the works of Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram.

The ´panoply of methods and techniques´ used are secondary, being only ´the means of achieving a sonic end´. Formal concepts important in spectral music include process, though ´significantly different from those of minimalist music´ in that all musical parameters may be affected. These processes most often achieve a smooth transition through interpolation. The Romanian spectral tradition focuses more on the study of how sound itself behaves in a ´live´ environment. Sound work is not restricted to harmonic spectra but includes transitory aspects of timbre and non-harmonic musical components (e.g., rhythm, tempo, dynamics). Furthermore, sound is treated phenomenologically as a dynamic presence to be encountered in listening (rather than as an object of scientific study). This approach results in a transformational musical language in which continuous change of the material displaces the central role accorded to structure in spectralism of the ´French school´.

Following the logic of some previous approaches, O.M., in a deliberately more officialized way, had flirted with

Dronology

melgacootacilio.bandcamp.com/album/dronology-otac-lio-melga-o-duration-01-10-31

Dark Ambient

melgacootacilio.bandcamp.com/album/dark-ambient-otac-lio-melga-o-duration-51-45

(...)

and now,

Spectral.

[More specifically, there are interesting instances in Movements II and III. As is customary, Otacílio is not a hostage of very rigid formulas and he tends to intervene melgacianly - which is natural to someone with an iconoclastic spirit and who moves with ease through genres/styles/formats, when he so desires. The cosmopolitanism of this terrific record is a perfect proof of expansivist fluidity. Its title can also be translated as incorporeal, bodiless, immaterial, intangible, spiritual. Something that is not reclusive in a form but traverses it.]

The Austrian writer and journalist, known as a satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright plus poet Karl Kraus in ´Quotes about Science and Scientists´ wrote: ´Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.´ In a lighted analysis of spectral synthesis, I affirm, Ladies and Gentlemen, that the present work of O.M. is, audibly, a spectral and analytical synthesis of Light.

En-light-enment.

I l l u m i n a t i o n." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

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I - Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生 or 弥生 / 1929) is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, soft sculpture, performance art, and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition, and pattern. A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced her contemporaries such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and George Segal and exhibited works alongside the likes of them.

In 1957, she moved to the United States, settling down in New York City where she produced a series of paintings influenced by the abstract expressionist movement. Switching to sculpture and installation as her primary media, Kusama became a fixture of the New York avant-garde during the early 1960s where she became associated with the pop art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, Kusama came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which naked participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots. Although largely forgotten after departing the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, and an important voice of the avant-garde.

Kusama's work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. Kusama is also a published novelist and poet, and has created notable work in film and fashion design. Major retrospectives of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998, the Whitney Museum in 2012, the Tate Modern in 2012, and the Hirshhorn Museum in 2017. In 2006, she received a Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2008, Christie's New York sold a work by her for $5.1 million, then a record for a living female artist. In 2015 Artsy named her one of the Top 10 Living Artists of 2015;

II - Francisco Alexandre Stockinger (1919 – 2009), also known as Xico Stockinger, was an Austrian artist and naturalized Brazilian. Stockinger is known as one of the main Brazilian modern sculptors, but was also an active printmaker, photographer, cartoonist, and graphic artist. Stockinger arrived in Brazil in 1921 and became a resident of São Paulo in 1929. Stockinger was chairman of the Francisco Lisboa Rio Grande do Sul Association for the Visual Arts (Associação Rio-Grandense de Artes Plásticas Francisco Lisboa) from 1957 to 1978;

III - Son of journalist Wladimir Bernardes, from a young age, Sérgio Bernardes (1919 - 2002) was a pilot of single-engineers, and was racing in the streets of Rio de Janeiro.

He studied architecture by the National Faculty of Architecture of the University of Brazil, now Federal University of RJ. One year before his graduation, one of his projects, the Country Club of Petrópolis, was published in the French magazine L'architecture d'aujourd'hui, an edition dedicated to the new Brazilian architecture.

Graduated in 1948, he worked with Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer early in his career, authoring representative works such as the Brazilian pavilion project at the 1958 World's Fair in Belgium; of the São Cristóvão Pavilion; of the Ulysses Guimarães Convention Center, in Brasilia; of the mast of the national flag of Brasilia; and Hotel Tropical Tambaú in João Pessoa. He also conceived a large number of projects commissioned by public agencies, nevertheless stood out for its residential projects. His designs include the homes of many celebrities, including plastic surgeon Ivo Pitanguy.

Throughout his career Sérgio Bernardes won several biennials, among them the Venice Biennale in 1964, whose prize money he exchanged for a Ferrari, which he took on his trips abroad and he rode at race tracks. The building where his former office was located was on Sernambetiba Avenue, in Barra da Tijuca, in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Sérgio Bernardes was a visionary - even an inventor (from functional objects to planes). He reflected Brazil in a conjunctural way how rare men did it;

IV - João Carlos da Silva (1958) or "João das Alagoas", was born in the Alagoan municipality of Capela, an area of ​​the Alagoas (State) forest. Autodidact, he is a master of ceramics responsible for re-creating the bumba-meu-boi ox, a play so common in popular Brazilian figurative art. With his hands, João brings forth from the clay great oxen with their mantles carved in low and high relief, representing stories of the northeastern folklore, the street plays, the marriages, the baptized, in short, the stories of the people and their traditions.

From a young age, he already excelled in school through his drawings. Used clay as a joke to make small oxen. João tells us that he learned from experience and observation, and that his inspiration comes from other great Brazilian artists, such as Master Vitalino, his main reference.

The notoriety began in 1987, when he made an exhibition of paintings in the city of Campinas, São Paulo. It was in this exhibition that he began to adopt the name today consecrated. Before, he signed his works with the name of "João Maravilha", a nickname won at football matches with friends. But advising the curator of this exhibition in Campinas, who thought that the "Maravilha" ("Marvel") did not suit him very much, gave the idea of ​​the name "João das Alagoas", a nom de plume he carries and with which he became known throughout the country.

He has an impressive curriculum: won several awards for best craftsmanship in some states; an honorable mention in Cordoba, Argentina and many of his works integrate important collections of popular art that are exhibited in galleries of Recife, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre and Rio de Janeiro. João has pieces also exhibited abroad, such as the Ceramic Museum of Mexico.

The artist maintains in his hometown, Capela-AL, an atelier, where, in addition to producing his pieces, he gives classes voluntarily to those interested in learning the art of ceramics.

On August 04, 2011 Mestre ("Master") João das Alagoas was declared a Living Cultural Heritage of Alagoas;

V - The term "spectral music" was coined by Hugues Dufourt in an article written in 1979 and first published two years later. Dufourt, a trained philosopher and composer, was the author of several important articles on spectral music.

The term was initially associated with composers of the French Ensemble l'Itinéraire, including Dufourt, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, and Michael Levinas, and the German Feedback group, principally Johannes Fritsch, Mesias Maiguashca, Peter Eötvös, Claude Vivier, and Clarence Barlow. Features of spectralism are also seen independently in the contemporary work of Romanian composers Ştefan Niculescu, Horațiu Rădulescu, and Iancu Dumitrescu.

More recent composers who have built on the spectral idea include Julian Anderson, Ana-Maria Avram, Joshua Fineberg, Georg Friedrich Haas, Jonathan Harvey, Fabien Lévy, Magnus Lindberg, and Kaija Saariaho. Jazz saxophonist and composer Steve Lehman has introduced spectral techniques into the domain of jazz;

VI - Characteristic spectral pieces include Gérard Grisey's Partiels, Tristan Murail's Gondwana and Georg Friedrich Haas's In Vain. John Chowning's Stria (1977) and Jonathan Harvey's Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco (1980) are examples of electronic music that embraces spectral techniques.

...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.