T h e T r u m p e t s O f J e r i c h o

(L i t u r g i c a l P i e c e
F o r W i n d I n s t r u m e n t s)

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration ​26​:​37] 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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"Flute, Piccolo, Oboe, English horn, Clarinet, Bass clarinet, Bassoon, Contrabassoon, Saxophones, Trumpet, French horn, Trombone and Tuba. Otacílio Melgaço creates an Epic having as source exclusively blowing apparatus. From both families: Woodwind and Brass. It can be heard as an instrumental narrative as well as an abstract masterpiece. In one way or another (or another): in its twenty-six minutes and thirty-seven seconds, it´s a monumental work. No wall (whether real or metaphorical) would really deserve to remain erect before such (in the most iconoclastic sense) ´demolishing´ (and in the most fascinating) sonic expression.

I call the attention of the Ladies and Gentlemen to how O.M. offers us a true ´bacchanal of timbres´. Yes, I mean: an exuberantly orgiastic perspective! Melgaço as a kind of Bacchus. Dionysus is the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness, fertility, theatre and religious ecstasy in ancient Greek religion and myth.
He´s also known as Bacchus, the name adopted by the Romans and the frenzy he induces is bakkheia. As Eleutherios
(´the liberator´), his wine, music and ecstatic dance free his followers from self-conscious fear and care, and subvert the oppressive restraints of the powerful. The cult of Dionysus is also a ´cult of the souls´; his maenads feed the dead through blood-offerings, and he acts as a divine communicant between the living and the dead. Reading the above description, does not it sound like a composition as ´The Trumpets Of Jericho´?

The mastery with which Otacílio immerses himself (and all of us, listeners) in the richness of the coloraturas becomes extraordinary when this is added to the resourcefulness of the musical dynamics that makes some of these wind instruments look like human voices; there are passages in which we come across a penetrating Chorale! It´s at the same time astonishing and flamboyant! If the theme is biblical (and so once again is dionysically proved the polysemy/plurality of the Melgacian creations) I could not omit this other approach: how the sound as a ´thing-in-itself´ is able to excite the senses, perceptions and visceralities. To those who are aware of this, in a revolutionary way, I would say.

In sums of microcosms abundant in concepts, epistemologies and exegeses, we can not give up a more primordial coexistence with, for example, the music. Before that, with the sonic universe. The impression I have is: this has been vilified by a pasteurized modus vivendi superficialistic. A lot of information and little formation. I'm talking about how we - listeners - have to do our part. I´m referring to such a sonic universe while still not organized by the hands of a musician and how we should prepare ourselves more to apprehend it. A more detailed rescue of the silences and noises and natural sounds that surround us, and which inhabit us. Because, when this vastness manifests itself to us through a composition, it will demand even more from us. And it seems that we live in a deafening reality. As if unfortunately triumphing the manicheistic conception that differentiates ´body´ and ´mind´ (to the point of creating maimed stereotypes). I´m saying that we (we who feel, we who think) are the same organic synergistic complex, not segregated or hierarchical. Subjected to a prefabricated rationalism (nowadays insignificantly questioner but hauntingly hard-headed), as we turn more cerebral (or, depending on, lobotomized), I think we are becoming ´unembodied´ (without remnants of physicality). Our abilities to exert senses/feelings, to sharpen them, begin to atrophy. Everything becomes automated (merely collateral), including how to absorb the Audible. I think this compromises some capabilities. Even several that also depend on our pure intellectuality (and spirituality, for some). Capabilities which claim the artistry and the more sensitive scanning of the body itself as our essential space of perceptions. For instance: h-e-a-r (in all its reach), l-i-s-t-e-n (in all its scrutiny). We can no longer cripple this conjunction. Capabilities that need our concrete/embodied vitality as to crumble paradigms; undo castrations; expel us from artificial paradises; ... to make us see endowed with detachment and criticism the infernal machines that politically, economically, religiously - depending on how - can represent the mutilation of Being or what Antonin Artaud, about Vincent Van Gogh, called ´The Man Suicided by Society´.

It´s enough to fractionate the person; with postmodernity, everything has already been too fragmented, shattered. It does not even seem possible to put together all the pieces; the pieces can no longer be assembled as a puzzle. Maintaining the metaphor, now it´s time to invent new images. This is what Otacílio Melgaço does (resonantly) through his creations.

Therefore that's what I'm talking about: How the sound as a ´thing-in-itself´ is able to excite the senses, perceptions and visceralities and such pristine potency, so well-instrumentalized - in ample iconoclasm and fascination - by O.M., indeed leaves no stone unturned." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"Mr. Melgaço is not a religious man. As we have said heretofore, not in the sense of belonging to or following a doctrine or institution of such nature. This does not prevent that his art can oftentimes reveal to us a deep ´religiosity´. Or ´spirituality´, if you thereby prefer. Because in this way he has more freedom to move through his ´private mysteries´, without dogmas or commandments. Because thus he has more independence to visit references considered ´sacred´ but from his own artistic prism. Consequently, when O.M. uses the term ´liturgical´ it´s not in traditional form nor under the orthodox frames of some compositional primer. ´Ritualistic´ is an interesting and more elastic synonym, certainly. Plus: in counterpoint, ´humanistic´ ever.

´It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.´ (Hannah Arendt)

The story of Jericho is told in Joshua 6:1-27.

The first five books of the Hebrew Bible tell how Noah cursed Canaan to become a slave, and how God gave the land of the Canaanites to Abraham and his descendants. The children of Israel (descendants of Abraham) themselves became slaves in Egypt, but through Moses God brought them out of Egypt and to the borders of the promised land of Canaan. There Moses instructed them to seize the land by conquest, and placed them under the command of Joshua.

Joshua sent spies to Jericho, the first city of Canaan to be taken, and discovered that the land was in fear of Israel and their God. The Israelites marched around the walls once every day for seven days with the priests and the Ark of the Covenant. On the seventh day they marched seven times around the walls, then the priests blew their ram's horns, the Israelites raised a great shout, and the walls of the city fell.

Realize that there´s a double perspective here (if we take into account a current and exempt view): we may be speaking of a people who are leaving servitude behind ... even as ... (if we think of what was done of the inhabitants from that city; the Israelites did not slaves or plunder but massacred every man, woman and child in Jericho, sparing only Rahab, Canaanite prostitute who had sheltered the spies, and her family) ... even as ... may have been a folk who (either through a historical fact of the past or an allegory), from the faith (blind faith?) in the law of their god, felt absolutely authorized to slaughter others human beings. Two sides of the same coin. But today, this relationship among Divinity and Battle, among Belief and Carnage, seems really an absurdity without proportion. Be like individuals medievally being tortured and burned alive; or by the practice of terrorism; or as one nation trying to annihilate another in the name of its deity (and, inter alia, there are subtle manners of doing it ... since many deify economic power and imposition of a way of life and cultural imperialism or racial supremacy) and so on.

I believe that Otacílio Melgaço brings to us two mentions too. One, the sonorous. The vigor, strength, stamina, energy of music to break down barriers. A beautiful, a perfect figure of speech to be evoked by an artist of his carat. And, extrapolating, there are these symbolic connotations - mentioned above - that sound quite appropriate to the world in which we are living here and now. Any doubts about that?

A p p e n d i x

A stimulant observation: This work already existed before the election of the present US president. But now, shortly after the inauguration, it has been posted here. Is it a coincidence that the first five letters of the word ´Trumpets´ are ...?
Faced 1) with the current resumption of the construction of walls separating nations and human beings (if we take as an example the actual vertical barricade parting United States of America and Mexico - which seems to be expanded from now on -, we can not forget that there´s already another blockade of the same nature sorting out Mexico and Guatemala, videlicet, again the two sides of the same coin);
2) with xenophobic and extremely nationalist/isolationist tendencies before each of us;
3) with a recrudescence of policies easily susceptible to bellicose actions;
... (besides the direct and clear message that´s embedded in a prole like ´The Trumpets Of Jericho´) such subtleties are very eloquent." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

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I - In 1868, Charles Warren identified Tell es-Sultan as the site of Jericho. In 1930–36, John Garstang conducted excavations there and discovered the remains of a network of collapsed walls which he dated to about 1400 BCE, the accepted biblical date of the conquest. Kathleen Kenyon re-excavated the site over 1952–1958 and demonstrated that the destruction occurred c.1500 BCE during a well-attested Egyptian campaign of that period, and that Jericho had been deserted throughout the mid-late 13th century. Kenyon's work was corroborated in 1995 by radiocarbon tests which dated the destruction level to the late 17th or 16th centuries. A small unwalled settlement was rebuilt in the 15th century, but the tell was unoccupied from the late 15th century until the 10th/9th centuries;

II - Most scholars agree that the book of Joshua holds little of historical value. The book's origin is usually dated to a time far removed from the times it depicts, and its intention linked with a theological scheme in which Israel and her leaders are judged by their obedience to the teachings and laws (the covenant) set down in the book of Deuteronomy, rather than as history in the modern sense. The story of Jericho, and the conquest generally, probably represents the nationalist propaganda of the kings of Judah and their claims to the territory of the Kingdom of Israel after 722 BCE; these chapters were later incorporated into an early form of Joshua written late in the reign of king Josiah (reigned 640–609 BCE), and the book was revised and completed after the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586, and possibly after the return from the Babylonian exile in 538. The combination of archaeological evidence and analysis of the composition history and theological purposes of the Book of Joshua led archaeologist William G. Dever to deem the biblical story of the fall of Jericho as "[not] founded on genuine historical sources" and "invented out of whole cloth."

...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.