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Heitor Villa-Lobos and 'Choros' No. 3: Modernism, Nationalism, and "Musical Anthropophagy"


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1 University of Florida, Gainesville, Fl, United States
     

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In the 1920s, composer Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote a series of fourteen nationalistic pieces called Choros, which was the direct result of his search for an "authentic" Brazilian musical language. In Choros, Villa-Lobos combined elements from the Brazilian urban popular genre choro (from which he drew the title of his series) and Brazilian Amerindian music with European techniques, especially the unbalanced accents, abrupt metrical changes, and dissonances typical of Stravinsky's primitivism. Villa-Lobos presented some of his Choros in Paris, where he lived in two occasions, and due to what Parisians perceived as musically "exotic," some Choros achieved great success in that city. While scholars Lisa M. Peppercorn, Eero Tarasti, and Jorge Coli, suggested that Villa-Lobos took advantage of a Paris thirsty for "exotic" music to elaborate the aesthetic of Choros and other pieces from the 1920s, they did not acknowledge that the Choros series resulted from Villa-Lobos's search for a Brazilian musical language that had started before he went to Paris for the first time in 1923, as his symphonic poems Amazonas and Uirapuru, both from 1917, demonstrate. In addition, the series also reflected the philosophies of an entire class of Brazilian modernist artists who proposed the so-called "anthropophagic art," by which the Brazilian artist should "devour" (assimilate) European techniques and aesthetics to portray national art. This article examines how the Choros series reflects Villa- Lobos's assimilation of local musical elements and European aesthetic ideals in the 1920s, a move that resulted from his personal search for an "authentic" Brazilian musical language and was motivated by the pervading Brazilian artistic ideology of the time.

Keywords

Villa-Lobos, "Musical Anthropophagy", Choros, Paris, 1920s, Hybridity in Music, Musical Nationalism, Musical "Exoticism".
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  • Heitor Villa-Lobos and 'Choros' No. 3: Modernism, Nationalism, and "Musical Anthropophagy"

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Authors

Gabriel Augusto Ferraz
University of Florida, Gainesville, Fl, United States

Abstract


In the 1920s, composer Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote a series of fourteen nationalistic pieces called Choros, which was the direct result of his search for an "authentic" Brazilian musical language. In Choros, Villa-Lobos combined elements from the Brazilian urban popular genre choro (from which he drew the title of his series) and Brazilian Amerindian music with European techniques, especially the unbalanced accents, abrupt metrical changes, and dissonances typical of Stravinsky's primitivism. Villa-Lobos presented some of his Choros in Paris, where he lived in two occasions, and due to what Parisians perceived as musically "exotic," some Choros achieved great success in that city. While scholars Lisa M. Peppercorn, Eero Tarasti, and Jorge Coli, suggested that Villa-Lobos took advantage of a Paris thirsty for "exotic" music to elaborate the aesthetic of Choros and other pieces from the 1920s, they did not acknowledge that the Choros series resulted from Villa-Lobos's search for a Brazilian musical language that had started before he went to Paris for the first time in 1923, as his symphonic poems Amazonas and Uirapuru, both from 1917, demonstrate. In addition, the series also reflected the philosophies of an entire class of Brazilian modernist artists who proposed the so-called "anthropophagic art," by which the Brazilian artist should "devour" (assimilate) European techniques and aesthetics to portray national art. This article examines how the Choros series reflects Villa- Lobos's assimilation of local musical elements and European aesthetic ideals in the 1920s, a move that resulted from his personal search for an "authentic" Brazilian musical language and was motivated by the pervading Brazilian artistic ideology of the time.

Keywords


Villa-Lobos, "Musical Anthropophagy", Choros, Paris, 1920s, Hybridity in Music, Musical Nationalism, Musical "Exoticism".

References