Notes for: July 21, 2009
Heitor Villa-Lobos’s career as Brazil’s leading composer is a remarkable story, starting from his humble beginnings in the streets of Rio de Janeiro and reaching international stature in concert halls throughout the world.
The only formal musical training he had as a boy was with his father, a senior officer in the Brazilian National Library who was also an accomplished amateur cellist. When he was 12, his father died, and his mother dedicated herself to financing young Heitor’s continuing education with the hope of his becoming a doctor. Instead, he chose the bohemian life of a street musician in Rio, playing the guitar in one of the city’s popular chôro bands. This experience opened the door to Brazil’s wealth of popular music, with its unique combination of African, Portuguese, and native elements, and provided him the opportunity to learn the subtle art of improvising guitar accompaniments.
At the age of 16, Villa-Lobos was hired as a cellist in a theater orchestra, but Brazilian folk music remained his primary interest. Two years later, selling part of his father’s library to finance the costs, he made the first of many trips into the Brazilian interior to collect the various types of Brazilian folk music and to broaden his understanding of its characteristics. He also enrolled for further training at the National Music Institute, but soon quit, unable to accept the discipline of formal instruction and preferring to study folk materials on his own.
In his late teens, he began composing serious music, blending Brazilian folk idioms with more traditional musical forms. His initial works included a piano trio, songs, sacred music, and pieces for the guitar, piano and chamber orchestra. From these humble beginnings grew a steady stream of music – more than 2,000 works over his lifetime, diverse in form and in worth, but nearly all inspired by a passionate devotion to his native land.
Villa-Lobos was also a bit of an eccentric, inventing, for example, a method of extracting a melody from a picture by tracing the latter’s outline on graph paper and then plotting the melody a half-step to a vertical unit and an eighth note to a horizontal unit. Again, at a dinner party given by the Brazilian Deputy Consul in New York City, he was so inspired by a serving of feojada, Brazil’s national dish, that he wrote, on the spot, a fugue celebrating the delicacy with its four parts designated “farina,” “meat,” “rice” and “black beans.”
Jet Whistle is another example of the pixyish side of Villa-Lobos’s personality. Composed in 1950, the duet is a tongue-in-cheek effort to provide three different views of triple time. In fact, the composer joked, the piece might well have been called “The Waltzing Jet Whistles: Pas de Deux for Flute and Cello.”
The first movement is in conventional waltz rhythm. At first, the flute merely supplies the upbeats for the cello’s tune. It then takes over with plenty of skittering up and down.
A songful Adagio follows – so chromatic (i.e., using half-steps) that the C major tonality is barely implied. But there is no ambiguity in the finale, a racing Vivo, which gives the piece its title. While the cellist punches out an accompaniment, the flutist must hit the ceiling again and again with vehement scales, roulades, trills and screeches. On the final page, the flutist is instructed “to blow into the embouchure fff as if one were warming up the instrument on a cold day.”
Notes for: July 31, 2018
The New Grove Dictionary calls Heitor Villa-Lobos “the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music,” citing his “achievement in creating unique compositional styles in which contemporary European techniques and reinterpreted elements of national music are combined.” That’s a very dry way to describe a very colorful composer, whose unique voice had a profound musical impact on his country and won him international fame.
From his earliest years Villa-Lobos rebelled against expectations. His father, an amateur musician, taught him the cello and the clarinet, but Heiter liked the guitar, which he taught himself. His mother expected him to be a doctor, but Heiter was captivated by Brazilian popular music and preferred the life of Rio’s street musicians. As a teenager he left school and began a decade of traveling throughout Brazil, collecting folk and traditional music while at the same time teaching himself composition. The ethnic music he discovered and adapted, combined with his own experiments in rhythm and harmony, contributed to the creation of his distinctive musical voice. Brazilian critics savaged his early works, with their daring balance of vernacular music and Modernist techniques. But he had supporters, including the pianist Artur Rubinstein, who began playing his music abroad. By the time he went to Paris in 1923, he already had begun to develop a following. And by the time he moved back to Brazil in 1930 – having met and been influenced by Debussy, Stravinsky, and Varèse – he was an international star, as well as a national hero for his championing of Brazilian folk and popular music.
Villa-Lobos’s output was enormous. His range was equally impressive: He could apply Bachian contrapuntal techniques to Brazilian themes (the nine pieces of Bachianas brasileiras), or base a masterful set of fourteen technically complex pieces on the chôros, a rhythmic, improvisational, uniquely Brazilian musical form. Or he could surprise with the unexpected, as he does in The Jet Whistle,” with its exotic pairing of two instruments of contrasting range, timbre, and texture. From the opening notes of the Allegro, Villa-Lobos has fun with the instrumental contrasts, as the flute chirps over the cello’s long, low lines. When the two reverse roles, the flute becomes flamboyant while the cello accompaniment lumbers. Twice they move in opposite directions, the flute to the top and the cello to the bottom of their ranges. The mood changes in the second-movement Adagio, where the flute’s cool melody intertwines with the cello’s at times dissonant counterpoint. In a boisterous finale, the cello eggs on the flute, which charges higher and higher in a series of pyrotechnic runs until the flutist blasts air into the mouthpiece – a screech that reminded Villa-Lobos of a jet engine on takeoff. Hence the title.