Heitor Villa-Lobos had a great curiosity about the street music he would hear on the sidewalks of Rio de Janeiro. That music would often find its way into his own compositions. Likewise, Villa-Lobos loved to venture into the forests and jungles of Brazil, returning with inspiration for new music. He was intrigued by indigenous dance rhythms, which he would express in a musical notation which had evolved over centuries in Europe. This manner of writing music to paper came to the new world with the Jesuits and also through immigration of Western trained composers who found themselves in the new land surrounded by the sounds of a new continent.
Like Carlos Chávez in Mexico, Villa-Lobos invented an imaginary music of the Amazon in the universal language known as vocalese. We find this in the aria of Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5, and later in music he salvaged from the score he wrote for the film “Green Mansions,” retitled “Forest of the Amazon.” The music is a mix of bird calls, orchestral interludes and soprano vocalise.
I can't say how Villa-Lobos transferred what he found in the forests of the Amazon to publication as composed music. Some composers will jot down ideas in a musical shorthand, then expand it once they are near a piano, or at least at a desk with pen and paper near at hand. In the old days of the early 20th century, the likes of Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly would carry bulky recording equipment on their backs so they could make crude audio recordings, which they then turned into sophisticated music.
Laurel Zucker is an accomplished flute player and an avid producer of recorded classical music. She has 40-something recordings on the Cantilena label, revealing that she is not only a virtuosic flutist, but also a composer like Villa-Lobos. Laurel loves the outdoors, and much of that experience she translates into music. Many of her treks are into the forests, jungles and wetlands of Central and South America.
“Well, I traveled to a lot of places in Latin America. I had a very close friend, a surgeon, but her hobby—she really was talented at it—was a photographer, and she always wanted to go into Latin America, and I went with her,” Zucker says.
“We'd stay a couple of weeks in the jungle and eco lodges or whatever. And I just was fascinated. I got so inspired by seeing all these animals of different environments I witnessed there… so I just wrote all this music there. I had a computer… and I just started writing.”
When one walks amongst the ruins of the pre-Columbian cities, many of them reclaimed from the jungles surrounding them, there's a strange sensation of being surrounded by spirits. When I spent a full day at the Mayan site Palenque, I was amazed to look up to see a raptor diving at tremendous speed to snare in mid-air a smaller bird. I felt at one with all that was around me, sensing this same scene must have played out 10 centuries earlier, witnessed by the ancestors of the modern day, Mayans.
“You know, when I was in Brazil, I wrote this piece called ‘The Great Potoo.’ If you've never seen a potoo, it doesn't look like a bird. It looks like a piece of wood. It's kind of prehistoric looking this bird. And so I wrote a piece... the way I felt when I looked at it,” Zucker says. “I remember seeing a lot of prehistoric-looking animals in the jungle.”
PLAYLIST:
Edson A. Da Silva: Espirito da Floresta Amazonica
Cafe Da Silva
The Audiophile Society
Villa-Lobos: Forests of Amazon
Renee Fleming, Alfred Heller, Moscow RSO
Delos 1037
Villa-Lobos: Aria from Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5
Donna Brown, Cellists of Sao Paulo SO
Bis 183032
Laurel Zucker: Peruvian Afternoon in the Jungle
Zucker et al
Cantilena 66050
Laurel Zucker: The Great Potoo
Zucker et al
Cantilena
