A fiddle forgotten : Jose Eduardo Gramani and the revival of the Brazilian rabeca : postmodernism and performance practice / O violino violado : rabeca, hibridismo e desvio do metodo nas praticas interpretativas contemporaneas : tradição e inovação em Jose Eduardo Gramani

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2008

RESUMO

This study examines changes in ways of performing music that took place in the second half of the 20th century. As an example and reflection of these changes, it takes the opus of José Eduardo Gramani and his research on the Brazilian rabeca and the context of "historically informed performance" (HIP). My point of reference is Adorno s essay Bach Defended against his Admirers (1951), which discusses the role of contemporary performers in relation to music written in the past, particularly Bach s, and the question of authenticity and historicism. This thesis takes the Frankfurt philosopher s argument as a watershed for showing the changes in musical interpretation posed by what is conventionally called post-modernism. Based on the point of view of the musical performer, including my own experience playing Baroque violin and Brazilian rabecas, and my professional relationship with the musician José E. Gramani, I set out to analyze these changes on an axis that fluctuates between subjectivity and objectivity in rendering musical works, one which points to the key role of performers as intermediaries between listener and musical work - poietis represented by the culture of author and text, and esthesis examining the performance of a work as the outcome of collaboration between composer and performers, as posed by the semiotician Jean-Jacques Nattiez (2005). To look at the principles posed by musicians aligned with applied musicology, meaning those playing early music on period instruments, I have used the emblematic figure of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the musician, conductor and researcher who strove to develop a phenomenological approach to playing music in the early 1950s, in which praxis is balanced by theory. The disturbing question - why historical instruments? - raised by Adorno s essay and its critique of purists is also latent in the questioning of renewed interest in popular culture and its agents, in this case Brazilian rabecas. As a response, I analyze the processes leading to the emergence of these instruments and redefine their status within the context of the hegemonic culture of the classical matrix, not as signs of a new wave of national consciousness on the lines of the Romantic spirit s pursuit of purity and origins, but as a renewal of contemporary classical language, as in the literary work of Guimarães Rosa. The study looks at the way in which the crisis of centrality characteristic of post-modernism and the question of hybridism and autonomization of elements of popular culture, represented by the rabeca, were posed musically in the work of José Eduardo Gramani, and how his interest in rabecas also derived from his innovative focus on teaching rhythm while reflecting the changes in musical performance practices that occurred in the late 20th century.

ASSUNTO(S)

rabeca historical musicology musicologia aplicada rabeca performance practice

ACESSO AO ARTIGO

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