In the quest of compositional matrices for music themes concerning landscape: Exploring senses as a means for creative processes. Villa-Lobos and his existential signs

Abstract

This essay comprises the dialog between visual art and music. Since 2015, Elisa Bracher and Rodrigo Felicissimo have established new frontier in the discussion and production of a creative process known as the compositional technique “Melody of the Mountain”, originally developed by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959). The aim of the artwork project is to bring out the experience acquired from this creative technique study over a series of art expeditions settled on the Artic mountains, Andes mountains the South American highlands of Condoriri in Bolivia, Cuzco in Peru and along the mountain range of Serra dos Orgaos, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In these expeditions Elisa Bracher has taken a range of landmark photographs with a pinhole camera. Back in her studio, she developed an array of artwork such as paintings, drawings, and sculpture. Subsequently, Rodrigo Felicissimo registered these images in order to develop them, through Villa-Lobos compositional technique, in a set of graphics relating to the melodic themes. The obtained melodies finally were harmonized and composed for chamber music ensembles. This ongoing research has taken ground into the field of music signification studies, based on the subject statement assign on Eero Tarasti’s “Metaphors of nature and organicism, (2015). The work in progress has so far produced a first series of paintings, photographs, poems, music composition in a suite form and a set of songs, one of them, Vuoristoilmaa (“mountain air”) with the participation of the Finnish soprano Laura Pyrro, that translated it into Finnish and sang the composition, during Rodrigo’s presentation session in the Symposium Sources of Creativity: from Local to Universal, in Mikkeli, Finland, 2018. This essay present discussions, achievements and contributions obtained to this point and introduces new argument on the development of this technique focused on the mountains of Riverside County, California State mountains and the Grand Canyon National Park, under the guidance of Professor Paulo C. Chagas at the University of California - Riverside.