Abstract
This report contemplates an instrumental composition as a project for audiovisual production in social isolation, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on the problematization of the impact of the pandemic in music making, solutions were sought that were not only viable as an artistic result but that could also be projected in a purposeful and prospective way in times of humanitarian crisis, of dismal symmetry between capitalist neoliberalism and programmed neglect in public health policies. After a description of the research on the use of art in past pandemics as a guiding principle in the choice of materials, the audiovisual production is detailed. The piece was written in April 2020 as a result of the analysis of a Renaissance motet, which, in turn, was conceived as a tribute to a composer who had perished from the plague and as a palliative against the disease.
Highlights
This report contemplates an instrumental composition as a project for audiovisual production in social isolation, during the Covid-19 pandemic
The audio and video recordings made by the group were edited for audiovisual production and dissemination via the internet by Fábio Scucuglia1
The obstinacy in building a testimony on the barbarism that plagues us that went beyond musical discourse led, as a f irst stage, to research on musical responses to times of plague in the history of Western culture. This survey allowed the conformation of the base materials of Teledescante no1, which, together with the suggestions present in the title and in the program notes – and in a brief quotation at the end of the piece – created a potential listening field, charged with associated meanings by the structural relations between discourses with markedly different origins and qualities2
Summary
The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic amidst the advance of poverty, of neoliberal policies and of neofascist rhetoric in Brazil (little was known, in April 2020, of the devastating reach of programmed negligence in public policies to prevent viral contagion) conducted initial research more directly towards the bubonic plague than to more recent occurrences like the so-called “Spanish flu”. Obrecht’s 3-part Parce domine has its final cadence over A, but the bassus in Obrecht’s piece (Fig., which would serve as the cantus firmus for Verdelot’s motet) emphasizes very prominently the note E in the first and last verses, before coming to a rest on A Verdelot ingeniously plans his motet in two parts, using Obrecht’s melody in its original version in the first part, ending this section on A (momentarily suggesting mode 9), and in the second part, he transposes the cantus firmus a fifth higher (strictly keeping the same durations), starting on B and ending on E – and asserting mode 4 for the motet as a whole. The destroying hands, from the 14th to the 21st century, are certainly not restricted to biblical angels, to viral envelopes or to bacterial scourges
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