Pérolas e Porcarias (2001)
5 musical scenes for actor, percussionist and baritone. Text fragments by Augusto de Campos, Hilda Hilst, Goethe and brazilian newspapers. [ca. 10'00]
Premiered in the XIV Biennial of Brazilian Contemporary Music, Rio de Janeiro, October 23, 2001.
Available for download:
Asked to comment on the musical borrowing aspects of some of my previous compositions, I wrote elsewhere in 2007:
“(…) Later on, in 2001, this same category of nostalgia came back in another quotation of Schumann within the piece “Pérolas e Porcarias”, which is a set of five musical scenes for actor, percussionist and baritone. In a quasi Faust-Mephisto relationship, the baritone and the actor get into musical friction: singing versus spoken word, pitch versus noise, etc. The singer hums to himself a lied by Schumann at a certain passage, without lyrics; as if remembering a tune. Later in the same piece, the actor goes to one side of the stage and puts on an old LP — preferably, as I indicate on the score, the opening of Verdi’s Traviatta. The singer seems to be in an almost surreal trance triggered by the Old, not only the old music, but also the old and warm scratch noises from the vinyl. Pérolas e Porcarias, by the way, was also based on a poem, this time by Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos. The poem is called “Pérolas para cummings” [perls for cummings]:
(…) [In my original there were a few lines here attempting to 'explain' the poem to English readers. Because they are probably more limiting than illuminating, I decided to omit them.] The piece also included fragments of text by other poets, and also random excerpts from Brazilian newspapers. This use of “borrowed text”, and especially the apparent contradiction of sources (“sophisticated” poetry versus irrelevant lines of newspapers classifieds), I see as, in a way, under-developed attempts to musically re-compose borrowed sources of disparate origins.”