Fernando de Oliveira. Gilberto Mendes\'s music theater and his compositional processes.

Author(s)

Fernando de Oliveira Magre

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA/SBD)
• Defense date: 2017-09-18

Examining board members

Silvia Maria Pires Cabrera Berg; Denise Hortência Lopes Garcia; Antonio Eduardo Santos

• Advisor: Silvia Maria Pires Cabrera Berg

Abstract

This current research aims at investigating the fundamental characteristics of Gilberto Mendes\'s music theater. This work is divided into three parts. In the first chapter, we present a broad bibliographical review about the development of music theater genre, seeking its root from Wagner\'s idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, going from the experiences of the first decades of the twentieth century to its actual establishment as a practice, in the 60s. We also seek to promote a dialogue between Gilberto Mendes\'s works and contemporary researches on music theater, especially Salzman & Dési (2008) and Roesner & Rebstock (2012), in order to insert the composer into the international discussion about the genre. In the second chapter, we scrutinize the main constituent features of the composer\'s compositional language of music theater, in order to identify its most recurrent and idiomatic processes. Finally, in the third chapter we analyze four Gilberto Mendes\'s works: Cidade (1964), Son et Lumière (1968), O Último Tango em Vila Parisi (1987) and Escorbuto - Cantos da Costa (2006). In order to develop the analyses, we adapted Nicholas Cook\'s musical multimedia theory (1998), so that we could identify types of relations and solutions operated by Gilberto Mendes in the composition with artistic elements from diverse origins. We consider that this research will contribute with music theater researches done outside major European centers, in addition to increasing the scope of studies about this genre in Brazil and, especially, about Gilberto Mendes\'s production. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 15/07985-8 - Gilberto Mendes's Music Theater: the quest for a compositional language
• Grantee: Fernando de Oliveira Magre
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master