Tabulae scriptae: metalanguage and the paths of Henri Pousseur and Willy Corrêa de Oliveira

Author(s)

Maurício Funcia de Bonis

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA/SBD)
• Defense date: 2012-04-27

Examining board members

Flávia Camargo Toni; Silvio Ferraz Mello Filho; Florivaldo Menezes Filho; Cecilia Almeida Salles

• Advisor: Flávia Camargo Toni

Abstract

Among the debates (that were as useful and plentiful as they were belligerent) about the paths of musical composition in the middle of the 20th century, the question of which kind of relation was to be established with the past (with the history of music) was a favoured one. Since then its growing pertinence, alongside the atrophy of common practice (and of a thoroughly shared musical language) in contemporary music, makes this discussion surmount its original context (within avantgarde music of the 1950s and 60s) and become a fundamental problem for the creation of music in our time. In the large-scale confrontation of these questions, the paths of two composers stand out, in their musical thought inasmuch as in their compositions: Henri Pousseur (1929-2009) and Willy Corrêa de Oliveira (born in 1938). The premise of this discussion, the denial of the tabula rasa of the art of the past (represented here by the image of the \"table\" whose writings haven\'t been erased, \"tabulae scriptae\"), is faced with the contextualization of the debates on music as language in the middle of the 20th century (and around the contemporary music medium). This context is expanded pointing out to semiotics and to the relations of musical language and capitalist means of production. Henri Pousseur and Willy Oliveira come to the similar conclusions, approaching the critical situation of contemporary music in hodiernal society as a result of a generalized crisis on human relations. This leads to a consideration of the present state of musical practice as a metalanguage: in the absence of a common universal language, the composer\'s work turns to the reflexion on language itself and on the nature of the creative process. The musical works of Willy Corrêa and Henri Pousseur (independently, and in different ways) show a reflex of this thought in the frequent use of various kinds of metalinguistic procedures in composition, in their recuperation of materials and procedures of the past (in new treatments). In separate chapters, we propose a panoramic view of each of their musical paths, approaching their use of metalinguistics in their works in general, and also analyzing some of their compositions in detail. Before discussing the common points and the striking differences between their paths, one more chapter includes a testimony of an adherence to these principles, with analysis of musical compositions of my own. (AU)