Música Peba N. 2

Música Peba Nº 2 (2011) -- Paulo Rios Filho (1985)
22 de outubro de 2011 -- Concertgebouw, Amsterdã
Nieuw Ensemble -- Arie van Beek (regente)

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Música Peba Nº 2 is a consequence of my impression that the music which is often considered as the "good Brazilian music" is, in true, an impossibility. First, because being good is nothing more than arrogance. And second, because being Brazilian is nothing more than naiveness (when it is not the actual opposite, namely, arrogance again).

The first piece of the Música Peba ("Rubbish Music") series builds a dialogue between Anton Webern (Drei lieder... op. 18, n. 1) and a very commercial popular Brazilian song by Dorgival Dantas called Você não vale nada mais eu gosto de você ("You are not worth at all, but I love you"). Both songs are used/quoted/transformed in different ways to give form to the original composition, and at the end the general issue is: which of these pieces is to be considered as trash-music? Webern's, Dantas's or mine? Trash for whom? In what context?

Música Peba Nº 2 makes use of Grisey's Partiels and Tom Jobim's Águas de Março to throw an similar issue, and it imposes various levels of ironic approaches upon these works of reference, sometimes looking at them merely as cliché sources, sometimes deforming/camouflaging/hiding them in search of a more subjective and non-referentialist expression.

In technical means, the work could be considered as an environment for the controlled cohabitation of fragments from the above-cited pieces of music, in terms of the free use and modification of entire blocks and/or motives and cells and also in terms of two distinct chains of chords which move gradually one above the other during almost the entire work.