Music: Precocious Momus

Most composers spend the early part of their lives in conservatories of music, where they learn to write potted fugues and hothouse symphonies. But no conservatory ever held Brazil’s bouncing, fiery Heitor Villa-Lobos. When he was six years old his lawyer father, an amateur musician, taught him how to play a lick or two on the cello. He taught himself how to play the piano. By the time he was 19 he was roving from one Brazilian settlement to another, playing in half-caste cabarets and straw-thatched cinema palaces. And he listened long and often to the junglysongs of Brazil’s Indians, the hot, oozing rhythms of Brazil’s primitive Negroes. With these in his inner ear, he started to write music—unorthodox, a new musical dialect made from aboriginal shouts and strummings. The salons of Rio de Janeiro made faces at it, thought it barbaric. But the peões in the thatched huts ate it up.

When bluntspoken, disheveled Carioca* Villa-Lobos went to Paris in 1923, he did not go to get polished. “I didn’t come here to study,” blurted he. “I came to show you what I have done.” When he had finished showing them his blunt, smoldering music (much of it written for Brazilian tom-toms and gourd rattles), the Parisians decided he was a sort of musical William Saroyan. His Paris apartment became a rendezvous for admiring Left-Bankers. Villa-Lobos, who couldn’t afford to keep open house, threw them out, told them not to come back unless they brought their own food. Even on those terms, they came back. When Heitor Villa-Lobos returned to his native Brazil a few years later, he found that his European reputation had preceded him. He was Brazil’s No. 1 composer.

Last week in Baltimore Brazilian Pianist Guiomar Novaěs and Conductor Hans Kindler’s National Symphony gave one of Villa-Lobos’ biggest works its first U. S. hearing. Called Momo Precoce (The Young Momus) after the ancient Greek god of ridicule, the composition depicted the sights & sounds of Brazil’s annual, three-day-long “Children’s Carnival.” After listening to its naïve, childlike jingle themes, half-focused in a turbulent hubbub of flashy orchestration, Baltimoreans rated it one of the most bumptiously original pieces they had heard in a long time.

Meanwhile Villa-Lobos was in Brazil, hard at work writing more music, organizing and conducting outdoor song festivals for school children, revamping the teaching methods of Brazil’s Department of Musical Education, of which he is superintendent. Since 1931, when he was named to this post, Villa-Lobos has concentrated his energies on spreading music in Brazil. At Sao Paulo, in 1931, he staged the biggest musical event Brazil had ever known by conducting a chorus of 10,000 voices and an orchestra of 400 through a gigantic marathon of native music. Following year, he repeated the performance in Rio’s Fluminense Stadium with 18,000 school children. When the National Education Congress met at Rio in 1935 he had a chorus of 30,000 and an orchestra of 1,000.

Conductor Villa-Lobos usually conducts these demonstrations with a cigar in his mouth. Says he: “Art? I don’t care a hoot for art. Art today is entertainment, football. I am not concerned with creating artists. There is no longer such a thing as art. I am only seeking to educate the youth of the country. I am creating audiences, yes, customers, for the Brazilian artists of the future. I am giving the people of Brazil musical appreciation.”

* Colloquial name for a native of Rio de Janeiro.