What's that? You want to hear a piece of music in which a male choir are pretending to be woodpeckers? Okay.
Pica-Pau (Woodpecker), written in 1925, is the subtitle of the third of Heitor Villa Lobos's set of Chôros that he wrote throughout the 1920s. Chôro seems to be one of those words that doesn't work well in translation out of Brazilian Portuguese - Googling just comes up with a definition of 'weeping' or 'sadness', which doesn't describe the music at all. It's a word that seems to have been used to describe certain groups of Brazilian street musicians, and it looks as though Villa Lobos used the word it to denote his links with the popular music of the time, and also to hammer home his musical nationalism.
Each Chôro is written for completely different groups of instruments, ranging from solo guitar to a massive orchestra with choir. There's also unusual combinations of instruments, like in Pica-Pau which is scored for a male chorus with clarinet, bassoon, alto sax, trombone and three horns.
The melodies for Pica-Pau are adapted from two songs that Villa Lobos heard in a recording of the indigenous Parecis Indians, a tribe that still live in Brazil's Mato Grosso. But the middle section heads off into crazy town, where the choir begin to chant 'Pica-Pau' and imitate the sounds of woodpeckers knocking on tree trunks and other jungle sounds. The final big cheer of 'Brasil!' was apparently only put in because Villa Lobos needed to finish things with '-il' and actually any word with the same final syllable would have been fine. Excellent, that's my kind of artistic integrity. I hope you like this, it's a great little piece.
Pica-Pau (Woodpecker), written in 1925, is the subtitle of the third of Heitor Villa Lobos's set of Chôros that he wrote throughout the 1920s. Chôro seems to be one of those words that doesn't work well in translation out of Brazilian Portuguese - Googling just comes up with a definition of 'weeping' or 'sadness', which doesn't describe the music at all. It's a word that seems to have been used to describe certain groups of Brazilian street musicians, and it looks as though Villa Lobos used the word it to denote his links with the popular music of the time, and also to hammer home his musical nationalism.
Each Chôro is written for completely different groups of instruments, ranging from solo guitar to a massive orchestra with choir. There's also unusual combinations of instruments, like in Pica-Pau which is scored for a male chorus with clarinet, bassoon, alto sax, trombone and three horns.
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| Pica-Pau! |
The melodies for Pica-Pau are adapted from two songs that Villa Lobos heard in a recording of the indigenous Parecis Indians, a tribe that still live in Brazil's Mato Grosso. But the middle section heads off into crazy town, where the choir begin to chant 'Pica-Pau' and imitate the sounds of woodpeckers knocking on tree trunks and other jungle sounds. The final big cheer of 'Brasil!' was apparently only put in because Villa Lobos needed to finish things with '-il' and actually any word with the same final syllable would have been fine. Excellent, that's my kind of artistic integrity. I hope you like this, it's a great little piece.
The more I listen to Villa Lobos, the more I think that
his music is criminally neglected in Britain. He was really really really good, and he should be getting a stack more performances than he does at present. I'm saving another knockout piece by Villa Lobos with birds in for later in the year, and
I also wrote THIS a couple of months ago.
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