O Paraná composer Arrigo Barnabé will put on a collective show as part of his activities as artist-in-residence at Unicamp. According to Arrigo, who will stay at the University throughout the first semester, the project will involve students from various units in a work that will bring together elements of music, theater, dance and visual arts, among others. “It will be interdepartmental work.” Restarted in 2006, the Artist-in-Residence Program has already brought names such as Décio Pignatari, Fernando Morais, Ruy Castro and Lélia Abramo to the University.

Arrigo, who will also give lectures and workshops, will suggest the creation of a study group dedicated to analyzing the different aesthetic aspects of Brazilian music. “It would be interesting to contrast Adorno, Tinhorão and Augusto de Campos”, observes the composer, who also intends to discuss the presence of technology in the means of artistic production. “We are at the beginning of a new era in the field of composition. We will have a lot of changes due to this music-computer interaction,” he predicts.

In the interview that follows, Arrigo talks about the influences that marked his career, analyzes the Brazilian musical scene – popular and classical – and says that he does not give up on remaining faithful to the principles that have guided his work since the end of the 70s. , when he emerged to the general public by winning the TV Cultura University Festival with the song Diversões Eletrônicas. “I never wanted success”, reveals the composer. “I celebrate dissonance.”

Jornal da Unicamp – What are your expectations regarding the season at Unicamp?

Arrigo Barnabas – We will have a lot of work ahead of us. Our proposal is to present a show at the end of the project. The idea is to bring together students of classical music composition, popular music and multimedia. It will be a composition work. We will have to build a work with the students. The intention is to work in an integrated manner with students from other departments, including dance, theater and fine arts. It will be an interdepartmental work.

JU – How will this work be built?

Arrigo – I proposed a project that would be done in class. It wouldn't make sense for me to write it. The objective is to work, in the case of popular music students, with the idea of ​​articulated language, thinking about speech, the literary text; With classical music students, I will work with things that are inarticulate, that is, more abstract. The execution of the work, I believe, will be the responsibility of Unicamp bodies – the orchestras, choirs, theater and dance students, etc.

JU – Your trajectory is somehow linked to the university. To what extent can academic training be useful to the artist?

Arrigo – Academic training is important for the artist. I learned this at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at USP. FAU was a spectacular school. Its basics should be adopted by art schools. It was a free school, there was a lot of conversation among the students. I don't know what it's like today, but in 1971/72 we had access to various cultural activities. In fact, I believe that all schools should have greater freedom in their curriculum. Sometimes music students are interested in mathematics.

On the other hand, the criteria adopted in evaluating the production of knowledge in academia cannot be the same in areas as different as arts and exact or technological sciences. A fine arts student, for example, cannot be evaluated in the same way as a doctor; an artist is not an engineer... This is, in my opinion, a big problem in Brazilian universities. The measurement of this production needs to be different. It's not enough to just complete steps. This process of legitimizing student training is very complex and needs to have other criteria.

JU – In your work, you fuse influences from Erza Pound, atonal music, Provençal poetry, references to the underworld, twelve-tone music and rock, among other elements and combinations. Does this hybridity have to do with your formation?

Arrigo – I can't say exactly. I studied music at a conservatory in Londrina, but I wasn't an outstanding student. On the other hand, I have always been very interested in the cultural area – literature, arts, cinema, etc. – in short, all this part of, let's say, spiritual activities, including religion. Of course we suffered the impact of Tropicalismo, of entertainment music. It has a great emotional value and often goes beyond the idea of ​​mere entertainment. It ended up becoming an artistic reference.

JU – What were these influences?

Arrigo – I was raised in the midst of mass culture, in the cultural industry, in the 60s. I had contact with all things that tried to be loaded with meanings, especially the movements of the time. They had content, they were not empty things. Afterwards, everything became empty, but at the time it was super important.

I was influenced by those people who produced this artistic production in a more radical and ideological way. These artists were against the idea of ​​a system, at least at first. This in a certain way crystallized some timbres of entertainment. It was a kind of paradigm.

It's difficult, for example, for a person of my generation not to like electric guitars, not to find cool those tones produced electronically by Jimi Hendrix and other artists. This is part of our training. In addition to having an affective value, it has another meaning: it is a technological achievement.

JU – Was there then a notion of the elements that you would later deal with?

Arrigo – There was an idea – quite debatable – widely circulated at the time, mainly by people on the left, that art had to be popular. They preached that art had to communicate directly. If she didn't communicate directly, it wasn't art. It's completely wrong business. These more dogmatic people looked at everything from this utilitarian point of view. It was something more linked to socialist realism, that is, art had to have a use. This was exactly the opposite of the way I saw and thought about art. Art, for me, is useless. It only serves to exist.

JU – How did you live with these dogmas?

Arrigo – There is no need to propagandize an ideology. This was very disruptive at that time, it was a complicated business. How did these people see Beethoven, Bach? I had no interlocutors, I was very alone. I remember that, at that time, in the early 70s, shortly after having come into contact with the work of [Erza] Pound, I read Signs in Rotation, by Octavio Paz. It is a book that I consider fundamental to understanding this work timeless, of art that happens in time, such as poetry and music. I like this idea of ​​you establishing and creating time, as if you were creating an eternal present – ​​the moment the work is read, seen or heard, time begins again, it becomes its own. Paz talks a lot about this in the essay Consecration of the Instant.

Besides all that, the references, the influences and the ideologies, I didn't see very inspiring things in Brazilian classical music at that time. Of course, we had important composers – Gilberto Mendes, Willy Corrêa de Oliveira, Marlos Nobre, among others – whose works were powerful. But this power was not equal to that of popular music which, even in the most well-behaved areas, had more spontaneity.

JU – To what do you attribute this difference in treatment?

Arrigo – Maybe because classical music is more rigid, because you only evaluate the technical part to the detriment of musicality. Often, the fact that a person did something correctly doesn't mean anything. On the other hand, we had contact with the work of composers like [Karlheinz] Stockhausen, [Igor] Stravinsky, whose works were super powerful. I remember the impact I felt when listening to the Teenagers' Song. Even Bartók, who I only heard at the end of the 70s, was spectacular.

When I came into contact with this cultured production, I noticed that in Brazil artists like Júlio Medaglia and Rogério Duprat mixed elements in the tropicalist movement and in other works. Regardless of the work of these composers, the connection work done by them led to them being placed as co-authors. All of this drove us. We believed in the idea that popular music was art.

Continued on pages 6 and 7