05-05-2020, 18:18
Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Symphony No. 6, Sobre a linha das montanhas do Brasil (On the Outline of the Mountains of Brazil)
It’s in four movements, around 25 minutes in all and I love the ingenuity that went into the creation of this little symphony; basically, extracting a melody from an image in a process he invented called millimeterization. The idea is to lay transparent graph paper over a photograph - in this instance, his beloved mountains, presumably in silhouette, with the vertical lines being allocated to the pitches and the horizontal lines to durations. You would then have a melody of sorts (probably quite strange - or possibly not!) which would then need to be further adapted and harmonized to get a pleasing result. Living with the outlines of mountains constantly in view makes me feel especially intrigued by this work - I like to think I understand why he would have been so inspired although I expect mine are mere hills by comparison! His music is so warm …
It’s in four movements, around 25 minutes in all and I love the ingenuity that went into the creation of this little symphony; basically, extracting a melody from an image in a process he invented called millimeterization. The idea is to lay transparent graph paper over a photograph - in this instance, his beloved mountains, presumably in silhouette, with the vertical lines being allocated to the pitches and the horizontal lines to durations. You would then have a melody of sorts (probably quite strange - or possibly not!) which would then need to be further adapted and harmonized to get a pleasing result. Living with the outlines of mountains constantly in view makes me feel especially intrigued by this work - I like to think I understand why he would have been so inspired although I expect mine are mere hills by comparison! His music is so warm …
"The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us." ~ Bill Watterson