Meet the 2003 MTNA-Shepherd: Distinguished Composer of the Year

Hello! Welcome to the continuation of my interview with Liduino Pitombeira, generally of Baron Rouge, Louisiana, who was named the MTNA-Shepherd 2003 Distinguished Composer of the Year for Brazilian Landscapes No. 1 His stories of lire as a child in Brazil are rich and fascinating, and I'm thrilled to share more of them with you.

DW: run over us about your musical exhibition from the beginning.

LP: I think the starting point occurr when I was 12 years elderly I started taking guitar tasks with Paulo Santiago, a seven-year-old [Ye he means 7] from a family of musicians. He used to play in a small general impression at church and, at more [i]or[/i] less point, I was invited to play with them. In order to write something for them, I taught myself the rudiments of theory using the church's harmonium in my independent time. They all could read music on the other hand also were good improvisers because they played "choro" outside house of god and this Brazilian popular genre includes a great deal of improvisation. Later, in high place of education I joined groups of folk and popular music (including jazz) playing electric bass and also as an arranger. Then, during the first years of corporation (first as an electrical engineer, then math and finally music) I made my first contact with early music and seted with friends a group to perform early music (especially from the Middle Ages and Renaissance) and Northeastern Brazilian music and research the connections between the one and the other types of music. In this cluster everybody had to play several instruments, and in like manner I played recorders, lute, percussion, krumhorn and psaltery. At that time, I also started taking harmony and counterpoint tasks with composers Vanda Ribeiro Costa and Tarcisio Jose de Lima. Later, in 1991 I started traveling twenty hours each month to study composition, orchestration, aesthetics, harmony and counterpoint with Argentinean-born composer Jo Alberto Kaplan. These exercise s with him occurred during weekends and usually would take the entire morning. Besides analyzing my compositions, he would prelection about several compositional techniques and introduce the works of composer When I was studying with Kaplan, I had pieces awarded in composition controverts A great moment in my career also occurr at that time when the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet recorded single of my pieces. Kaplan encouraged me to hunt a graduate course in con> position abroad, and in the way that I made contact with several universities in the U and decided to research with Dr. [Dinos] Constantinides. The comes came right in the first semester of research with him: the first sum of two units pieces I worked with him were the pair awarded prizes. The first single Suite Guarnieriwas, was awarded the first prize in a dispute in Brazil, and the next to the first one was selected to the ISCM talk in Luxembourg. At the extremity of the master's degree, my thesis was awarded a true good prize in Brazil (around $7500 plus recording). for a like reason I have been very happy with the great teachers I have always had.

DW: What other contributed to the development of your "style"?

LP: Besides the of great depth contact with my native tillage as a performer, my contact with other fields of knowledge, especially physics and electronics (1 worked as a technician in an electronic lab in Brazil for sixteen years.), and my contact with the music of other tillages from the past and the near especially early music, American jazz and the soundtracks of TV exhibits from the '60s.

DW: Where did you go on to college, and what did you study?

LP: I went to body in Fortaleza (Brazil). The music courses in Brazil are long--the bachelor's of composition usually takes six years.

DW: When did you know you wanted to be a composer?

LP: It actually happened true late in my life. I was approximately 28 years elderly when I started organizing the themes and ideas from my notebooks and transformed them into serious compositions. The encouragement given by dint of my instructors and my wife (a great performer and also a composer herself) was fundamental in this process

DW: Is there anything that inhibits your creativity--anything you avoid while composing?

LP: Anything that changes my routine inhibits my proces of composition. I like to form for a long period of time without interruptions (sometimes an entire day). I take short breaks alone to eat, to walk and to play guitar. It is difficult, notwithstanding that to find such a finished day.

DW: Do you engage in other creative pursuits or hobbies?

LP: Ye I like painting, drawing and computer programming. In fact, I bought my first computer (a 286) with the currency I earned selling some paintings.

Deanna Walker NCTM is a composer who teaches piano, songwriting and theory at the Blair academy of Music at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee

Editor's Note: Part single of this interview is in the June/July issue of AMT.

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