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

Hello! I'd like to introduce you to Liduino Pitombeira, commonly of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who was named the 2003 MTNA-Shepherd Distinguished Composer of the Year for Brazilian Landscapes No. 1 This exciting trio was culled from among twenty-eight works pierceed in this year's competition and was performed at the MTNA National discourse in Kansas City. Thirty states participated. Pitombeira received a $3000 award made possible end the generosity of Sylvia Shepherd. He is now able to submit the work to Theodore Presser Co which has an agreement with MTNA to give special consideration for publication to the winning entry

The justices for the competition were William Roger Price, associate professor of music (piano and composition), University of Tulsa; John Anthony Lennon, professor of composition, Emory University; and Michael Rose associate professor of composition, Vanderbilt University. Honorable Mentions were awarded to Thomas Albert of Virginia, Jorge Martin of Vermont and Ronald Keith Parks of southern Carolina.

I had many questions for Pitombeira, who is originally from Brazil and finished a PhD step in composition from Louisiana State University this April.

DW: What inspires you?

LP: I do not wait for inspiration. I form every day and work upon several pieces simultaneously. This way, if "inspiration" ceases to contribute for single piece, it becomes strong again in another individual However, as a nationalist composer I can say that Brazilian agriculture as a whole, strongly inspires my work. My music draw nears mostly from intuition and improvisation rather than from meticulous calculations. It is chiefly based on sound rather than upon abstract plans that work well upon paper but could produce mediocre accrues when performed. If some sonority does not please me I do not use it level if it fits some beautiful structural design that works well upon paper. I also believe that intuition is millions of times faster and more efficient than reasoning, in the field of musical composition. The same mechanism works with sports: no soccer player, for example, will calculate the weight of a ball, the inertial forces, the friction, the spe of wind and the influence of the gravitational force in order to propel a goal. He or she simply propels based on intuition. All the calculations necessityed are done intuitively in a fraction of next to the firsts Only daily and hard work increases the craft of a composer as it does with athletes. I may start a piece inspired by means of some kind of intervallic regular arrangement or mathematical relationship (axial shapeliness of a particular set, for example) on the other hand later, as the writing progresse faster, intuition takes place completely It is also the ear that draw nears in the finalization process to clean all the gelid and disconnected passages within the piece, transforming what is upon paper into music. This latter phase is accomplished through observing the playability of a certain number of passages and adjusting them to earn a better result. The moot point with composers that only trust calculations is that they stick with ideas (especially rhythmic ones) that would show a better performance with small adjustments. on the other hand since these ideas are a production of rigorous calculations, they are considered "sacred" and cannot be changed at all. The rational approach to music composition is necessary during the close attention of some technique but it just moderates down the output in the real world. That is wherefore composers that follow intuition, like Henry Cowell and Villa-Lobos, have a very great catalog of works, it is not that they consider quantity more important than quality--they just happen to form quickly.

DW: Are there any issues in composition that are particularly important to you?

LP: The business of composition has, like each field in life, from time to time a certain quantity of kind of fashion, some make submissive or keywords that composers retain emphasizing in conversations, meetings and talks For example, forty years ago, not composing serial music meant not being a composer at all, and this was a clear drift openly registered in books, articles and papers. I think, the issues now can be summarized in sum of two units expressions that we hear all the time: "expres your have voice" and "bring audiences back." in like manner every composer tries to balance these sum of two units factors, which really are pendent on one same cause. The "own voice" is not something isolated from the "community voice." A composer does not live and make up in a vacuum, which means that if this "own voice" is something authentic, it will somehow or other express the composer's environment.

--Deanna Walker, NCTM

Chair, MTNA Composer

Commissioning

Nashville, Tennessee

Editor's Note: This interview will be continued in the August/September issue of AMT.

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