Volume 12
Ernst Widmer - ENTROncamentos SONoros op.75

Short Review

“Sound Crossroads” was composed in 1972. In her analysis, Ilza Nogueira states that the title derives from the thesis that was written that same year by the composer for the UFBA Full Professorship Competition. Consequently the author prepared a didactic project aimed at the appreciation of new music, at capacitating the public to understand the bases of musical construction and to accept the vanguard sonorities. Derived from the didactic proposals of his thesis, the piece was conceived for this project, expecting to function as a pedagogical experiment in which the artistic language mediates teaching and enables learning. It is therefore an association of pedagogy and composition, aiming at informal musical education in concert halls and creating a public for contemporary music. A compositional work with such goals is more of a strategic procedure than a “work of art”. It is therefore an elaboration of routines that enable revelations, the arousal of knowledge. For such, the composer enables comparisons between contrasting, resembling and equivalent elements, and even stimulates the integration of the public in the process of musical construction, enabling lucidity trough playfulness.

Therefore, “Sound Crossroads” is not a piece in which Widmer projects his compositional style in the unmistaken way as he does in his compositions that have an aesthetic objective. In this piece you will not find the stylistic tendencies that marked his compositional trajectory as an artistic signature: referencialism, regionalism. Even so, other constant tendencies in his work acquired here thematic importance: timbre research and the tendency towards musical theater.