Volume 03
Jamary Oliveira et al. - A Declaração de Princípios dos Compositores da Bahia em depoimentos

Short Review

In the year of the Composers´ Group of Bahia 40th anniversary (2006) I remembered to ask some former members for a statement regarding the Group´s "Bill of Principles". Thus, Fernando Cerqueira, Guilherme Vaz, Jamary Oliveira, Leon Biriotti and Rufo Herrera wrote about what that document meant in the context f its time: how it is explained as a cause or an effect.

My intention was to pay homage to a cultural project committed to resisting the political forces that repressed the freedom of artistic expression during the Brazilian military regime (1964-85). By means of the radical avant garde, experimentalism and rebel attitude, they resisted the consumerist culture of hegemonic capitalism. And with a rhetoric of humor, irony and paradoxes they tried "to invent the future", as Fernando Cerqueira says.

This five statements have essentially different approaches concerning what became memorable for each composer, be it in the document itself, in the artistic movement that generated it or in the political-ideological surrounding context. Together they join the "Bill of Principles" as the five fingers around the palm of a hand: complementing, integrating and interacting with one another in order to transmit a sense of epoch. The statements project a kaleidoscopic view of a social-cultural project that involves the student, the master, the educational institution, the political system and external influences. Based on them, the critical commentary "The Composers Group of Bahia and its 1966 manifest" reflects upon the "Bill of Principles" in the context of the esthetic-ideological manifests that preceded it: from Oswald de Andrade´s Anthropofagic Manifest (1928), to the Música Nova Manifest (1963). (Ilza Nogueira)