Volume 09
Jamary Oliveira - Trio

Short Review

Jamary Oliveira’s Trio (vl., vlc. e pf.) was composed in 1967 for the 1st Presentation of the Young Composers from Bahia. These presentations included a competition of new pieces, which in this first year privileged the categories of Trio (vl., vc., pf.) and Symphonic Orchestra. In this contest, Jamary Oliveira’s Trio was awarded 1st prize.

Lasting 13’:43”, the piece has three movements: Allegretto (ca. 3’:38”), Largo (ca. 7’:05”) and Moderato – Animato (ca. 3’:15”).

Observing that the composer works with rhythmic motives and themes and that the work’s organic structure evolves in sequences of durational proportions, Ilza Nogueira’s analysis intends to comprehend the Trio as a compositional work focused basically in the “rhythm” parameter – that is, in organizations of temporal structures.

This analysis shows how rhythmic elaboration, either motivic or thematic, brings into evidence the compositional intention of establishing schemes, methods and structural procedures, exploring the dialectic relationships between contrast and repetition, rigid and flexible, western concert music and Afro-Bahian traditions. It also observes how the dissociation between rhythmic and pitch structures deviate the work from those aesthetic models of the immediately preceding tradition (tonal), relating it to more ancient traditions such as the medieval isorrithmic system of the ars nova. The analyst also observes that such a relationship, far from meaning a recovery from the isorhythmic medieval model, seems to intend an adaptation of the ideology of dissociation between rhythm and pitch to the ideal of renewing the musical language. Finally, the analysis concludes that the composer builds a basically rhythmic musical poetics, whose premises – interaction between symmetry and asymmetry in the first movement, the isorhythmic pattern in the second and the integration between concrete and abstract elements in the third – are regarded as highly intellectual, using proportions and arithmetic and geometric symmetries.