Orquestra Popular de Câmara’s “Inverted Babel”: aesthetic project and creative process in Brazilian Popular Instrumental Music

Abstract

Orquestra Popular de Câmara [Popular Chamber Orchestra] was an ensemble created in São Paulo in 1997, by initiative of pianist Benjamim Taubkin, aiming at promoting a confluence of musicalities, conjoining the “regional” and the “cosmopolitan”, the “traditional” and the “modern”, the “rural” and the “urban” – in sum, bridging the polarities around which discourses on identity in Brazilian music tend to revolve. Viewing such polarities not as fixed categories but rather as modulations of traits placed on a continuum, this article intends to identify, through an analysis of the phonogram “Suíte pra pular da cama (e ver o Brasil)” (1998), how the aesthetic project of a “Babelic” integration of musicalities finds concrete expression in the Orquestra’s music, and which procedures and sonorities are used, here, to evoke these different “worlds”. Drawing on the concepts of Didier Guigue’s “aesthetics of sonority” as applied to popular music by Sérgio Molina, we describe the structure of the “Suíte…” as a juxtaposition of “state-moments” – harmonically static sections driven by improvised interaction – and “process-moments” – predetermined sections, with defined themes and harmonic development – in which “tonal” modernity is interwoven with “modal” tradition, according to the distinction proposed by José Miguel Wisnik.