Latin American Links
November,
2004:
Please
note that the Villa-Lobos Website is no longer being updated.
This
resource will remain on the RDPL server.
Here are some web-sites
relating to Latin American culture: the visual, literary & performing
arts, and general sites relating to scholarship, travel and history.
Music of Latin America
Check
out the Latin American
Music Center for information on music and musicians in South and
Central America.
música OBJETIVA
is a marvelous classical music website from Brazil. This site also
hosts the Dicionário
da Música Brasileira, which is becoming a very useful resource.
The Brazilian Music Collection
of The University of Akron Bierce Library has an excellent web-site, managed
by Professor James Ryon. The collection is dedicated to the memory
of Walter Burle Marx, Brazilian composer/ conductor/pianist, whose entire
opus was contributed to the collection in 1997. Burle Marx conducted
many important Villa-Lobos concerts in New York in the late 1950's.
The Collection is searchable on the web. This is a valuable North
American resource for serious Villa-Lobos scholars.
Brazilian Orchestras on the Web
Juracy Cardoso e Claudia
Ribeiro Sales has a useful website with links to Brazilian Orchestra
websites, including:
A. Carlos Gomes
Gomes was a 19th century
Brasilian opera composer admired by Verdi.
Ernesto Nazareth
A page on the Ragtime
Website is Ernesto
Nazareth, with information about the composer of Choros, who lived
from 1863 to 1934, and who was a major influence on Villa-Lobos.
See the Ricardo
Peres page on this server for information on his new CD which includes
music by Ernesto Nazareth.
Brazilian
Music Up To Date - an excellent web version of this important magazine
about Brazilian popular music. The site includes reviews
of classical CD's as well - the picture on the left is the cover of
a recently-reviewed Guarnieri Piano Concerto CD.
Brasil
Yaih?
is a Yahoo!-like search engine and hierarchical
map of the Brazilian and Latin American World Wide Web, which is now a
pretty big place.
Brasil
Web is one of the best links on the WWW to online resources in Brasil.
Other important cultural sites include:
-
The Solaris Quintet
is an Ohio-based woodwind quintet with lots of Brazilian music in its repertoire,
including music by Villa-Lobos, Mignone, Lacerda, and many less familiar
composers. Oboeist and professor of music James Ryon tells me that
the group is planning a CD of Brazilian music. I'll pass on the latest
information when it arrives.
-
Maria Brazil - called the "home
of Brazilian culture on the World Wide Web, this delightfully informal
site has more depth than many similar resources. Visiting this site recently
(December 12, 1996) I was pleased to see so many RealAudio files. This
is a chance to put Villa-Lobos in his context, and to hear his influence
in the marvellous music being recorded in Brazil today.
-
Premiere
Brazil is the exclusive place for Brazilian cinema at Estação
Virtual. Here you can find interviews with directors, profiles and details
about new and classic national films.
-
Brazilonline is a cool
Brazilian site.
-
The Brazilian
Society - at the University of Reading, England
-
Museums of Brazil
- administered by the University of Sao Paulo (in Portuguese)
-
Museu Historico Nacional
in Rio de Janeiro (in Portuguese)
-
The Brasil Page
- a very useful resource
-
National Library Foundation
- Brazil Music Department and Sound File - has MIDI files and features
on Carlos Gomes, Mário de Andrade and Ernesto Nazareth. The portrait
of Andrade to the right is from this new site.
-
Brazilian Association at Indiana
University (in Portuguese)
-
Artisti Brasiliani
is an excellent page of Brasilian musical links, from Italy. It includes
information on many great Brazilian composers and performers, including
Tom Jobim, Vinicius de Moraes, Chico Buarque and Gilberto Gil. Many
useful links as well.
-
Brazilian Guitar (Violão
Brasileiro) is maintained by Ricardo Filipo. This is a really useful,
well-designed site.
-
MDNet Music Hall - Brazilian
music on the Web. This site has a lovely concert by guitarist (and
Director of the Museu
Villa-Lobos) Turibio Santos in RealAudio format: "Choros
do Brasil." This is marvellous music! The site has other
RealAudio files as well.
-
Check out The Brazilian Sound:
the best source of information on Música Popular Brasileira - the
popular music of Brazil.
-
The online magazine Real
Brasil is published by the University of Texas at Austin. This is an
invaluable reference which includes solid, well-researched links to web
resources, as well as news about Brazil's economy, ecology, politics and
culture. Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated in a while.
Modern Brazilian composer and instrumentalist
Egberto Gismonti is in many ways an heir of Villa-Lobos. There's
lots of web activity related to EG - start with the Egberto
Gismonti WWW Archive, which is managed by Lucca Sticcotti in Italy.
Here's a short hommage to Villa-Lobos from EG:
"In my opinion, his was the first step in establishing an orchestral
form of Brazilian music. This did not come about because of the music he
composed or the forms he employed but because of the tremendous liberty
he took in composing. This is the special uniqueness of Brazilian music,
that it is music from a country which, in spite of extreme political and
economic difficulties, manifests extreme originality from a creative point
of view. This, because it has not become acculturated".
-
Rainforest Action Network. Save the rainforest:
join RAN.
-
DIA Documentacao Indigenista
e Ambiental (Indigenous and Environmental Documentation). This
site includes some fabulous images, including the eça de adorno
de plumas para cabeça from the Bororo tribe, which I've
used (with permission) as the logo
of the Heitor Villa-Lobos site. This particular image comes from
the Langsdorff expedition to the Amazon (1821-1828.) I've also used
an embossed version of the same image as a background on this page.
USENET Newsgroups can be an excellent source of current information.
Try soc.culture.brazil. Other newsgroups
to consider:
There are three listserv's (mailing lists) I'm reading regularly that I
find very useful:
-
SEGOVIA-L - a very active Classical Guitar mailing list. There's
information on the list on the guitarist.com
website. To subscribe, send the message "SUBSCRIBE SEGOVIA-L your-email"
to the list processor: Majordomo@lists.teleport.com.
There are often posts relating to Villa-Lobos and other Latin American
music.
-
BMS-L - a list of the Brazilian Music Society. "The BMS-L
was created in September 7, 1996 and is devoted to
stimulate the scholarly discussion of Brazilian music, broadly defined
to encompass the classical, folk, and popular musics of Brazil...."
Check out the list's archives,
then subscribe to the list by sending the message "SUBSCRIBE BRAZILIAN-MUSIC-SOCIETY
your
name" to the list processor at: LISTSERV@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU.
-
SAUDADESDOBRASIL - another very active list, covering all Brazilian
music - popular and classical. Check out the list's information
site, and browse the list's postings.
Subscribe by sending the message "SUBSCRIBE SAUDADESDOBRASIL your name"
to the list processor at: listproc@lists.Princeton.EDU.
Argentina
Astor Piazzolla
The modern master
of the tango from Argentina has a big following on the Internet. Here are
the most important of the WWW resources:
Astor
Piazzolla Home-Page. Colm O'Riain's super web-site with some marvellous
sound files.
Astor
Piazzolla Discography. Cesar Luongo's excellent site has a very nearly
comprehensive discography of this great Argentine composer and performer.
Just before he died,
Piazzolla gave an interview
given in Chile. Here's a little bit:
"I think Villa-Lobos is 100 percent Brazilian. His chamber music is
excellent, and totally Brazilian. Because if Brazil has anything, it is
popular music. We don't have anything like that in Argentina. They [Brazilians]
make a more intuitive music, we are more 'cold', maybe. "
Alberto
Ginastera
Argentina's great composer
Alberto Ginastera lived from 1916-1983, and his music is currently enjoying
a fairly high level of interest around the world. The
Fundacion Ostinato's mandate to "disseminate the works and ideas of
Argentina classical music composers" is being fulfilled through an excellent
website which includes some information on Ginastera,
as well as the production of CDs
and the promotion of concerts.
See the Ricardo
Peres page on this server for information on his new CD which includes
Ginastera's Piano sonata no. 1.
The
National
Library of Argentina site contains information about Argentine culture,
as well as some marvellous sound files of representative Argentine composers
Alberto Ginastera, Mariano Mores, Luis Gianneo and Astor Piazzolla.
Borges
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was a great poet,
essayist and writer of Ficciones (and National Librarian of Argentina).
The
most important Borges sites is the Jorge
Luis Borges Centre, maintained by The Jorge Luis Borges Center for Studies
& Documentation at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. The site is mirrored
at the Libyrinth, a website in the United States. The Libyrinth is "a project
devoted to the work of twentieth century authors who share a sense of exploration
for their medium of language, and a love for pushing the borders of reality
into fantastic and wonderful new shapes." The section of the Libyrinth devoted
to Jorge Luis Borges is called The
Garden of Forking Paths.
A
new site in both English & Spanish is Internetaleph,
Martin Hadis' site on The Life & Works of Jorge Luis Borges.
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