Gilberto Ambrósio Garcia Mendes (cropped)

Gilberto Mendes (13 October 1922 – 1 January 2016) was a 20th-century Brazilian

avant-garde The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...

composer, and one of the pioneering fathers of the company New Consonant Music.

Biography

Gilberto Mendes was born in Santos,

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

, in 1922. He studied piano with Antonieta Rudge and harmony with Sabino de Benedictis. The influence of Villa-Lobos is evident in his early works, in some way preceding the advent of

bossa nova Bossa nova () is a style of samba developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is mainly characterized by a "different beat" that altered the harmonies with the introduction of unconventional chords and an innovativ ...

in his early songs. His contact with the poets of the Noigandres group gave him the ideological inspiration to feed his talent. He attended the Santos Conservatory from 1941 to 1948, where he studied harmony with and piano with Antonietta Rudge. He later studied composition under

Cláudio Santoro Cláudio Franco de Sá Santoro (23 November 1919 – 27 March 1989) was an internationally renowned Brazilian composer, conductor and violinist. Biography Early life A native of Manaus, the capital of Amazonas, Santoro started to study violin ...

in 1954 and under George Olivier Toni from 1958 to 1960. In 1962 and 1968 he attended the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music where he attended classes given by

Pierre Boulez Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (; 26 March 1925 – 5 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor and writer, and the founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of post-war Western classical music. Born in Mont ...

Henri Pousseur Henri Léon Marie-Thérèse Pousseur (23 June 1929 – 6 March 2009) was a Belgian classical composer, teacher, and music theorist. Biography Pousseur was born in Malmedy and studied at the Academies of Music in Liège and in Brussels from 1947 to ...

, and

Karlheinz Stockhausen Karlheinz Stockhausen (; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groun ...

. In 1962 he created the New Music Festival and in 1963 was a signatory of the Manifesto Música Nova (New Music Manifesto). He was a pioneer of

aleatoric Aleatoricism or aleatorism, the noun associated with the adjectival aleatory and aleatoric, is a term popularised by the musical composer Pierre Boulez, but also Witold Lutosławski and Franco Evangelisti, for compositions resulting from "action ...

and concrete music in Brazil, using new musical notations and theatrical elements. Mendes's compositions include

cantatas A cantata (; ; literally "sung", past participle feminine singular of the Italian verb ''cantare'', "to sing") is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir. The meaning of t ...

motets In Western classical music, a motet is mainly a vocal musical composition, of highly diverse form and style, from high medieval music to the present. The motet was one of the pre-eminent polyphonic forms of Renaissance music. According to Margare ...

, orchestral music,

incidental music Incidental music is music in a play, television program, radio program, video game, or some other presentation form that is not primarily musical. The term is less frequently applied to film music, with such music being referred to instead as t ...

, solo and chamber pieces, and some

works. Most of them are published by Alain Van Kerckhoven Editeur. In 1965, he founded the Santos New Music Festival. In the 1970s and 1980s, he taught at the

University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UW–Milwaukee, UWM, or Milwaukee) is a public urban research university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It is the largest university in the Milwaukee metropolitan area and a member of the University of Wiscons ...

and the

University of Texas The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

, then was a professor of music at the

University of São Paulo The University of São Paulo ( pt, Universidade de São Paulo, USP) is a public university in the Brazilian state of São Paulo. It is the largest Brazilian public university and the country's most prestigious educational institution, the best ...

(USP).

Discography

Francisco Mignone, Almeida Prado, Gilberto Mendes - I Bienal De Música Contemporânea Brasileira - Disco 3 ‎(LP) Not On Label SCM1003 1975 Fernando Cerqueira (2), Gilberto Mendes, Lindemberque R. Cardoso, Radamés Gnattali - ii Bienal De Musica Brasileira Contemporanea Disco 3 ‎(LP, Album) Bienal De Música Brasileira Contemporânea SCM-1007 1977 Dantas Leite* / Mendes* / Paraskevaídis* - La Voz, La Palabra ‎(LP, Ltd) Tacuabé T/E 11 1978 Gilberto Mendes ‎(LP) Odeon 31C 063 422709 1979 Marcel Worms - Gilberto Mendes, Alicia Terzian, Emil Viklický, Burton Greene, Vincent Van Warmerdam, Jacob Ter Veldhuis, Daan Manneke, Hanna Kulenty, Various - More New Blues For Piano ‎(CD, Album) NM Extra 98021 2001 Ricardo Tacuchian, Wayne Peterson, Christopher James (17), Raoul Pleskow, Gilberto Mendes - Carnaval / Carnival: Music From Brazil And The U.S. ‎(CD) North/South Recordings N/S R 1028 2002 Piano Solo: Rimsky ‎(CD-ROM) LAMI LAMI-003 2003 A Música de Gilberto Mendes - Vários Compositores Num Só Compositor Do Modernismo Ao Pós-Modernismo ‎(CD, Album) Selo SESC SP CDSS 0025/10 2010

Footnotes

References

* * Randel, Don M., ''The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music''. Harvard, 1996, p. 576. 1922 births 2016 deaths 20th-century classical composers 20th-century male musicians Brazilian classical composers Brazilian male composers Brazilian columnists Male classical composers University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty University of Texas at Austin faculty People from Santos, São Paulo {{Brazil-composer-stub