Live Be Give

Gal Costa & Caetano Veloso: “Baby” (Tropicalia ou Panis et Circencis, 1968)

Yesterday, when I posted Chico Buarque’s “Construção,” Rob/Ley Lines chimed in to mention that the song exemplifies what he calls the “specifically Brazilian genius for arranging,” which I have to agree with.

So today, here’s another undisputed Brazilian classic that also showcases the peculiar Brazilian genius for arrangement (I’ll pick a few more to fill out the week, too). This is from Tropicalia ou Panis et Circencis, the founding musical document of the short-lived Tropicalia movement that brought Gal Costa, Caetano Veloso, Os Mutantes and Gilberto Gil to high prominence in Brazil.

Costa sings beautifully here, joined by Veloso at the very end, on lyrics that are as much about modern living as love—the middle verse goes something like, “You need to learn English/need to learn what I know/and I do not know more.” The next verse is a quick love note to São Paulo, “the finest city in South America.” But the guy who really makes this song completely transcendent for me isn’t singing or even playing an instrument on the track. It’s the late Rogério Duprat, who arranged the song.

Before we even get to the strings, let’s talk about the rhythm section. It’s the most spectral bossa nova beat I’ve ever heard, and bossa nova is a genre known for often being pillowy and soft. This sounds almost more like the echo of a band than the actual notes they’re playing.

And those strings. What Duprat has done here blows my mind every time I hear it. They’re not just playing some simple embellishing line. They flutter, hold their breath to hear what she’s going to say next, sigh when she says it, and enter in this beautiful, out of sync manner that mixes up several melodies at once. Every little phrase is loaded with as much meaning as the words. When she calls her lover “baby,” she swoons a little, and the strings swoon in their turn. It’s really brilliantly done. 

György Ligeti - “Lux Aeterna” (1966)

“Lux Aeterna”, Ligeti’s piece for a 16-voice choir, written in 1966, is a canon, a musical form that dates back to the Renaissance. In its most basic form, such as in Pachelbel’s quite famous canon in D, it consists of a melody, followed by a repetition (or a variation) that starts at a different time, so that you wind up with multiple versions of the same melody playing in different rhythms and creating counterpoint. It’s basic polyphony—you may have done it with “Row Row Row Your Boat” in grade school.

So how does Ligeti get it to sound so otherwordly? Well, for starters, he’s not using tertian harmony, which is what we’re used to—this is where a basic chord is made of intervals of thirds, ie C, E and G (a C major chord). He’s using tone clusters, where the notes sounding simultaneously might be C, C# and D, for one example. So you get these dissonant smears—the term for it is micropolyphony, where sustained dissonant chords slowly shift over time.

What Ligeti was primarily interested in anyway was timbre—he wanted to explore the particular tones and textures of the voices. They are actually singing these words: “Lux aeterna luceat eis / Domine, cum sanctis tuis in aeternum / quia pius es / Requiem aeternum dona eis / Domine / et lux perpetua luceat eis.” But you don’t really notice the words unless you’re listening for them. What you do notice is the disorienting effect of sixteen voices singing independent lines, many of them in extreme falsetto.

Ligeti was forced to re-evaluate his world more than once, and I speculate that this may have been among the factors that allowed him to so thoroughly re-think what music should sound like.

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