Jorge Antunes is a very important historical reference for our experimental music history, reconized as the precursor of electronic music in Brazil as well as one of the most representative names in avant garde Brazilian music.He was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1942, began studying music in 1958 and in 1960 entered the National School of Music. Until 1964 Antunes embraced the nationalist current in his instrumental works, influenced by Villa-Lobos. But already in 1962 he had become interested in electronic music, at the same time as he was beginning another graduation in Physics where he constructed a variety of generators, filters, modulators and other electronic equipment.In 1969 he received a grant for postgraduate study in composition at the Torcuato Di Tella Institute, Buenos Aires, having won a biennial competition used to select one composer from each country of the Americas to carry out studies at the Advanced Musical Studies Centre of Latinamerica.
The piece presented in the podcast was produced when he was already studying electroacustic composition in CLAM (Buenos Aires). The work Auto-Retrato Sobre Paisaje Porteño, has a duration of 14 minutes and 50 seconds, represents the search for an aesthetic definition and a domination of the sound material.
Antunes used an old-fashioned gramophone recording – a plate - with a tango by Francisco Canaro, purchased by the author in a junk shop in Caminito, in the La Boca district of Buenos Aires. In the second-hand store Antunes also bought an old gramophone. In the CLAEM laboratory, when he played the antique recording, Antunes perceived that the arm of the gramophone was heavy: the stylus nearly penetrated the acetate surface of the plate. A scratch would cause the sound track to repeat itself continuously. This defect became a special effect, providing the basic rhythmic element for the construction of a samba, which, when combined with the cell of the tango, opened the way for the composer’s integration with the Buenos Aires landscape.
This audacious innovation in using sounds from an old recording, together with the noise of the disk itself, sparked controversy in the musical world, since instutionalized electroacoustic music at the time was radically opposed to squeaks, called “suplido” in Spanish and “souffle” in French. Cleanness of the sound, without noise, was the rule. In subsequent decades Antunes’s original idea was imitated by other composers, who discovered sources of inspiration in noisy old recordings.
Here you can download the first album he recorded in a professional electroacustic studio, including the piece heard in the podcast.
