Latin American Electroacoustic Music Collection

Jorge Antunes, Historia de un Pueblo por Nacer , 1970
[Carta Abierta a Vassili Vasilikos y a todos los Pesimistas]
(Brazil)



Recording time: 16 min 34 s.

Other resources available:
- Biography of Jorge Antunes
- Compositions by Jorge Antunes

About this composition:

The work was composed in 1970 in the Electronic Music Laboratory of the Institute Torcuato Di Buenos Aires. Inspired by the plot of the novel and film Z by Vassili Vasilikos, the work is cyclical with 3 long sections, whose dramatics are gradually increasing, always being discharged in very strong and aggressive attacks.

The story of Z is, according to Antunes, extremely pessimistic: it takes place in a Latin-American country subject to successive military coups, which are overthrown by democratic resistance, only to be followed by the return of the military to power.

The fourth and last section of the piece is short. In it Jorge Antunes sketches a cell with the initial notes of the International. The motives succeed one another in canonical entries. The intention of the author is to break the pessimism of the initial discourse, in order to show the direction to utopia.

The intention was the construction, by each movement, of a gradual evolution of sound journeying from very low intensity (with barely audible sounds), until reaching a level of extremely powerful and violent sonority. Innovative acoustic and psychoacoustic experience was produced by the composer in the final part of the third section of the work: sinoidal sounds of very low frequency, around 16 Hertz, provoke a throbbing of the wave, which gives way to a resulting subjective sound. The very low recorded sounds, when well reproduced by loudspeakers, are scarcely audible. But the resultant sound, not present in the recording, is clearly audible and aggressive, and is formed in the air contained in the physical space where the listener is situated.

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