Meet the 2003 MTNA-Shepherd: Distinguished Composer of the Year.

Hello! I'd like to introduce you to Liduino Pitombeira, currently of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who was named the 2003 MTNA-Shepherd Distinguished Composer of the Year for Brazilian Landscapes No. 1. This exciting trio was selected from among twenty-eight works entered in this year's competition and was performed at the MTNA National Conference in Kansas City. Thirty states participated. Pitombeira received a $3,000 award made possible through the generosity of Sylvia Shepherd. He is now able to submit the work to Theodore Presser Co., which has an agreement with MTNA to give special consideration for publication to the winning entry.

The judges for the competition were William Roger Price, associate professor of music (piano and composition), University of Tulsa; John Anthony Lennon, professor of composition, Emory University; and Michael Rose, associate professor of composition, Vanderbilt University. Honorable Mentions were awarded to Thomas Albert of Virginia, Jorge Martin of Vermont and Ronald Keith Parks of South Carolina.

I had many questions for Pitombeira, who is originally from Brazil and finished a Ph.D. degree in composition from Louisiana State University this April.

DW: What inspires you?

LP: I do not wait for inspiration. I compose every day and work on several pieces simultaneously. This way, if "inspiration" ceases to contribute for one piece, it becomes strong again in another one. However, as a nationalist composer, I can say that Brazilian culture, as a whole, strongly inspires my work. My music comes mostly from intuition and improvisation rather than from meticulous calculations. It is mostly based on sound rather than on abstract plans that work well on paper but could produce mediocre results when performed. If some sonority does not please me, I do not use it even if it fits some beautiful structural design that works well on paper. I also believe that intuition is millions of times faster and more efficient than reasoning, in the field of musical composition. The same mechanism works with sports: no soccer player, for example, will calculate the weight of a ball, the inertial forces, the friction, the speed of wind and the influence of the gravitational force in order to shoot a goal. He or she simply shoots based on intuition. All the calculations needed are done intuitively in a fraction of seconds. Only daily and hard work increases the craft of a composer as it does with athletes. I may start a piece inspired by some kind of intervallic symmetry or mathematical relationship (axial symmetry of a particular set, for example) but later, as the writing progresses faster, intuition takes place completely. It is also the ear that comes in the finalization process to clean all the cold and disconnected passages within the piece, transforming what is on paper into music. This latter phase is accomplished by observing the playability of some passages and adjusting them to get a better result. The problem with composers that only trust calculations is that they stick with ideas (especially rhythmic ones) that would produce a better performance with small adjustments. But since these ideas are a product of rigorous calculations, they are considered "sacred" and cannot be changed at all. The rational approach to music composition is necessary during the study of some technique but it just slows down the output in the real world. That is why composers that follow intuition, like Henry Cowell and Villa-Lobos, have a huge catalog of works, it is not that they consider quantity more important than quality--they just happen to compose quickly.

DW: Are there any issues in composition that are particularly important to you?

LP: The business of composition has, like every field in life, from time to time some kind of fashion, some subject or keywords that composers keep emphasizing in conversations, meetings and conferences. For example, forty years ago, not composing serial music meant not being a composer at all, and this was a clear tendency openly registered in books, articles and papers. I think, the issues now can be summarized in two expressions that we hear all the time: "express your own voice" and "bring audiences back." So, every composer tries to balance these two factors, which really are dependent on one same cause. The "own voice" is not something isolated from the "community voice." A composer does not live and compose in a vacuum, which means that if this "own voice" is something authentic, it will somehow express the composer's environment.

--Deanna Walker, NCTM 

Chair, MTNA Composer

Commissioning

Nashville, Tennessee

Editor's Note: This interview will be continued in the August/September issue of AMT.