Gerard Béhague/Paulo Costa Lima: A Program note for the Festival Sonidos de las Americas, New York, Carnegie Hall, April 1996.
Atotô do L’homme armé is the second in a series of pieces named Atotô (the Yoruba greeting word meaning ‘listen, silence!’ for the Afro-Brazilian god/orixá Omolu or Obaluaiê) in which the composer seeks simultaneous reflection on and celebration of some perennial questions. He states: ‘It is quite possible that ethnomusicology and composition are capable of exchanging respecful looks at each other, shying away from the easy paradises of our past’. Costa lima wrote this piece as he was working on his essay Music and Psychoanalysis: A Possible Interface, in which he investigates the production of pleasure in music from structural identification with a supposed divine enjoyment, present in the mechanisms of tonal organization, or even in the formal conceptions.
‘Surely for this reason’, he writes, ‘I went to the Alujá of Xangô (The Yoruba god of thunder and fire) with its characteristic rhythms of Afro-Bahian ecstasy, that, combined with another war-like ancestry (the medieval song of L’homme armé) provides the initial gesture of the piece. The object of compositional attention comes from the proportions of the Alujá in confrontation with the motives of the original melody. The latter appear with the proportions of 5/7 of the Alujá of Xangô, something announcing the set of metric modulations that must occupy the entire first part of the piece. After a slow central part, with traits of improvisation, the festive tempo of the ALuxjá returns and the texture becomes more and more polyphonic from motives strictly derived from the interaction of the original elements. Let the ancestral be new! I say rather euphorically to my listeners!
Colloquium: Contemporary Brazilian Music and Thought 