The Keyboard Music of Heitor Villa-Lobos

Piano Suite “Prole do Bebe”

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.210609.012How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Heitor Villa-Lobos, Keyboard Music, Piano, South American Music, 20th century Music, Prole do Babe

Abstract

The Brazilaizn Composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) is an influential composer and ethnomusicologist in the early twentith century. As a prolific composer, he has composed vocal works, symphonies, operas, chamber and instrumental works. He has also devoted himself in music education by developing music curriculla for the public schools in Brazil. His msucal style combines frequent use of folk materials with improvisatory nature. Unlike many other conseratory-trained composers, he has never recived any formal classical training, but though self-taught he can manage to play several musical instruments fluently. As a musicaologist, he spent many years of his life traveling throughout Brazil and Europe to gather folk songs, the most significant contribution is the Guia Pratico, publised in the 1930s, contains six volumes of folk songs put together by Villa-Lobos over decades. Compared to his instrumental and chamber works, which are popular and frequemtly performed, his piano music seems unfamiliar to those piano students and publics. Although he has composed a great deal of piano works, most of them are for professional pianists to perfrom on stage instead of being used as teaching materials for beginning or intermediate students. His piano music are mostly character pieces with descriptive titles, they are colorful, highly complex in rhythm and technically demanding. One of the legendary concert pianists in the twentith century, Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982), a close friend of the composer, admired his talent and introduced his piano music to the worldwide audience, ever since then his piano music has been much respected and appreciated. Among these wonderful piano repertoires performed by Rubinstein, the piano suite “Prole do Bebe Vol.1” (The baby’s Family Vol.1) is considered the most popular and accessible one, and the seventh piece of the suite entitled “O Polichinelo” was often played by Rubinstein as an encore piece to his performing program. In this article, several areas regarding to the composer and his piano music will be discussed, and these are: The Life of Heitor Villa-Lobos, The Musical Style in General, List of His Significant Piano Works, the Background and Stylistic Features of “The Baby’s Family Vol.1”.

Copyright

© 2021, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - MingChih Hsieh
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/06/10
TI  - The Keyboard Music of Heitor Villa-Lobos
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Language, Art and Cultural Exchange (ICLACE 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 57
EP  - 60
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.210609.012
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.210609.012
ID  - Hsieh2021
ER  -