He established a conservatory for choral singing in 1942 and, with fellow composer Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez, cofounded the Brazilian Academy of Music in 1945. In 1932 he took charge of music education throughout Brazil. In Brazil for a performance in 1930, Villa-Lobos presented a plan for music education in the São Paulo school system and was appointed director of music education there. The success of his first trip-he made Paris his home base for the remainder of the 1920s-encouraged him to organize and perform in a number of concerts during this period he published more of his work and solidified an international reputation. He composed ceaselessly (about 2,000 works are credited to him in all), and by the time of his first trip to Europe in 1923 he had produced a long list of compositions in every form, from solo pieces for guitar to trios, quartets, concerti, vocal music, and symphonies. In 1919 he met the pianist Artur Rubinstein, who helped advance Villa-Lobos’s reputation by playing his music in concerts throughout the world. Although many critics initially attacked the dissonance and modernity of his work, he persisted in his efforts to merge Western music and the Brazilian vernacular tradition. In 1915 a concert in Rio de Janeiro featured his compositions, and his career was given a vital boost that same year when the firm of Artur Napoleão began publishing his music. He began a serious study of the works of Bach, Richard Wagner, and Giacomo Puccini, whose influence can be noted in his compositions. He returned to the city with a large group of manuscripts and an intimate knowledge of the Afro-Brazilian music of the country’s northern and northeastern regions. Instead, he became a musical vagabond, playing cello and guitar to support himself while traveling throughout the states of Espírito Santo, Bahia, and Pernambuco, absorbing Brazilian folk music and composing his own pieces.ĭuring this period Villa-Lobos enrolled briefly at the Instituto Nacional de Música in Rio de Janeiro, but he was to continue his travels for three years. He left home at age 18 because his widowed mother opposed his “delinquent” friends and wanted him to become a doctor. When they returned to Rio de Janeiro, Villa-Lobos began associating and performing with the city’s popular musicians. While traveling with his family to various regions of the vast country, he also developed an interest in native Brazilian folk music. He learned to play cello (actually a modified viola) at age six and was inspired by music from Johann Sebastian Bach’s A Well-Tempered Clavier that was given to him by an aunt. Under the influence of his father’s weekly musical get-togethers, the boy became interested in music. Villa-Lobos’s father was a librarian and an amateur musician. Keith Jarrett – The Art of Improvisation Part 1/10
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