2 – SEARCHING THE OTHER
João Bosco highlights that “Jobim the arranger” provided “Jobim the composer” with significant boost, and reveals the importance of constantly handling referential music matter composed by other authors, who present themselves as “matrices” for triggering a personal creative process.
JOÃO BOSCO
00:00 sources
01:05 searching the other
A point of interest in Jobim’s musical career is
the fact that he was always in contact with other composers’ music,
and brought it to his piano to make arrangements.
Basically, this is a form to enrich,
which must have been very significant in his process of making music.
Speaking for myself,
I never take the guitar to make a song.
I take the guitar to make someone else’s song.
SARAIVA
To remember something…
JOÃO BOSCO
That’s it, to remember someone’s something
and then I start playing the song,
my way, since I don’t read scores.
I don’t know exactly what chord is being played,
but I’ve got an idea, which I start developing.
And it is in this search for the other that you find yourself. […]
02:00 Sonho de Caramujo (Snail’s Dream) (J. Bosco/A. Blanc) [i]
That is the explanation I have about how these paths start coming up,
with the other always leading us somewhere.
By presenting their artistic references, the interviewees also “lead” us to different places, inviting us to approach the musical tradition of two continents that equilibrate by complementarity in the process of molding the Brazilian music: Europe and Africa. The descriptive transcriptions of the music examples carried out by Guinga and João Bosco are presented respectively in – 2.3 – harmonic-melodic matrices, subchapter that studies the relations of the “height” axis, inherited in its harmonic sense from the European written tradition, and in -2.2 – rhythmic matrices, which work different perceptions of rhythm in light of the African referential of essentially oral tradition.
The next part of the text approaches a person that, as we have just seen, is vital for the musician who composes songs: the lyricist.