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

American Music Teacher, August-Sept, 2004 by Deanna Walker

Hello! Welcome to the continuation of my interview with Liduino Pitombeira, currently of Baron Rouge, Louisiana, who was named the MTNA-Shepherd 2003 Distinguished Composer of the Year for Brazilian Landscapes No. 1. His stories of lire as a child in Brazil are rich and fascinating, and I'm thrilled to share more of them with you.

DW: Tell us about your musical development from the beginning.

LP: I think the starting point occurred when I was 12 years old. I started taking guitar lessons with Paulo Santiago, a seven-year-old [Yes, he means 7.] from a family of musicians. He used to play in a small ensemble at church and, at some point, I was invited to play with them. In order to write something for them, I taught myself the rudiments of theory using the church's harmonium in my free time. They all could read music but also were good improvisers because they played "choro" outside church, and this Brazilian popular genre includes a great deal of improvisation. Later, in high school, I joined groups of folk and popular music (including jazz) playing electric bass and also as an arranger. Then, during the first years of college (first as an electrical engineer, then math and finally music) I made my first contact with early music and founded with friends a group to perform early music (especially from the Middle Ages and Renaissance) and Northeastern Brazilian music and research the connections between both types of music. In this group everybody had to play several instruments, and so I played recorders, lute, percussion, krumhorn and psaltery. At that time, I also started taking harmony and counterpoint lessons with composers Vanda Ribeiro Costa and Tarcisio Jose de Lima. Later, in 1991, I started traveling twenty hours every month to study composition, orchestration, aesthetics, harmony and counterpoint with Argentinean-born composer Jos, Alberto Kaplan. These lessons with him occurred during weekends and usually would take the entire morning. Besides analyzing my compositions, he would lecture about several compositional techniques and introduce the works of composers. When I was studying with Kaplan, I had pieces awarded in composition contests. A great moment in my career also occurred at that time when the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet recorded one of my pieces. Kaplan encouraged me to pursue a graduate course in con> position abroad, and so I made contact with several universities in the U.S. and decided to study with Dr. [Dinos] Constantinides. The results came right in the first semester of study with him: the first two pieces I worked with him were both awarded prizes. The first one, Suite Guarnieriwas, was awarded the first prize in a contest in Brazil, and the second one was selected to the ISCM Conference in Luxembourg. At the end of the master's degree, my thesis was awarded a very good prize in Brazil (around $7,500 plus recording). So I have been very lucky with the great teachers I have always had.

DW: What else contributed to the development of your "style"?

LP: Besides the deep contact with my native culture as a performer, my contact with other fields of knowledge, especially physics and electronics (1 worked as a technician in an electronic lab in Brazil for sixteen years.), and my contact with the music of other cultures from the past and the present, especially early music, American jazz and the soundtracks of TV shows from the '60s.

DW: Where did you go to college, and what did you study?

LP: I went to college in Fortaleza (Brazil). The music courses in Brazil are long--the bachelor's of composition usually takes six years.

DW: When did you know you wanted to be a composer?

LP: It actually happened very late in my life. I was approximately 28 years old when I started organizing the themes and ideas from my notebooks and transformed them into serious compositions. The encouragement given by my instructors and my wife (a great performer and also a composer herself) was fundamental in this process.

DW: Is there anything that inhibits your creativity--anything you avoid while composing?

LP: Anything that changes my routine inhibits my process of composition. I like to compose for a long period of time without interruptions (sometimes an entire day). I take short breaks only to eat, to walk and to play guitar. It is difficult, though, to find such a perfect day.

DW: Do you engage in other creative pursuits or hobbies?

LP: Yes. I like painting, drawing and computer programming. In fact, I bought my first computer (a 286) with the money I earned selling some paintings.

Deanna Walker NCTM, is a composer who teaches piano, songwriting and theory at the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Editor's Note: Part one of this interview is in the June/July issue of AMT.