Villa-Lobos and Modernism

Villa-Lobos and Modernism: The Apotheosis of Cannibal Music provides a new assessment of the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos in terms of his contributions to the Modernist Movement of the twentieth century. In this profound study, Ricardo Averbach elevates Cultural Cannibalism as a major manifestation of the Modernist aesthetics and Villa-Lobos as its top exponent in the music field. Villa-Lobos's anthropophagic appetite for multiple opposing aesthetics enlightens through the juxtaposition of contradictory elements, leaving a legacy of unmatched originality, a glittering kaleidoscope of sounds that draw from the radical power of Josephine Baker to the outrageous extravagance of Carmen Miranda, from Dada to Einstein's counterintuitive scientific findings, from folklorism to atonality. The constructed analyses use the works of Stravinsky as a familiar and popular touchstone for accessing Villa-Lobos as the leading exponent of an aesthetic movement that has been neglected due to a traditional Eurocentric view of Modernism. Averbach opens up new possibilities for the study of twentieth-century music, in general, while unveiling how much our present aesthetics owes to the Modernist ideas introduced by the Brazilian composer.

Ricardo Averbach is director of orchestral studies at Miami University and past president of the College Orchestra Directors Association.

Acknowledgments
Preface
Chapter 1: The Anthropophagic Aesthetic
Chapter 2: Villa-Lobos, the "Cannibal who Wore Tails"
Chapter 3: The Sad Clowns of Carnival: Polichinelo and Petrushka
Chapter 4: Taking Flight with Two Ballet Birds: Uirapuru and Firebird
Chapter 5: Dissecting Uirapuru
Chapter 6: Breaking Treaties: Amazonas and Le Sacre du Printemps
Chapter 7: Diving into the Amazonas
Chapter 8: Towards a New Assessment of Villa-Lobos
Chapter 9: The Influence of Surrealism in Villa-Lobos's Modernist Works
Appendix 1: The Anthropophagous Manifesto: An Annotated Translation
Appendix 2: Glossary of Musical Terminology
Bibliography
About the Author