Music review — Federal University of Bahia
English Translation: Alex Pochat
This work, written in 2015 for accordion, triangle and zabumba, lasting less than 7 minutes, was the result of a commission by the Música Agora na Bahia (MAB, Salvador-BA), debuting during its fourth edition, along with other Bahian composers’ premieres for the same ensemble. The main purpose of those commissions was to bring together two culturally remote frontiers such as the popular forró and the so-called contemporary scholar music.
Combining the dance music aspect of forró with the quest to move further between the borders, I’ve looked for inspiration in the electronic dance music. Thus, technological elements that manifest themselves sonorously in the EDM (Electronic Dance Music) could find analogies in the writing and structuring of this new work for instruments purely acoustic. In the creative process, a number of technomorphisms were used, a central concept of my doctoral research (in progress at the time of writing this text), see Holmes (2015). The main technomorphisms in Za-boom! are as follows:
Composition of loops using Reason (Propellerheads company software designed for electronic music, which emulates analog equipment such as synthesizers and drum machines), working on ReWire with score notation software, to where rhythms and accents have been transcribed, thinking of the zabumba as both a bass and snare drum, and the triangle as an electronic drum open and closed hi-hat. Loops are presented at the beginning in a simpler way and gradually the ornaments are added, in a typical progressive construction of electronic dance.
C.29-44: “Filtering” process on the accordion by means of repeated chords in the left hand, the same ones that are doubled and go changing inversions and register in the right hand, as a simulation of a synthesizer filter that highlights a part of the spectrum more than the rest.
In the same bars, percussion rhythms and accents were randomly generated by a software algorithm, transcribed into the score and repeated as 4-bar loops.
C.76: The accordion plays a 16-note bass sequence (derived from the original one shown in C.45 for the first time), emulating a typical 16-step a synthesizer sequencer, where each step can be given a different pitch. This sequence begins in a very slow tempo and goes in continuous BPM acceleration, to which the percussion, also with 16 steps, is added, ending in the dancing feeling again.
C.124: Then the same part of the accordion will be varied to represent a delay effect, with repetitions of the truncated sequence, decreasing with each new attack.
Finally, outside the technomorphism scope, it is important to note that the notes of the main sequence of the accordion (C.45) respond to the pushing of neighboring bass buttons of the left hand, allowing a relatively agile movement, with the speed that the performance of this piece requires.
Za-boom! was premiered on 16 December 2015 by Edinho de Lima (accordion), Érica Sá (triangle) and David Martins (zabumba) during the IV MAB at the Goethe Institut (Salvador).
Holmes, Bryan. 2015. “Música e tecnomorfismo: surgimento do conceito e estudos preliminares.” Resonancias vol. 19, nº36: 95-113.