Case study on Cannon by Brazilian composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist Hermeto Pascoal, a work for flute, flute humming and pre-recorded sounds, designed as a musical spiritism session and included in the LP Slaves Mass (PASCOAL, 1977). Departing from an artistic drawing of a music staff spiral included in the internal covers of the same LP (PASCOAL e PEREIRA, 1977) and a transcription based on the listening of the track in the same disc, the score of the work was reconstituted and edited in detail (PASCOAL e BORÉM, 2010; included in this issue of Per Musi, p.80-82). The combination of formal, scalar, proportional analyses with the spectral analysis reveal an intimate relation between the musical and extra-musical contents of the work, in which opposing elements dialog: improvisation and the layers of pre-recorded sounds, acoustical sounds and manipulated sonorities, individual and the collective performances, stable and unstable modalities, the popular (the Brazilian embolada, modal jazz, free jazz) and the classical (musique concrète, bimodalism, atonalism, cadenza, recitative) languages, the earth and the spiritual worlds. It presents an original analytical approach of the work based on the "paradoxal separation-fusion continuum", devised and realized by ethnomusicologist COSTA-LIMA NETO (2009). It also includes a context of the religion role in the music of the so-called "mago" (wizard) of the Brazilian popular music.
Hermeto Pascoal; Brazilian popular music; modalism; atonalism; spiritism and music; electro-acoustical music; music analysis