The CAMERATA IN FUGA performs DE PROFUNDIS, a work based on qualities of feeling!

Could we ground a musical system on qualities of feeling? Could we use qualities of feeling as a ground for a compositional method? How to deal with qualities of feeling expanding them, instead of going back to subjective, coded emotions or banal clichés?

De Produndis is one of the works in which Edson Zampronha first tried to answer to these issues. This work is being performed by the excellent Brazilian choir Camerata in Fuga and Thiago Cazarim (piano) in a series of really consistent, convincing and thrilling concerts! See the Camerata in Fuga agenda here! 

Camerata in Fuga & Thiago Cazarim (piano)

In the late 1980s Edson Zampronha composed four works for choir and piano based on these ideas. De Profundis is the second one and it takes 6 minutes long. It was reviewed in 2008 to be still more effective. 

Edson Zampronha's strategy was to focus on how we identify qualities of feeling in a piece of music instead of creating a perhaps useless catalogue of these qualities. His alternative was to use a set of musical signs for leading the listener to conclude a specific quality of feeling. Music, in this sense, is a special construction in which the conclusion is one or more qualities of feeling. 

These musical signs are symptoms-like: when in face of a series of signs like these it is possible to imagine a cause that explains them. However, here the cause is just a quality of feeling. And we do that without thinking about it! When a set of symptom-like musical signs are appropriately arranged they might lead listeners to conclude one exact and precise quality of feeling, which can be beautiful, very impressive and complex, so complex and admirable that we have no words to express it. 

This is a real alternative to the avant-garde cul-de-sac: here a quality of feeling is concluded, instead of being reduced to a structure, expressed or eliminated.

Besides, these symptoms-like musical signs are just one possible case Edson Zampronha has tried in De Profundis. Other possibilities exist, other rich possibilities to ground a controlled musical thinking for achieving specific qualities of feeling, admirable qualities that deeply touch us.  

De Profundis is a work in which I am glad to say that these ideas work, opening a fruitful path that is still to be more explored. Edson Zampronha himself has explored these ideas in many other works. The performance of the Camerata in Fuga and Thiago Cazarim (piano) is superb! Do not miss their thrilling concerts!