Chôros


Chôros is the title of a series of compositions by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, composed between 1920 and 1929.

Origin and conception

The word chôro is Portuguese for "weeping", "cry", and came to be the name used for music played by an ensemble of Brazilian street musicians using both African and European instruments, who improvise in a free and often dissonant kind of counterpoint called contracanto. In this context, the term does not refer to any definite form of composition, but rather includes a variety of Brazilian types. Villa-Lobos described the basic concept of his Chôros as a "brasilofonia"—an extension of the popular street-musicians' chôro to a pan-Brazilian synthesis of native folklore, both Indian and popular.
The tenth work in the series is for mixed choir and large orchestra, and quotes at length from a popular song, originally composed as an instrumental schottische, Yará, in 1896 by :pt:Anacleto de Medeiros|Anacleto de Medeiros. In 1907, :pt:Catullo da Paixão Cearense|Catullo da Paixão Cearense transformed it into a popular song by adding words to the melody, retitling it "Rasga o coração". The Villa-Lobos work bears this phrase as a subtitle.

History

The series of Chôros was composed between 1920 and 1929, but the pieces were not all composed in numerical order. Sometimes, when Villa-Lobos was working on one piece in the series, an idea would occur to him for another that seemed to him to belong much further along, and so he would compose a new Chôros around that rhythm or theme and assign it a higher number, in the expectation of writing pieces to go in between. For example, whereas Chôros no. 7 was written in 1924, the Chôros 3, 4, 5, and 6 were not composed until 1925 and 1926, and the Introdução aos Chôros was written only in 1929.

The ''Chôros'' series