It's "Heitor". Everett Helm has this to say in
Dictionary of Contemporary Music (ed John Vinton):
". . . had his first music lessons from his father, a writer, cellist, and 'man of the people'. Other facts of V-L's early life are difficult to establish, partly because of his own contradictory statements and anecdotes, some of which appear to be pure fantasy. After his father's death in 1899 he earned a meager living playing the cello in cafes. A rebellious lad, he had little formal education, musical or otherwise. In his youth he travelled to the north and interior of Brazil, where he developed a burning interest in folk music. Darius Milhaud's sojourn in Brazil (1917-18) may have fanned V-L's ambitions as a composer. Artur Rubinstein 'discovered' him in 1919 and performed his works widely. Thanks to a travel grant from the Brazilian govt, he spent 1923-30 in Europe, chiefly in Paris, then returned home where he held a series of official positions connected with music education. In 1942 he founded and became the director of the Conservatorio Nacional de Canto Orfeonico, an in 945 he established the Brazilian Academy of Music. His travels took him to other Latin-American countries, Europe, and (from 1944) the US, frequently as conductor of his own music. his last years were clouded by illness; only his native vitality and willpower enabled him to keep going.
V-L's enormous output (over 3000 works) is marked by unevenness of quality and diversity of styles. A gifted musician who worked chiiefly by instinct, he possessed a high degree of technical ability that enabled him to compose at great speed and almost automatically (while conversing, for instance). Self-criticism was not his strong poin. He seldom revised his works extensively, and he did not discriminate carefully between his good and his inferior compositions. French influences in his music are sometimes patent, as in the impressionistic Floral Suite (1917), the Satie-like Ironic and Sentimental Epigrams (1921), or the Milhaud-derived harmonic style of the Nonet (1923). The sophisticated banalities of the fourth Choros reflect the spirit of Milhaud's Le Boeuf sur le toit and the vogue for banal cafe music. Few pieces, however, are sheerly imitative.
While a V-L style, as such, can scarcely be said to exist, there is nevertheless a personal quality, or 'inflection', in his best music. In some instances it is the Brazilian flavour he imparted through the use of folk music traits (a predilection for syncopation, lush chords and chord progressions, broad melodies with a predominantly falling line, and the juxtaposition of sharply contrasting elements); in others it is more a question of atmosphere and feeling, especially the nostagia that haunts Brazil and Brazilians and that can only be epressed by the word saudades, signifying a combination of longing, tenderness, and profound sadness as exemplified in the fifth Choros, 'Alma brasileira'. The vigorous works, however, have an almost savage quality, verging at times of primitive kinetic energy, as in the finale, 'Toccata', of the Bachianas brasiliera No 8.
Except in choral settings and piano pieces, V-L seldom quoted the rich repertory of Brazilian folk music, which ranges from primitive Indian chants and the languorous songs of the sertao in teh northern interior to the 'cowboy' songs of the south adn the anonymous popular music of the cities. However, this music shaped many of his melodies and rhythms, as did such popular-music forms, as the 19th-century modinha, a sentimental song, or the choros, a highly rhythmic dance piece. Many works have local connotations (such as the four orchestral suites, 1937, entitled The Discovery of Brazil), others are full of local colour (3 Indigenous Poems, 1926), and still others are programmatic (Origin of the Amazon, 1950). The most innovative aspect of V-L's stle was his lavish use of percussion instruments, many of them indigenous to Brazil.
Although he possessed an excellent contrapuntal technique, V-L was a melodist par excellence. He was a thoroughgoing romanticist (he called himself a sentimentalist), who showed a cavalier disregard for theories and questions of style as such. There is, in fact, no direct line of development in his music; some of his most 'radical' works were written in the 1920s, while many of his later works were 'conservative'. In some pieces, notably the Bachianas brasileiras, in which he envisaged a combination of Brazilian folk music and Bachian counterpoint, he sought a union of local and universal elements. In others (for example the String Quartet No 5, subtitled 'Quarteto brasileiro') he set out to be purely Brazilian. He was the greatest of a long series of Latin American nationalist-folklorist composers and the first to produce works that could hold their own in the international concert repertory. he founded no school, however, and his stylistic influence on younger composers has been slight."
― sundar subramanian (sundar), Wednesday, 19 February 2003 17:27 (twenty-three years ago)