Matheus Reguta Kulik - Toada do Mestre Carlos

"This piece is a piano arrangement of a distant echo from the past, a Catimbó melody recorded in Northeastern Brazil in 1938 by the Missão de Pesquisas Folclóricas (MPF, "Folk Research Mission"). Catimbó was a syncretic folk religion that mixed African, Native American and Christian beliefs. Catimbó sessions mainly consisted in the invoking of spiritual entities (called "Mestres", i.e. "Masters") by a ceremonial master (called "Mestre" as well) in order to act as healers and oracles in the participating community. Although now extinct as a faith in itself, Catimbó elements (most notably the centrality of the Jurema, a shrub with psychoactive compounds, in the ceremonies, ritually consumed as a beverage or smoked) are shared by other African-Brazilian religions such as Umbanda, Candomble and Santo Daime.

There are some 65 Catimbó melodies recorded by the MPF. What called my attention to them was a certain structural oddness: being so simple and monophonic they are full of colour and contrast. In some way they are the opposite of gregorian chant, using tritones and broken chords as a basis for melodic contour and for modal transformations (i.e. between major and minor thirds, but of other modal degrees as well) and a metrical rhythm, with off-beats and syncopated accents within very regular time structures. I tried to insert this monophonic oddness into the harmonic and intervallic elements of my arrangement; I hope thus not to create a "sound postcard" of Northeastern Brazil ("Macumba para turistas" in the words of Oswald de Andrade) but rather to invoke this distant spiritualized echo to our modern ears, preserving its otherness as a symbol of a very different world."

-- Matheus Reguta Kulik

Performed by Irene Huang
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