Abstract:
Camargo Guarnieri is perhaps the most significant Brazilian composer after Heitor
Villa-Lobos. His work Momentos is the culmination of Guarnieri’s efforts as a composer
for the piano. It reveals the composer’s compositional essence through an intimate and
expressive character, and a distillation of form and style. The scope of this dissertation
provides musicians who are interested in performing Momentos with a theoretical
analysis and commentary of the expressive quality of the individual pieces. Momentos
displays a highly chromatic and contrapuntal language that incorporates elements of
Brazilian nationalism—i.e., stylistic aspects derived from modinha, toada, and lundu—
and nineteenth-century compositional techniques such as harmonic ambiguity and
linear chromaticism. A performance of this work, in the form of a recording, is included.