Camargo Guarnieri's ten Momentos for piano : a recording and discussion of stylistic and expressive elements

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.