The Cries, the Carnivals

This is "VillaLobos Week"--according to the U.S. League of Composers, which is celebrating the first North American visit of South America's best-known composer: plump, talkative, 57-year-old Heitor Villa-Lobos. It is also the bouncy Brazilian's second week of Manhattan performances and the halfway point in his U.S. schedule of guest-conducting (Los Angeles' Janssen Symphony, Manhattan's Philharmonic, Stokowski's New York City Symphony, the Boston Symphony).

Thus far, besides treating several thousand music lovers to samples of his 1,500-odd works, Villa-Lobos has acquired an ecstatic admiration for tall buildings and vanilla ice cream. In the encounter of two such dynamic protagonists as Villa-Lobos and the U.S., onlookers expected even more to happen before he returns to Rio de Janeiro, where he is the city's amateur three-cushion billiards champion as well as musical overlord of Brazil's Ministry of Education.

The Villa-Lobos legend (TIME, Jan. 29, 1940, et seq.) goes back to his youth, when he picked up a living playing in Brazilian cafes and theaters. When he be came known as a composer, he voiced a characteristic self-tribute: "Better bad of mine than good of others." Sent to France in 1922 on a Brazilian Government scholarship, he told his Paris teachers: "I didn't come to study with you; I came to show you what I've done."

What Is Inspiration? Now a celebrity who frankly enjoys basking in his own effulgence, Brazil's music boss has made music study compulsory in Brazilian schools. He freely advises all young Western Hemisphere composers to stop leaning on Europe for inspiration and look to their own landscape, folklore, traditions. As for himself: "I do not know what the word inspiration means. . . . When I write, it is according to the style of Villa-Lobos."

His style, as tingling U.S. ears have been discovering, is a dazzling, ingenious mixture of jungle boogie-woogie, sophisticated orchestration, 5-16 rhythms, Latin dance tunes and instrumental oddities. Manhattan's Philharmonic -Symphony, playing two of his major works (Choros No. 8 and 9) last week with Villa-Lobos himself directing, had to improvise for such strange percussion properties as the caxambu (a gravel-filled bottle).

As Villa-Lobos explains it, his music is emphatically not "a device for amusement or for quieting the nerves." His Choros are an effort at "a serious music . . . with all the elements of my country welded together--the birds, the forests, the mountains, the Indians, the cries, the people, and the gay, boisterous carnivals." Manhattan critics agreed that Villa-Lobos leaves out very little.

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