University of Iowa Professor Michael Eckert has released a new CD, Brazilian Dreams (MSR Classics).
From the MSR Classics website:
"Brazilian Dreams reflects what may seem an unpredictable turn in the creative activity of an American composer born in California and living in Iowa. Concerned throughout my earlier career with writing in a modernist, post-tonal idiom, I gradually found myself on a musical itinerary that led me to write in the style of chôro, a music from a country I have never seen. A genre of Brazilian popular music that developed in Rio de Janeiro in the late nineteenth century, chôro has its roots in a performance style for social dances such as the polka, mazurka, waltz, and maxixe, combining harmonic and formal features of European music with Afro-Brazilian rhythms. Beginning with a trio of guitar, cavaquinho (a relative of the ukulele) and flute, chôro ensembles expanded to include the pandeiro (a Brazilian tambourine), and seven-string guitar. The latter provided a bass line, improvised as a counterpoint to the tune played by the lead instrument, typically flute or bandolim (the Brazilian mandolin). For American listeners, chôro may seem reminiscent of traditional New Orleans jazz in emphasizing ensemble improvisation, and of ragtime in its emphasis on syncopation. Flourishing during the 1920s and 1930s, chôro was marginalized in the 1950s and 60s by American musical imports and the rise of bossa nova, but underwent a revival in later decades.
The classically-trained pianist Ernesto Nazareth (1864-1934) brought the chôro idiom to the keyboard, and in turn many of his “Brazilian tangos” later became part of the popular chôro ensemble repertoire. Among other Brazilian classical composers, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Radames Gnattali composed chôro-inspired art music for concert performance. Most of the music on this CD could be called “erudite chôro,” a term denoting chôro composed for concert performance by instruments associated with European classical music."
Eckert is a professor in the School of Music, part of the UI College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. He teaches music theory and composition, and has been on UI faculty since 1985. His awards for composition include: the Bearns Prize from Columbia University, a Charles E. Ives Scholarship for the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and the Music Teachers National Association Distinguished Composer of the Year award.