Harry Crowl is perhaps an unpaired figure in Brazilian musical landscape. A skilful composer which seems to be at work in every single moment, always observant with eyes (and ears!) wide open, he owns the seriousness and constancy requested to a de facto composer. Refusing to accommodate himself in the comfort of yet discovered paths, he often opens ways to a music which is equally pictorial and (why not?) philosophical.
This natural curiosity led him to develop new musical formulas and structures to fulfil his purposes. He has revisited as well old forms to give them back their original sense. In this way, his Sonatas concern the real meaning of the word: ‘suonare’ (to sound) and rescue the sensorial pleasure of the form. The praxis of a permanent superposition ‘old-and-new’ reflexes as well his activity as a musicologist.
The musical attitude of Harry Crowl is an international one, which, nevertheless, does not forget the Brazilian element, expressing it through an idiom both personal and universal. It reflects as well a man constantly interested not just in the exchanges among other artistic domains, as painting or literature, but whose curiosity leads to the translation into music of their inner and subjective values.
From the domain of literature, for example, it is notorious how the symbolist poetry exerts a kind of fascination on him. In a broader sense, his restless attention to the timbre on each musical purpose is analogue to the synesthetic treatment recurrent in the symbolist production. Not surprisingly, some of his songs were composed on poems by Dario Vellozo (1869-1937) and João da Cruz e Sousa (1861-1898), two of the most important exponents of symbolism in Brazilian literature.
In his most recent music, his inspiration is delivered from any previous idiomatic cliché of contemporary music and materializes itself into an increasingly personal speech, full of his own idiosyncrasies. With a huge knowledge of repertory, some of his compositions bring playful quotations and reproduce other compositional techniques. Being a savant man and a hairsplitting researcher, the authority of his music instigates us to a new musical understanding. His musical text, based on a freely-built atonalism, flows in a nonlinear structure, inviting the listener to travel through a sort of stream of musical consciousness, always attentive to the resources of each instrument. Actually, for a better appreciation of his music, one must guides himself towards the field of purely musical experimentation. Indeed, listening to it, we dive into a new world of possibilities.
Knowing him since 2003 and being his pupil during a number of years allowed me to follow the genesis and maturation of some of his pieces as Transeuntes and Marinas for piano and his 3rd and 4th Symphonies, as well as the premières of compositions as his second Flute Concerto, as well as to watch him on his activities as the president of the Brazilian section of ISCM. Through the appreciation of his works, I could also understand better the mechanisms by which his sensitivity operates and observe the depth of the mills of his inventiveness.
Here you can read a little interview where he talks about his music and life:
1) Tell us about your main influences (or the formers of your musical thought)
I have drawn influences from many different sources. The music of Villa-Lobos, Schönberg, Lutoslawski and Messiaen, as well as early music by Monteverdi, Portuguese polyphonists and Brazilian colonial music rank among the most important ones. I could also mention that the experience of form in other art expressions, such as literature and visual arts, have also influenced me.
2) In which proportion the musicological activity has influenced your compositional process?
It does occasionally. Cannot say that it is there all the time, but I have already developed musical forms that I took from 18th century religious music. I consider musicological research sometimes as a very practical tool for composition. To me, it’s very stimulating to devote some thinking on how composers from the past in completely different environments solved some composition problems.
3) How do you evaluate the panorama of contemporary music nowadays?
That’s not an easy question. Although, one could say that never in western world history so much music has been written, the diversity of styles is like a true maze. There are so many interspersing of cultures and means of making music that our “traditional” classical music has turned into a tiny niche within this thick jungle of musical trends. However, I’m most inclined to say that the early avant-garde experiments from the 1960’s and 70’s have lost their breadth. Young composers all over tend to be more towards having a wider audience rather than having academic or critics recognition. There are a lot more professional possibilities than some 30 or 40 years ago. I find it most challenging!
4) Even knowing about a natural predilection for the most recent production and the difficulty on choosing one among many works, what is your dearest composition?
As you put it, having written so much music to this date, it’s impossible to point at just one. That might be changed over time, naturally. At this moment, I could say that my chamber opera “Sarapalha”, based on a short story, by the renowned Brazilian writer Guimarães Rosa, is my dearest work.
5) Having travelled intensively through different places of the world, including a handful of less visited territories as Iraq, for example, how does this experience contributed to your edification as human being and as a composer?
It’s always very important to me to experience the cultures and ways of other peoples. While working in Iraq, in 1982, as a translator for a Brazilian company, I experienced the music, the language and many other cultural aspects of both Arabic workers from many origins, as well as from Turkish workers that I had the opportunity to hang around. I still regard as very dear a solo piano piece I wrote then, “Taghai’urun”(mutation), blending extended techniques with irregular meters, such as 13/4, taken from Arabic-Andalusian songs, and very polyphonic writing based on a medieval tune of the same origin.
6) Tell us some words about your compositional process.
Most of times, I usually draw notes or rhythmic patterns from names, figures or abstract shapes and start to play with them. I do many sketches before actually start writing the piece. I think of timbres and their combinations, try many harmonies; serialize the notes, not necessarily using tone rows. Most of all, I like to think of a piece as a labyrinth where the listener will be guided without knowing where it’s heading.
Harry Crowl and Raul Passos in September 2008
Raul Passos
Music
http://musicabrconcerto.blogspot.com/
Abstract
Harry Crowl is a Brazilian-American composer born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 1958. He studied both in Brazil and the USA, at the Juilliard School of Music He currently lives in Curitiba, southern Brazilian state of Paraná, where he is the Artistic Director of the Federal University of Paraná’s Philharmonic Orchestra and Professor of composition and music history at the Superior School of Music and Fine Arts of Paraná (EMBAP). He also produces and presents radio broadcasts on both classical and contemporary music for the State of Paraná Educational Radio. Harry Crowl’s production comprises all genres of instrumental and vocal music ranging from solo and chamber music to orchestral, from songs to opera covering a range of 120 pieces to this date, and it has been performed and broadcast all over Brazil and elsewhere, especially in Europe and Latin-America. As a musicologist, he discovered, compiled, edited and published some important late 18th century music by Brazilian composers of great importance to early Latin-American music.
No. 14 plus minus 