Music From Mountains

No.1 composer of Brazil is hardworking, talkative, frantic Heitor Villa-Lobos. whose bumptious exuberance has turned him into a one-man national musical movement (TIME, Feb. 5). Villa-Lobos wants to give Brazil a folk music. One day he gazed out of his office window in Rio de Janeiro. He gasped. "There," he exclaimed, "was my music, my inspiration. There was the Corcovado, the Sugar Loaf, waiting these millions of years for someone capable of reading and expressing the music of their unique lines. I had found the source of my new, truly Brazilian folklore, without needing to go to the people or to other composers."

To get the contours of Brazil on music paper, Villa-Lobos invented a "millimetric musical chart"--a graph on which he placed, in vertical columns on the left side, the diatonic, chromatic and other scales, with one note for each horizontal line. Villa-Lobos got photographs of Brazil's major mountains, took tracings of their outlines. When he put a tracing on the graph, with the base of the mountain on any note that suited his fancy, he had something.

Villa-Lobos realized that music could thus be charted from business indices, people's profiles (turned on their side), or even a random scrawl. As director of Brazil's public musical education, he tried out his idea on school children. Last week many a Brazilian moppet, playing at composing, drew jagged lines on paper, superimposed them on a millimetric chart (with the chromatic scale only), rushed to a piano to hear the result.

To a U. S. newsman, Villa-Lobos said: "I, who have never seen your city of New York, but who adore it, will set down its melody expressly for you." Seizing a photograph of Manhattan's lower sky line, the composer exclaimed: "The feeling that this photo gives me is distinctly minor, though I know that the interior of the city is distinctly major. I would base this on C Minor." So. making a quick tracing of the sky line, he did. Puffing on a big 7-c-cigar, he sketched out the melody twice, sang it froggily, exclaimed at its Oriental character, finished the composition in an hour and 50 minutes. In its final form, harmonized for voice (wordless) and piano, he had it recorded as New York Skyline Melody. Climax of the leisurely, wandering composition: its climb up, over and down the Woolworth Building.

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