Villa-Lobos’s Nonetto (1923): a savage’s music?

Composed during his first trip to France, Heitor Villa-Lobos' Nonetto (1923) is intended to be a link between French musical taste between the two wars and a Brazil teeming with popular music. Influenced by the model of Igor Stravinsky and Edgar Varèse, this nonet received an enthusiastic reception from the Parisian public. The piece has a single movement of about thirteen minutes. It contains many singularities of construction that this article aims to analyze. Its unusual formation, the presence of a mixed choir, strangely underused, the extreme fragmentation of the discourse, the incantatory melodies, the abrupt accentuations, the rhythmic scansion, the rhapsodic and composite structure: everything seems to indicate that this is music for "savages", according to the criteria understood as such in interwar France, eager for exoticism and a change of scenery. Unlike the young European nations, sometimes cultivating a quest for purity in national expression, like the ethnographic work of Béla Bartók, Villa-Lobos restores the perception of a multiplicity of influences, which the Nonetto and other scores of the same period such as Uirapurú (1917) or Amazonas (1917) manifest by a relative juxtaposition of the way in which communities often very separate live: Portuguese-speaking immigrants (or not), descendants of slaves, Amerindians. It will be a question of putting into perspective the characteristics of the "savage" in France throughout history and then showing, through musical analysis, how the Brazilian composer integrated them to his advantage in this work, which constitutes a decisive milestone in his rich musical production.