FLOATING SOUND GALLERY

Vienna

Rodolfo Caesar

Rodolfo Caesar. Rio de Janeiro, 1950.
Studies of french horn, harmony and counterpoint with Bohumil Med, contemporary music with Reginaldo Carvalho and analysis with Marlene Fernandes at the Instituto Villa-Lobos. In Paris, I was a stagiaire at the GRM led by Guy Reibel, having also benefitted from the presence of Bernard Parmegiani, François Bayle, Michel Chion, etc. and of my dear colleagues stagiaires, and later from the tutorials on computer devices by Benedict Maillard and Daniel Teruggi. Back in Brazil in 1976, together with friends, we build the Estúdio da Glória, where we could compose and eventually make a living as technicians. It was a time where many partnerships developed with artists from diverse fields like dance, poetry, cinema, theatre and fine arts.
In 1989 I went to Norwich, England, for a Ph.D. with Denis Smalley at the University of East Anglia, where I could concentrate on my subject of interest: listening and composing in their relationship with technology. In 1994 I became a lecturer at the Music School at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, starting its classes of electroacoustic music at graduate and undergraduate levels, in parallel with research grants from the Conselho Nacional de Pesquisas, for which I wrote articles and books, mainly focusing on ‘listening: between the animal and the robot’. Initially it meant just an attempt to criticize technological abuses in music composition, later extending it to a larger and more anthropological scope.
As for my activities as a ‘concert composer', I interrupted them in the final 1990s, due to many factors, one of them my wish to work outside the closed space of the studio, and the closed one of concert halls. I still compose, but mainly as a tool for my research, and of course as a source of my personal pleasure. The principal sounding actors in my studies are insects, anurans, birds and other animals, as well as everything that one may capture during field recordings. Presently, I am studying rhythmic expressions of animals, without bioacoustics or any other behavioural science's ambitions: it's for musical knowledge. Animal's presence is not due to to their individualized ‘sounds’ (which is a word I am always trying to avoid), but to everything else that comes together in our listenings.