Published in Music in Middle Ages and Early Modernity

PDF download:

27.09.pdf

In this work I investigate the use in Father José Maurício Nunes Garcia’s Sinfonia Fúnebre (1790) of what the American musicologist Robert Gjerdongen calls Schemata. According to Gjerdingen, Schemata are abstract structures that were part of the Galant Style, either in Central Europe as in the Colonies, as Brazil is the case. In order to do so, I make a brief overview of the editions available for analysis; review of the Schemata concept in Gjerdingen and other authoritative authors; elaborate a table that articulates form, tonality, Schemata bar by bar; and last, exemplify the use of this Schemata in musical excerpts of the work. I conclude that the systematic and very sophisticated use of the Schemata by the Brazilian composer demonstrates that he is by no means just a mere imitator of the Galant Style, but instead, a great master of this idiom and capable to organize the Schemata at his will to fulfill his expressive needs as it is the case in this Sinfonia Funebre.