Meet the 2003 MTNA-Shepherd: Distinguished Composer of the Year.(Forum focus: composer commissioning)(Interview)

Hello! Welcome to the continuation of my interview with Liduino Pitombeira, currently of Baron Rouge, Louisiana, who was named the MTNA-Shepherd 2003 Distinguished Composer of the Year for Brazilian Landscapes No. 1. His stories of lire as a child in Brazil are rich and fascinating, and I'm thrilled to share more of them with you.

DW: Tell us about your musical development from the beginning.

LP: I think the starting point occurred when I was 12 years old. I started taking guitar lessons with Paulo Santiago, a seven-year-old [Yes, he means 7.] from a family of musicians. He used to play in a small ensemble at church and, at some point, I was invited to play with them. In order to write something for them, I taught myself the rudiments of theory using the church's harmonium in my free time. They all could read music but also were good improvisers because they played "choro" outside church, and this Brazilian popular genre includes a great deal of improvisation. Later, in high school, I joined groups of folk and popular music (including jazz) playing electric bass and also as an arranger. Then, during the first years of college (first as an electrical engineer, then math and finally music) I made my first contact with early music and founded with friends a group to perform early music (especially from the Middle Ages and Renaissance) and Northeastern Brazilian music and research the connections between both types of music. In this group everybody had to play several instruments, and so I played recorders, lute, percussion, krumhorn and psaltery. At that time, I also started taking harmony and counterpoint lessons with composers Vanda Ribeiro Costa and Tarcisio Jose de Lima. Later, in 1991, I started traveling twenty hours every month to study composition, orchestration, aesthetics, harmony and counterpoint with Argentinean-born composer Jos, Alberto Kaplan. These lessons with him occurred during weekends and usually would take the entire morning. Besides analyzing my compositions, he would lecture about several compositional techniques and introduce the works of composers. When I was studying with Kaplan, I had pieces awarded in composition contests. A great moment in my career also occurred at that time when the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet recorded one of my pieces. Kaplan encouraged me to pursue a graduate course in con> position abroad, and so I made contact with several universities in the U.S. and decided to study with ...