Composer: Marcelo Tupinambá (1889-1953)

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Tupinambá was a Brazilian composer who lived in Sao Paolo.  Tupinambá is a pseudonym of Fernando Lobo.   Lobo was a civil engineer who left the profession to play and create music in 1914.

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Tupinambá is spelled as Tupynambá in the score, but IMSLP and wikipedia use the former spelling.

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Date: ?

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Original Instrumentation: Piano

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Why this one:

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I wanted to get something non European, and it doesn't hurt that the Lacome Tango I did has by far the most streams of all the work I've done for LMP.  (The subtitle on this one is "tanguinho" which I think means "Little Tango.")

 

Like my earlier tango, this is a piano piece that i arranged for string trio with my notation software.  Unlike my first tango, I was fortunate that this one broke down in to bass, alto, and treble parts fairly intuitively and ended up being pretty easy to play.  (The Lacome tango adaptation resulted in some really difficult left hand fret work.  

 

I did some poking around online and "Cabocla" seems to mean "mixed race" or maybe "peasant."  I don't know how either of those terms, if they even apply, relates to the musical style here.

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Description:  

 

Key:  Am

Time: 4/4  BPM=85

 

This piece has an overall structure of AABBCA, with each section being 16 measures.  The bass line which I, not shockingly, put in the cello has the common tango short-long-short long long rhythm. throughout.  

 

Part A has an abac substructure and stays in A harmonic minor.  (The viola plays G#s, which in A minor its the raised 7th which is the characteristic of harmonic minor.)  I put the main melody in the violin here while the viola hits a lot of accent chords.

 

Part B has ratchets up in intensity and has the substructure dede.  The cello begins the phrases with eighth note walk downs before repeating the tango rhythm.  The violin and viola are mostly playing the same rhythm here and harmonizing with each other.

 

Part C modulates to A major and has a different character than the previous sections, almost like it's taking a breath and the music feels, for lack of a better word, "cheerier."

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The piece closes with a return to part A, in the home key of A minor.

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Performance:

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I did this all in one session, first the cello then viola then violin.  I didn't have any trouble, really, as I had practiced a lot.  Unusually, I made myself a scratch cello track on my phone to practice the viola and violin part to.   The rhythms of the viola and violin were hard to count against just a metronome but weren't hard to "feel" with the reference track.

 

I very much didn't have a strong sense of what this was going to sound like when all the parts were together and it's a really neat piece, so one of the recording challenges, especially when doing the final violin part, was not to get distracted while I heard all the parts together for the first time.   

 

This one was a lot of fun, and i hope my arrangement / interpretation doesn't make any tango enthusiasts cringe too hard.

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Album Art:

 

My father took this picture of Sao Paolo in 2004.