Noite dos tambores silenciosos

In this paper the compositional issues and techniques employed in my D.Mus. Thesis Composition Noite dos Tambores Silenciosos (for symphony orchestra) are discussed. The piece, constituted of three linked parts, exhibits a counterpoint of three distinct kinds of music as the main vehicle of the musical discourse.Two of these musics are connected with Maracatu de Baque Virado and Maracatu Rural, popular musical manifestations found in Pernambuco, a state in northeast Brazil. In a "defragmentation" process, reference materials from the Maracatus are abstractly fragmented and reconstructed according to a technique I call Zin-Zout, implementing in the music a continuous state of transformation, back and forth between micro and macro dimensions. The third kind of music, free of folk references, follows a transformational process built up according to a "palimpsest" technique. In this transformation the hierarchy of the musical parameters changes along with the units of the musical content.These procedures involve not only pitch and rhythm, but also other parameters like timbre, density and register in a structural way, as building elements of the content and form of the work.The defragmentation process establishes some predetermined compositional paths, but permits micro- and macro-level decisions based on intuitive considerations, especially in the manipulation of orchestration and micro rhythms. More systematic, the organization of pitch involves a limited serialism and a variety of modal treatment