This coming Sunday, May 25, guitars, flutes, percussions and musical sculptures will take over Inhotim to comprise a Contemporary Music Miniseries.  Starting at 3 PM, groups from Minas, Corda Nova, Flutuar Orquestra de Flauta, UFMG Percussion Group and Quarteto Cretinos e Plásticas will perform in the Institute’s gardens, a setting the mixes nature and art in a unique way.  To invite you to experience all this, Inhotim’s Blog has asked each group to tell you what makes their music contemporary.  Check it out!

“Percussion might be the most emblematic instrument in Contemporary Music.  This is so because it encompasses a diversified range of sounds and instruments, incorporating everyday objects and other ones invented by the musicians themselves, generating an almost infinite sound material for the composer of contemporary music. But contemporary percussionists are not limited to sound.  Their willingness to experiment allows their music to incorporate materials found in other areas, such as drama, literature, circus, dance, technology. Thus, maybe the most contemporary thing about the work performed by UFMG Percussion Group is the absence of prejudice and the group’s constant interest in expanding the musical language.”  Fernando Rocha, member of the UFMG Percussion Group

“Corda Nova has established itself as a representative of its time.  With contemporaneity in our DNA, the group has focused on working with living composers, and so far has taken to stage only works requested specifically for its concerts.  Fresh ink on paper alone does not define the synch of the group with its time:  Corda Nova’s members are immersed and synched with musical production as well as with current thinking, whether by means of extreme artistic proposals or through their academic and humanity background.  This ranges from the group’s insertion into community cultural life in their homeland to experiences with communities which are not well integrated with the Western world.  All of this has been reflected on the group’s production, culminating in creations that often extrapolate the strictly sonorous world towards the plastic and scenic worlds, as well as concepts and poetics that are a possible portrait, a facet of contemporary Brazil.  – Stanley Levi, member of Corda Nova.

“Freedom guides the work and aesthetical orientation of Flutuar Orquestra de Flautas, a group that refuses to be attached to a specific artistic current which might limit their spontaneous expression.  This is what grants this group artistic contemporaneity and originality:  boldness in experiencing and creating.  Everything at Flutuar is freedom: the choice of repertoire, the structuring of the arrangements, the action on stage, the easiness of its members, and especially, the joy of playing as a group. ” – Alberto Sampaio, member of Fluturar Orquestra de Flauta.

“More than being identified with the modes of production of an era, being contemporary means to be detached from this era, so as to question it in the way you act, play, think, and, in our case, make music.  We, from Cretinos e Plásticas, investigate, explore and interrogate the musical and artistic work at the same time we make our music.  From preparing and producing the instruments, to the poetic construction of the sonorous space by way of improvisation, getting close to other forms of art expressed in the instrument itself, taking ownership of this instrument’s plasticity, what we do is explore and get detached from the way music is made and thought of today.” – Marco Scarassatti, member of Quarteto Cretinos e Plásticas.