Writing Brazilian Music for Orchestra: Between Popular Music, Jazz, and Concert Music
- Rafael Piccolotto de Lima
- Aug 2
- 15 min read
What does it mean to write concert music in Brazil?
The question seems simple, but it carries tensions that have shaped the history of Brazilian music for many decades.
Since conservatories and institutions of musical education became established in the country, much of composers' training has been tied to the European concert music tradition. Harmony, counterpoint, analysis, orchestration, and composition were taught through models that reached Brazil as part of this cultural heritage.
At the same time, Brazil developed one of the richest and most diverse musical cultures in the world. Samba, choro, baião, maracatu, frevo, música caipira, Brazilian instrumental music, and countless other traditions became part of the everyday experience of generations of musicians.
The relationship between these worlds has not always been simple.
Throughout the twentieth century, many composers sought to bring concert music into dialogue with Brazilian culture, creating works that engaged with rhythms, melodies, sonorities, and forms of musical organization found throughout the country. Brazilian academic composition also maintained an intense dialogue with international currents, particularly different strands of European and North American contemporary music. These orientations never formed completely separate fields, but they generated recurring tensions surrounding identity, language, belonging, and artistic creation.
One of the questions that interests me most within this discussion has no simple or single answer. Instead, it opens a field of possibilities for both reflection and musical creation:
How can a contemporary orchestral language engage deeply with Brazilian musical culture without giving up the sophistication, experimentation, and artistic ambition that are part of the concert music tradition?
Over time, this question became one of the central concerns of my work as a composer. Many of the pieces I have written for orchestras, big bands, and other large ensembles grew out of my attempt to develop personal responses to this challenge.
A Question I First Encountered at University
When I entered the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) to study composition, this division was already present in a very concrete way.
There were separate degree programs. On one side were those connected to the concert music tradition, including composition, conducting, instrumental performance, and voice. On the other was the popular music program.
Today, this coexistence may seem somewhat more natural, but for many years most Brazilian institutions did not even offer higher education in popular music or any alternative to the classical or art music tradition.
The separation was not merely administrative. In many composition programs in Brazil and abroad, the idea of contemporary creation was primarily connected to international currents developed throughout the twentieth century.
Depending on the institution and the period, this could involve serial and post-serial practices, electroacoustic music, spectral thinking, explorations of timbre and noise, extended instrumental techniques, or highly complex forms of organization and notation. These strands profoundly expanded the resources available to composers. They never formed a homogeneous field, nor did they prevent the development of culturally specific responses.
Despite this diversity, regional identities did not always occupy the center of their aesthetic concerns. Within the university, however, the division was more complex than a simple opposition between the composition program and popular music.
In composition circles, creative references tended to center on modern and contemporary aesthetics that had challenged the tonal, formal, and timbral models of the tradition. In this environment, the ruptures introduced by the twentieth-century avant-gardes appeared not only as part of music history, but as paths actively encouraged for the creation of new works.
In programs connected to instrumental performance, voice, and conducting, the center of gravity usually lay in another period of concert music. Training focused primarily on the historical repertoire, from the Renaissance through the first decades of the twentieth century, with a strong emphasis on works written before the ruptures brought about by atonality and other modern movements.
The popular music program constituted a third environment, focused primarily on jazz, instrumental music, and different Brazilian genres. My education therefore unfolded among three spaces that coexisted within the same university but worked with very different repertoires, practices, and ideas about musical creation.
One of the reasons I chose Unicamp was precisely the presence of these different worlds within the same institution. Although I had entered the composition program, I also wanted to work alongside popular musicians, take courses related to that field, and participate in environments where improvisation was part of the musical practice.
I was not interested in abandoning the techniques, experimentation, or possibilities offered by contemporary concert music. I wanted to understand how that artistic ambition could coexist with the rhythms, approaches to performance, and cultural references that had also shaped my musical experience.
Even before I fully understood what I was looking for, I already sensed that the musical questions that interested me did not fit entirely within a single tradition.
→ READ MORE: Between Classical Composition, Jazz, and Brazilian Music: My Musical Education at Unicamp
A Tradition That Never Disappeared
While part of contemporary composition was developing new possibilities in dialogue with international aesthetic currents, another lineage continued to treat Brazilian musical culture as a field of artistic investigation. These paths were never completely separate, but they did not always organize their questions around the same points of reference.
Although discussions of national identity took different forms throughout the twentieth century, there is a relatively continuous thread in Brazilian music that has always drawn my attention. It is a lineage of composers who regarded the country's musical culture not as folklore to be merely illustrated, but as raw material for the creation of new musical languages.
Villa-Lobos is perhaps the best-known example of this tradition. His importance lies not only in the incorporation of Brazilian elements into concert music, but in his attempt to build a language of his own from those elements.
Something similar can be observed, in very different ways, in the work of Radamés Gnattali. Rather than reinforcing boundaries between popular and concert music, Radamés spent much of his life moving among radio, recording studios, concert halls, and orchestras, creating a body of work that frequently escaped those classifications.
In later generations, Tom Jobim developed this dialogue across different dimensions of his work. Although he is remembered primarily for the songs that became central to Brazilian music, his output also extends to instrumental music and symphonic writing. An important example is Brasília, Sinfonia da Alvorada, with music by Jobim and text by Vinícius de Moraes, created for the inauguration of Brasília and written for symphony orchestra, chorus, and narrators.
This symphonic dimension of Jobim's work also connects directly with my own trajectory. Brasília, Sinfonia da Alvorada was among the references I studied while creating Abertura Jobiniana, a composition I wrote for a National Symphony Orchestra of Costa Rica program devoted to the music of Tom Jobim. The piece received a 2013 Latin Grammy nomination in the Best Classical Contemporary Composition category.
While this relationship appears directly in Tom Jobim's symphonic writing, Egberto Gismonti enters this reflection through a different path. His output is concentrated primarily in solo and small-group work rather than in a recurring career as an orchestral composer. His importance to this discussion lies in the way concert music investigations interact in his work with rhythms drawn from Brazilian popular culture and transformed through a highly individual perspective. His harmonic constructions do not belong exclusively to either of these worlds, but contribute to the creation of a musical territory of his own. It was this language, rather than a model of orchestral writing, that became the starting point for my composition Fantasia Gismontiana, which I dedicated to him.
None of these composers created the same music or shared exactly the same aesthetic goals. What brings them together within this reflection is the way they treated Brazilian musical culture, at different moments, not as something external to concert music, but as part of compositional thought itself.
This is the aspect of this lineage that interests me most. Their works show that investigating new sonic possibilities does not require abandoning the cultural references that shape our musical experience. Complexity, sophistication, and experimentation can also emerge from a deeper engagement with those references and from their transformation into artistic language.
It is within this tradition that I recognize myself as a composer. Not because there is a single aesthetic to preserve or reproduce, but because this openness continues to shape the works I write for orchestras, big bands, and other large ensembles.
Contemporary Concert Music and Its Audience
There is another question connected to this discussion: how does contemporary concert music relate to its audience?
Since the mid-twentieth century, different currents have profoundly transformed composition. Serialism and post-serial movements proposed new ways of organizing pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and musical structures. Electroacoustic music incorporated recorded, processed, or electronically produced sounds. Spectral thinking, the exploration of timbre and noise, and the development of extended instrumental techniques expanded what could be treated as musical material. In another direction, minimalism investigated repetition, pulse, and gradual transformation. These currents never formed a single field, but they opened new possibilities for writing, organizing sound, and listening.
Some of these transformations also created challenges for their incorporation into more traditional institutions. Certain works came to require specialized techniques, electronic equipment, less conventional forms of notation, or an amount of rehearsal time that is not always available within an orchestra's routine. Others moved away from tonal references, melodic continuity, and formal models with which musicians and audiences had greater familiarity.
This does not mean that this music disappeared from concert halls. Some works entered the repertoire, while many others found greater continuity in festivals, universities, and ensembles devoted to new music. Even so, the relationship among these languages, institutions, and audiences remains an open question.
The presence of Brazilian cultural references does not offer an automatic solution to this relationship. It does, however, allow contemporary creation to engage with musical experiences that are part of the background of many musicians and listeners. This is one possible path, rather than a single model, for considering how new works can find their place and build relationships with audiences.
Three Works from Different Moments in My Career
The questions presented so far run through different moments of my work. To observe them in concrete terms, I chose three pieces written at intervals of roughly a decade. They do not represent stages in a linear evolution or offer successively better versions of the same answer. Each emerged in a different professional context, was conceived for a particular instrumentation, and established its own relationship among notation, Brazilian references, and performance practices.
These works show how the same investigation can take very different forms. Inconsciente belongs to the beginning of my career and brings together a symphony orchestra and a big band, with improvisation concentrated in one soloist. About a decade later, Fantasia Gismontiana carries this encounter between languages into a fully notated work for piano and orchestra. In Voa Hermeto, premiered in 2025, the investigation reaches a composer-led big band, with several soloists, guided collective improvisation, and different degrees of freedom integrated into the composition.
Inconsciente: The First Encounter Between Symphony Orchestra and Big Band
The first of these works is Inconsciente. It already existed as a composition for a small instrumental group when, in 2004, at the age of eighteen, I had the opportunity to rewrite it for a project bringing together the Campinas Municipal Symphony Orchestra and Big Band Canavial, a group formed by musicians, teachers, and students connected to the region's jazz and instrumental music scene.
Inspired by rhythms from Northeastern Brazil, particularly elements associated with baião and maracatu, Inconsciente came to inhabit the space created by the encounter between the symphony orchestra and the big band. Most of the material was notated, while improvisation appeared only in a soloist's part. The work did not offer a definitive answer to the questions I was beginning to formulate, but it allowed me to explore them concretely in a professional large-ensemble context.
I remember experiencing that process with tremendous enthusiasm, but also with considerable insecurity. Who was I, a first-year composition student, to write a work on that scale? How would the orchestra's musicians receive the material? How would the conductor respond? And how would audiences react to music built from references that did not normally occupy the center of the traditional symphonic repertoire?
At the end of the concert, however, something happened that would become deeply significant to me. Among those in attendance was conductor and arranger Cyro Pereira, one of Brazil's great figures in writing for large ensembles and one of the founders of the Orquestra Jazz Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo, now known as the Brasil Jazz Sinfônica. After the performance, I was introduced to him as a young composer who had taken part in the project.
His response was generous. He showed enthusiasm and encouraged me to continue exploring that direction.
Looking back, that episode had a profound impact on my career. For the first time, a territory that had existed only as an intuition began to feel like a possible path, a space in which references from Brazilian music could become part of contemporary orchestral writing without requiring me to choose a single side of that divide.
Fantasia Gismontiana: A Fully Notated Hybrid Language
About a decade after Inconsciente, Fantasia Gismontiana offered a very different configuration for this investigation. Composed for piano and orchestra, it is a fully notated symphonic work with no sections intended for improvisation. Both the solo part and the orchestral material are completely defined in the score.
From the standpoint of writing and performance, the work is more closely aligned with the concert music tradition. Its musical language, however, continues to explore a hybrid territory in which procedures associated with concert music engage with elements of Brazilian popular music through Egberto Gismonti's artistic universe.
Fantasia Gismontiana is an original composition conceived as a tribute to Egberto Gismonti. Musical ideas, melodic passages, harmonic progressions, and figures found in different works by the composer appear within the fabric of the piece, reorganized and transformed into a new narrative for piano and orchestra.
The goal was not to orchestrate a specific work by Gismonti. My task was to imagine how materials drawn from different compositions could be reorganized on a symphonic scale and contribute to the construction of a new work for piano and orchestra. This entire dialogue is built through notation.
The recording made at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami, featuring Russian pianist Asya Korepanova and students from the university, places this investigation at another moment in my career. The work grew from questions that had begun to take shape in Brazil, but it was realized in a different institutional environment by performers with other experiences and musical references. In this context, its language took shape through the fully notated material and the interpretive work developed from the score.
Voa Hermeto: Between Brazilian Music, Jazz, and Concert Music
In 2025, more than two decades after Inconsciente, Voa Hermeto presented another configuration for this investigation. Premiered by Orquestra Urbana at Sala São Paulo, the work emerged after many years of writing for big bands and other large ensembles.
Choosing Hermeto Pascoal as a point of departure was not incidental. In this context, I am interested in his work less as a source of materials to imitate than as an example of a creative stance.
Hermeto has always seemed to me one of the most radical and inventive figures in Brazilian music. His work is often associated with instrumental music, improvisational practices, and small groups, but it also embodies an attitude that I consider particularly important: a willingness to build a language of his own in which Brazilian references do not appear as secondary elements in relation to other musical traditions.
To me, this stance is as experimental as much of the avant-garde music produced throughout the twentieth century, although it organizes its questions from a different point of departure. While many contemporary currents developed languages shared by an international circuit, Hermeto built his universe by expanding elements rooted in his own musical and cultural experience.
It was this stance, rather than the reproduction of specific characteristics of his music, that guided the conception of Voa Hermeto. If Inconsciente captured an early intuition, this work began from a language developed over many years and from a more conscious command of how Brazilian references, notation, and interpretive freedom could participate in the same architecture.
Its point of departure was not to adapt elements of Brazilian music or jazz so that they might come to belong to concert music. The work emerged precisely from a territory in which those boundaries no longer provide an adequate explanation for what is being created.
This way of thinking engages directly with the idea of Third Stream, formulated by Gunther Schuller to describe music born from the encounter between jazz and concert music. One of the questions present in my doctoral research was what happens when this encounter also incorporates Brazilian rhythms, performance practices, and cultural references. Voa Hermeto represents a later artistic development of that investigation.
→ READ MORE: Blurred Distinctions: What My Doctoral Research Taught Me About Jazz, Concert Music, and Hybrid Musical Languages
→ READ THE COMPLETE DISSERTATION: Blurred Distinctions; Beyond Third Stream, in the University of Miami's official repository.
The work was written for big band, an instrumentation historically associated with jazz, but its instrumentation alone does not determine the music's identity. Its trajectory combines lyrical sections with passages driven by Brazilian grooves. At other moments, figures, textures, and procedures inspired by Hermeto Pascoal's experimental freedom transform these references without simply reproducing traditional patterns.
Throughout the piece, highly structured moments coexist with different degrees of creative freedom. There are several soloists, improvisations guided by detailed harmonic and formal structures, and passages of controlled collective improvisation in which the musicians receive specific directions for generating textures that change with each performance.
The goal was not to use improvisation as a decorative element, but to integrate it into the architecture of the work. Detailed notation, rhythms connected to Brazilian musical culture, and improvisational practices within the performance do not function as independent layers. The language of the composition emerges from the interaction among these elements.
For this reason, the premiere at Sala São Paulo held particular significance. Although the hall is associated primarily with the concert music tradition, its programming also occasionally welcomes projects that cross these boundaries, including work by the Brasil Jazz Sinfônica and, on that occasion, Orquestra Urbana.
Giving the world premiere of Voa Hermeto in that space did not mean transforming the work into classical music or distancing it from its relationship with jazz and Brazilian music. It meant recognizing that a creation born from the encounter among these traditions could also occupy one of Latin America's leading concert halls. The work did not need to be classified as belonging exclusively to jazz, Brazilian music, or concert music. Its identity emerged precisely from the dialogue among these traditions.
Brazilian Orchestral Music Is Still Being Written
When we speak about Brazilian orchestral music, there is a natural tendency to look to the past and to works that have already become part of its history. This repertoire remains a fundamental reference, but the territory continues to evolve. New works continue to be written, new projects emerge, and different composers continue to expand its possibilities.
In 2024, I conducted Del’Arco Orquestra in a concert devoted to Brazilian music at the theater at Shopping Iguatemi in Campinas. The program included works by Villa-Lobos and Tom Jobim alongside compositions of my own. The coexistence of these repertoires did not present Brazilian creation as a closed chapter, but as a living tradition in which works from different periods could share the same stage and create new relationships with one another.
Experiences such as this help answer, however provisionally, the question that opened this article. Writing concert music in Brazil today does not correspond to a single aesthetic, nor does it require every composer to place national identity at the center of their work. New music can engage with international experimental currents, the historical repertoire, local cultural traditions, or different relationships among these worlds.
In my own work, the answer begins with the decision to treat Brazilian musical culture as an active part of the language itself. This presence does not depend solely on quoting melodies or using particular rhythms in readily recognizable ways. It appears in how musical materials are conceived and transformed, and in the relationship each work establishes between notation and performance practices. In some compositions, this includes different spaces for improvisation. In others, the entire dialogue is incorporated into the score.
If I tried to answer the question that opened this article, "What does it mean to write concert music in Brazil?" my answer would not fit within a definition. The same is true of the more specific question guiding this reflection: how can a contemporary orchestral language engage deeply with Brazilian culture without giving up the sophistication, experimentation, and artistic ambition of concert music?
My answer lies in the works I have been writing and in the many others I still want to compose. These, however, are only the answers I have found along my own path. Other composers will find different paths within the richness of Brazilian musical culture and the diversity of possibilities available to contemporary creation. It is up to each of us to build music that makes sense in relation to our artistic experience and the culture in which we participate.
The continuity of this creative work, however, does not depend on composers alone. Musical institutions also carry a cultural responsibility to create spaces in which new works can exist. This means encouraging and compensating creative work, providing the conditions in which projects can be developed, and allowing this repertoire to be rehearsed, performed, and brought into contact with audiences.
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About the Author
Rafael Piccolotto de Lima is a composer, arranger, music director, and educator. A Latin Grammy-nominated composer and recipient of multiple international awards, including 13 DownBeat Awards and honors from ASCAP, he develops artistic projects at the intersection of Brazilian music, jazz, and orchestral writing. His work also encompasses recording production, research, education, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
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