The Music I Wish Existed
- Rafael Piccolotto de Lima
- Jul 29
- 13 min read
When Admiration Becomes Composition
No musical creation comes out of nowhere. Every work emerges within an artistic context and takes shape through contact with earlier music, people, and traditions. Some influences develop over time; others begin with the impact of a work heard only a few times but capable of remaining in our memory for many years.
Admiration is one of the forces that drives this process. Certain works move us deeply, awakening both the desire to understand them and the urge to participate artistically in that world. This curiosity opens paths that may later reappear in our own creative practice.
In this sense, looking at the artists who have shaped us also reveals something about who we are artistically. If I were asked to name some of the composers and arrangers who moved me and left a mark on my creative work, I would mention figures such as Villa-Lobos, Tom Jobim, Hermeto Pascoal, Egberto Gismonti, Moacir Santos, Nailor Azevedo “Proveta,” Gil Evans, Maria Schneider, Vince Mendoza, and Bob Brookmeyer.
This would not be a definitive list or a complete account of my influences. This article focuses on some of these artists, selected because their work entered directly into my creative process and offered elements that were ultimately transformed within my own musical practice.
My relationship with each of them also developed differently. In some cases, I spent long periods listening to particular works and returning to them often. In others, a piece moved me deeply after only a few hearings, remained in my memory, and resurfaced years later, transformed by other experiences. With some composers, I followed scores and orchestral scores as I listened to their music; with others, the relationship developed primarily through listening. I also had the opportunity to meet some of them personally, observe them working with a musical group, and speak with them.
Even when a score was available, this contact did not always take the form of systematic, exhaustive analysis. Often, I simply followed the writing, observed how particular sounds had been constructed, and allowed the experience to feed my imagination. New compositional questions began to emerge from this relationship between listening and artistic practice, mediated by memory. Those questions, in turn, led to works that brought these references into dialogue with my own experience and creativity.
In some works, the question was what paths might emerge in my own musical writing when I took as a reference the constructive logic that fascinates me in Moacir Santos, particularly his way of developing a composition from rhythmic cells and concise melodic gestures. In others, it meant bringing the sound world of Banda Mantiqueira into dialogue with approaches to form and musical development that I discovered later through the music of Maria Schneider and Bob Brookmeyer. I was also interested in what might happen when Hermeto Pascoal’s creative freedom encountered my own experiences between Brazil and the United States, popular music and concert music, improvisation and orchestral writing.
From Listening to Composition
The starting point was the work of these artists. What I heard enchanted me and awakened in me, as a lifelong student of music and a composer, the desire to understand how they had achieved those results. I tried to recognize the choices and ways of thinking that sustained those creations.
More than reproducing procedures, I wanted to absorb these ways of thinking and bring them into the context of the projects in which I was involved. This process nourished my creativity, offering new tools for formulating questions and imagining paths. When one of these questions continued to fascinate me and resonated with an artistic project or opportunity, it could become a compositional path and, eventually, a new piece.
Samba de Proveta: A Conversation with the Language of Brazilian Big Bands
What fascinates me most about the music of Nailor Azevedo “Proveta” is the natural way in which elements of samba, choro, and the jazz orchestra tradition seem to coexist within a deeply Brazilian musical language.
My relationship with this world deepened during the undergraduate research project I conducted at the Institute of Arts at UNICAMP, with support from FAPESP, on Proveta’s compositions and arrangements for Banda Mantiqueira. The research helped me understand that the music’s singularity did not reside in any isolated procedure, but in the way the writing, the traditions that nourished the repertoire, and the musicians’ experience complemented one another in the construction of a distinctive language.
Samba de Proveta emerged a few years later as a new development of the questions that the research had left open. In writing the piece, I sought to bring this sound world into contact with the approach to form that fascinated me in Maria Schneider’s compositions, especially her way of developing material and creating harmonic paths capable of sustaining a dramatic arc across an entire work. This encounter took shape through my own experience with Brazilian music and writing for large jazz ensembles.
The composition was recorded in 2015 for Orquestra Urbana’s album Pelos Ares, with Proveta as guest soloist. Before recording his part, we listened to the piece together and discussed different possibilities for his solo. As he listened, he imagined the music as the course of a night in São Paulo, beginning with the anticipation of early evening, building toward the collective energy of a performance, and eventually returning to the journey home.
I had not composed the work around this narrative, but his reading revealed a dramatic continuity that was deeply connected to my interest in formal development. Proveta recognized elements of samba and choro, but observed that the way the materials were organized struck him as innovative. Even the passages in 5/8 and 7/8, which are uncommon in these traditions, seemed integrated into the flow of the music rather than interrupting it.
During our conversation, he also remarked that traditions remain alive because different generations of musicians continue to reinvent them. For someone who had studied his work for so many years, this observation held particular meaning because it touched directly on the principle that had guided the composition: allowing what I had learned from this language to be transformed through contact with other experiences and ways of organizing music.
Entre Outras Coisas: Learning from Moacir Santos
I have great admiration for the music of Moacir Santos. What impresses me most about his work is not only its originality, but his ability to create a deeply Brazilian world without relying on predictable formulas or stylistic clichés. His compositions often begin with concise materials rooted in Afro-Brazilian culture, which are transformed by an entirely personal imagination.
There is an apparent simplicity in his music that has always drawn my attention. Not an obvious simplicity, but the kind that seems inevitable once we hear it, even though it is extraordinarily difficult to construct.
In many of his works, Moacir Santos organized the composition around a specific thematic core. This core could take the form of an extended melody, but it often appeared in the condensed form of a brief melodic shape or an easily recognizable rhythmic figure. From that core, the architecture of the piece developed and acquired its identity.
The title Entre Outras Coisas came from the way Moacir Santos referred to many of his works, calling them his “coisas,” or “things.”
In the composition, I bring together materials from different works by Moacir Santos, reorganizing them within my own language as though several of his “coisas” were speaking to one another. The title suggests a work situated among Moacir’s “things” while also pointing to the emergence of a new musical “thing” from that encounter.
Entre Outras Coisas was commissioned in 2024 through the Lamont School of Music at the University of Denver, following an initiative by Remy Le Boeuf in his role as a professor, for performance by his students in one of the university’s big bands.
Brookmeyer Motives: Musical Development and Transformation
During my years of study in the United States, I heard accounts from composers and musicians who had studied with or worked closely with Bob Brookmeyer about the central role motivic development played in his approach to teaching composition. This emphasis can also be heard in his works, where small musical ideas are continually transformed and assume different functions across the form.
Many of these compositions do not depend on the presentation of an extended melodic theme in a traditional format. Their architecture unfolds more continuously as concise cells are expanded, fragmented, and recombined to produce new musical events.
Motivic variation has a history that long predates Brookmeyer. What interested me was observing how this way of thinking manifested itself in writing for jazz orchestras, in works where the rigorous development of material coexisted with spaces for improvisation and the musical personalities of the soloists.
As I analyzed some of his compositions, I selected motives and ideas that struck me as particularly fertile. I created variations from them and used those new versions as the initial material for Brookmeyer Motives. From there, the materials continued to transform and began to shape the course of my own piece.
The title brings these different layers together. Brookmeyer Motives refers both to the importance Brookmeyer placed on motivic development and to motives from his own works that, through successive variations, gave rise to the materials of the composition.
Recorded with the Frost Concert Jazz Band in 2013, Brookmeyer Motives received a distinction in the Original Composition for Large Ensemble category at the 37th Annual DownBeat Student Music Awards the following year.
Negative Space: The Space Between Two Moments
In Negative Space, the dialogue was with Vince Mendoza. I have always admired his ability to create expansive harmonic spaces, transparent textures, and forms that seem to breathe naturally.
This connection became more concrete during my doctoral research at the University of Miami, when I analyzed Poem of the Moon. Its flow in 6/8, its structure built from harmonic suspensions, and its sense of continuity without definitive resolution became part of the conception of Negative Space and shaped part of its musical trajectory.
Negative Space also returns to a compositional interest that was already present in my music: working with pedal points and ostinatos. I had previously explored these devices in Sob(re) Pedais, a composition I recorded in 2015 for Pelos Ares, Orquestra Urbana’s first album. In that work, I was interested in the tension created by a point of support that remains in place while the rest of the music changes.
In Negative Space, pedal points and ostinatos reappear within a 6/8 movement with a jazz waltz feel, helping to sustain the harmonic suspensions and the sense of expectation that runs through the piece. This return shows how the same musical question can resurface at different moments, transformed by new references and by another stage of my life.
The concept of negative space refers to the area between objects, events, or experiences. Although it may appear empty, it possesses a shape, beauty, and possibilities of its own. Musically, I explored this concept through harmony that remains suspended, creating instability, expectation, and the sense that something is still about to happen.
The work was the final composition I wrote during my doctorate, as I prepared to leave Miami and move to New York. I found myself between a chapter that was ending and a life I did not yet fully know. The harmonic suspension thus also came to express that experience: an interval in which the past was already beginning to recede, while the future had not yet assumed a definite form.
Voa Hermeto: Freedom as a Creative Process
Written as a tribute to Hermeto Pascoal, Voa Hermeto grew out of my admiration for his creative freedom and for an imagination capable of turning any material into music. Hermeto has always fascinated me for the way he built a language of his own, expanding possibilities found within the Brazilian musical experience.
This attitude toward creation became the starting point for the composition, particularly what Hermeto called “universal music.” The term did not describe a generic language shared by everyone, but a highly individual musical world: expansive, open to different influences, and deeply marked by his way of thinking about and making music.
Musically, Voa Hermeto is organized around two contrasting moments associated with very different creative attitudes. The first has a lyrical, suspended, almost timeless character. The flutes move to the foreground within the woodwind section, and the melodic writing contains a subtle reference to Música das Nuvens e do Chão, one of Hermeto’s compositions that I particularly love. The connection remains beneath the surface, especially in the melodic contour.
The suspension then gives way to a section driven by a distinctive groove. It is a samba in seven, organized through an internal rhythmic mechanism that allows the irregular meter to feel like a natural part of the groove.
To develop this structure, I analyzed several pieces recorded by Hermeto Pascoal and his big band on the album Natureza Universal. In those recordings, I paid particular attention to the way the wind sections take on a rhythmic role, distributing repeating figures among the instruments and interlocking them to form the groove itself. This approach to distributing rhythmic material became one of the foundations of the second part of Voa Hermeto and was reshaped within the composition’s architecture.
In the piece, the big band functions as an ensemble capable of moving between great precision and freedom. The writing establishes detailed harmonic and formal structures while also incorporating open solos and passages of collective improvisation guided by specific instructions. As a result, some textures can change from one performance to another without losing their function within the work’s trajectory.
Written for big band, Voa Hermeto was premiered by Orquestra Urbana at Sala São Paulo.
From Tribute to Orchestral Reinvention
Abertura Jobiniana, a work that later led to my Latin Grammy nomination, emerged during the creation of a project presented by the National Symphony Orchestra of Costa Rica in tribute to Tom Jobim. The original idea was to develop a kind of symphonic medley of bossa nova themes, but I proposed writing an original overture that would engage with Jobim’s musical world through a more fully compositional approach.
The work quotes melodic motives, sonorities, textures, and harmonic trajectories from his music, but reorganizes them within a new symphonic work. Rather than presenting a sequence of familiar themes, I sought to transform features of Jobim’s musical world into the raw material for an original orchestral overture.
Fantasia Gismontiana grew out of a collaboration with Russian pianist Asya Korepanova, whom I met while we were both studying at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. Our mutual interest in developing a project led to the idea of writing a work that she could perform and record.
The virtuosic character of her playing and the equally prominent role of the piano in Egberto Gismonti’s music helped define the starting point. The instrument became the protagonist of a composition that moves through different musical environments and places the soloist in constant interaction with the orchestra.
To construct this trajectory, I drew on materials found in different works by Gismonti. These included a harmonic progression from Palhaço, a piano figure from Maracatu, and elements from Lôro. Removed from their original contexts, these materials became characters in a new musical narrative.
The fantasy form allowed these elements to reappear from different perspectives, combine with one another, and follow paths far removed from those of the original compositions. Rather than becoming a succession of independent references, the piece creates a single trajectory in which Gismonti’s materials are incorporated into the relationship between piano and orchestra.
Some time after the recording, I personally gave the score to Egberto Gismonti following his concert at the 10th Festival Etapa de Música de Arte, held at Teatro Etapa in Valinhos on August 21, 2016. Later, he sent me an extensive message sharing his impressions of the work and what he recognized in my artistic practice. Receiving this response directly from the composer who had inspired the piece was deeply meaningful to me.
Another important example is Asa, Zóio e Matulão, written in response to a commission from the Henry Mancini Institute in 2012. Because that year marked the centenary of Luiz Gonzaga’s birth, I chose to use the occasion to create a work in his honor.
In addition to composing the piece, I took part in its preparation and conducted its world premiere at Gusman Concert Hall in Miami on November 30, 2012. On that concert program, the work was placed in dialogue with Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring.
To write it, I drew on motives from Asa Branca, Assum Preto, and Pau de Arara, reworking them within a chamber-music aesthetic that evokes the rhythmic and melodic world of Northeastern Brazil.
In this case, the dialogue extends beyond Gonzaga to the way Copland constructed an American soundscape in Appalachian Spring through an imagined form of musical nationalism. In Asa, Zóio e Matulão, that landscape is shaped by the emotional and rhythmic memory of Northeastern Brazil and reimagined within a chamber-music context.
The Conversations Yet to Happen
Many of these compositions began with a listening experience that left a question open. Some quickly found a project in which they could take shape; others remained with me for years, changing along with my experience before becoming music.
The music I wish existed grows out of the questions I recognize in the work of composers I admire. By bringing those questions into my own experience, I find a way to continue that history and, through composition, make it my own as well.
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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