Paulo Silva on Carlos Gomes: notes on the teaching of counterpoint in the 19th and 20th centuries

Abstract

In 1936, an edition of the Revista Brasileira de Música in commemoration of the birth centenary of Antônio Carlos Gomes (1836-1896) was published. In this volume, an interesting article by Paulo Silva dealt with the studies of counterpoint and fugue of the author of Il guarany. Silva, professor of counterpoint and fugue at the National Institute of Music, selected examples of Gomes’ exercises conducted in Italy, under the guidance of Lauro Rossi, professor and director of the Milan Conservatory. In many of these examples, errors or slips are pointed out which Silva attributes, at least in part, to the shortcomings of Rossi’s teaching method. The present work seeks to find the motivations, aesthetic and ideological, underlying the comments present in his article. The figure of the partimento and its consequences in the contrapuntal formation of Gomes were the starting point for the discussion on the teaching of counterpoint in Europe and Brazil in the Nineteenth and first half of the Twentieth Century. Furthermore, a mention is made of the Brazilian musical milieu at the time in which Silva’s article was published.