Date: October 15, 2011
Location: Auditorium of the UFMG School of Music

Genetic criticism originates in the field of literature and, as its proponents conceptualize it, is a method of approaching literature that focuses not on the finished work, but on the writing process. In this sense, it involves deciphering not what the writer intended to say, but what he said. Furthermore, it involves deciphering how what he actually said was processed.

As a critique of the genesis of the creative process, the purpose of the research discussed here is to shift genetic criticism from the realm of literature to music. It seeks to demonstrate that it is possible to rediscover a composer’s creative acts through the traces he left behind, as if once again the compositional process unfolded in real time; it seeks to retrace the movement of the hand on the paper, in what remains as traces of the moment-by-moment compositional activity.

The successive stages of musical composition are witnessed by the rewritings and the ebb and flow of the creator’s thought, and their analysis is made possible by the indices contained in the manuscript’s graphic space, as Almuth Grésillon puts it. For this researcher, “manuscripts are not finished texts, but rather drafts. Avant-texts are generally made up of units ‘in statu nascendi,’ in the process of being written.”

The principles of genetic criticism have been appropriated by the field of musical composition, primarily in works produced since the second half of the last century. In Brazil, the incorporation of the principles of genetic criticism into music is still tentative. In this sense, this researcher’s work parallels studies of genetic criticism developed particularly at the Center for Research Support in Genetic Criticism at USP and the Center for Genetic Criticism Studies at PUC/SP, and aims to broaden the approach toward the creative process in musical composition.

Musical composition, as a decision-making process, can be its own object of investigation. In this sense, genetic criticism presents a viable scientific procedure, with its methodological principles that, if applied to other areas of knowledge, can be transposed as is to music. By delving into the genesis of the creative process through its evidence, genetic criticism in music can invest specificity in the study of the decision-making process that characterizes the exercise of musical composition. Its assumptions can reveal a process, always unique, through the traces of different orders that the composer left along the way.

Speaker: Professor Celso Gianenetti Loureiro Chaves – Institute of Arts of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul – UFRGS.

Panelists: Professor Maria Zilda Cury – Faculty of Letters of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG)
Professor Flávio Terrigno Barbeitas – School of Music of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG).