Radamés Gnattali is national and worldwide recognized as one of the greatest masters of Brazilian and Latin-American music. His concert work has consistent volume, about 300 pieces, among piano and guitar solos, as well as many chamber and symphonic music.

As far as the popular music is concerned, he also shines with a singular position if compared to his contemporary colleagues. Not only for the volume of his production, but also for his intensive and collaborative presence and action towards the popular musicians always working out with piano players, samba composers, singers and chorões in the daily toil at the radio stations and recording sets. Radamés has always realized and confessed how much he has learned from them.

(…) I have always worked with popular music and I really like it. In fact, I owe it to this that I do something Brazilian today (…)”. “My music is all Brazilian, based on folkloric and urban themes from Rio de Janeiro”.

This explains why Radamés liked to write for his friends so much and his instruments were little contemplated by the composers of his time. His classical music catalog includes concertinos, concertos, sonatas and sonatinas, entertainments and suites for mandolin, accordion, cavaquinho, drums, electric guitar, 7-string guitar, tambourine. And it is from these works that musicians of the greatness of Jacob do Bandolim, Edu da Gaita, Joel Nascimento, Chiquinho do Acordeom, Garoto take the stage of the Municipal Theater of Rio de Janeiro for the first time to perform as concert performers.

Founder of the orchestral arrangement for Brazilian popular music, alongside Pixinguinha, Radamés was also a pioneer in the sophisticated way of orchestrating the simple music of the urban songbook, without ever mischaracterizing it. The symphonic percussionist and drummer Luciano Perrone, famous for having systematized the samba batucada on the drums, in the 1920s, made an interesting comment about this characteristic feature of the maestro friend’s work:

“Radamés is impervious because when he makes popular music it is popular music and when he makes concert music it is concert music. One does not interfere with the other. As arranger and conductor, he makes a symphony orchestra play a samba without taking away its spirit, nothing smells like a symphony”.

In fact, Radamés knew, like few others, how to divide time and inspiration between the erudite and popular genres, in a balanced way, without one getting in the way of the other, establishing a natural and rare communication between aesthetics considered irreconcilable, until his arrival.

Project

The Radamés Gnattali digital catalog of popular music project, selected by the Rumos Itaú Cultural program – 2017/18, adds to the digital catalog of classical music by the gaucho composer, organized by us and released on multimedia CD-ROM, in 2005. , sponsored by the Petrobras Música/2003 program.

In 2006, on the occasion of the centenary celebrations of his birth, we launched Radamés Gnattali’s first website, remaining on the web until 2017 when we took it down to restructure its operating system.

Goals

Conceived and produced by Roberto Gnattali and Adriana Ballesté, the Radamés Gnattali digital catalog of popular music fulfills the following objectives:

. Create the first digital catalog of popular music works by the composer Radamés Gnattali, divided into two distinct categories: a) compositions; b) arrangements.

. Inventory, digitize and catalog in an image bank, all popular music scores – compositions and/or arrangements – collected in the composer’s personal archive and other sources.

. Build and launch on the web the new Official Radamés Gnattali Website, bilingual (Portuguese – English), containing the maestro’s unprecedented digital catalog of popular music.

. Contribute to the preservation and dissemination of the work of Radamés Gnattali, nationally and internationally, expanding the dialogue between the administration of its collection and the user public.

justification

compositions

Radamés composed around two hundred pieces of popular music. If, on the one hand, his concert music was recorded in sheet music, with all the rigor of musical language, cataloged in notebooks and filed in folders, the same was not true of his production of popular music. Not that he stopped writing a composition because it was a choro or samba, on the contrary, we know that Radamés wrote everything. For him, popular or erudite, music was music. However, the master did not devote the same care to his popular repertoire as he did to his concert music. The result of this is that several of his manuscripts were lost, no one knows where, leaving those songs only recordings and/or comments in the press. Although not included in the catalogs on this site, due to the lack of a physical document (the score), even so, we were careful to list all the titles of works by Radamés that we were aware of, always seeking information from reliable sources.

Arrangements

Radamés’ arrangements, which are part of the catalogs of this project, were selected according to the following criteria:

1) Arrangements for your own compositions.
2) Special arrangements (*) for music by other authors, written for chamber ensembles directed by the maestro, such as the Radamés Duo and Aida Gnattali, the Radamés Sexteto, the Camerata Carioca, the Orquestra Brasileira de Radamés Gnattali, among others.
3) Special arrangements (*) for songs by other authors, written for any type of group.

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(*) “Special arrangements” are understood to be the more elaborate ones, in which Radamés made use of compositional resources commonly used in his concert work.