Hans Joachim Koellreutter: an avant-garde experience in the tropics? (1939-1951)

Abstract

The initiation of Hans Joachim Koellreutter intellectual and musical trajectory in Brazil was given, mainly, by his participation in the musical society group Música Viva, which since its inception in 1939 until it's end in the early-50s, will assume in the core of the group serious aesthetic and political disagreements (which are not, somehow, disconnected). These differences show us a large portion of the discussions that were engaged in the Rio de Janeiro around the aesthetic and political direction of contemporary music and its relation with socio-cultural issues that were in vogue. Despite the constant lack of cohesion in the core of the group, both the bibliography studied and the documents collected point to the group as an avant-garde movement. However, none of the studies about Koellreutter and the Musica Viva aim to think the avant-garde concept developed by the group (and if this is thought as a concept in the period), just as there is no attempt to discuss the conceptual tradition of the term avant-garde. Thus, it is noticing this historiographical gap, that this research aims to understand Koellreutter's intellectual trajectory in order to develop the specificities of his performance inside the musical society with the intention to contribute to the theoretical discussion historically built around the concept of avant-garde (music) in Brazil.