Construção da expressividade na música brasileira:

identidade e intersubjetividades compartilhadas

Abstract

Problem

       In Western classical instrumental practice, the learning of techniques and modes of expressing emotions renders expressivity a performative act. The construction of interpretative decisions encompasses criteria of aesthetic value and achievement that range from spontaneity to the intentional pursuit of expressivity in specific contexts. According to Alessandri et al. (2016), understanding these values is central to grasping the performative and critical experience. Monteiro (2019) proposed that expressivity is related to shared singularities among pianists when facing Brazilian composers. Complementarily, Ribeiro (2018) discusses how pianism and the hybridization of languages shape the performer's identity. Given the trajectory of the first author — a Basque pianist trained in Europe and Brazil — this study questions how aesthetic and achievement values are configured when pianists come from distinct sociocultural contexts.

Objectives

            To explore how musicians from diverse sociocultural settings share the aesthetic values and the realization of works within the Brazilian repertoire.

Method (only for empirical research)

            Two expert-level pianists (P1 and P2) participated in this exploratory study, both having Works from the Brazilian Cycle by Villa-Lobos in their repertoire. In the first stage, the focus was on reports of previous experiences with the national repertoire. The second stage comprised a focus group with the first author and the two participants.

Results 

            Comparative analysis revealed distinct identification profiles grounded in the relationship between the self and the work. For P2, identification occurs through affinity and enculturation, with the music perceived as an organic "mother tongue." In this profile, expressivity is a direct extension of identity, characterized by an embodied "sense-gesture" where cognitive mediation operates automatically. From the perspective of Merleau-Ponty (1945/1999), P2 manifests the body-proper (corps propre) as the center of an operative intentionality: the meaning of the work is not an object of thought, but something that already integrates their gestures through habit, which functions here as a motor power that dispenses with conscious intellectual representation.

            In contrast, P1 presents a constructed identification, marked by a conscious dissociation between their personality and the character of the repertoire. For this pianist, performance is configured as a theatrical "acting," requiring the construction of a public persona to fulfill the work's expressive demands. While P2 is guided by a prior kinesthetic experience, P1 utilizes academic understanding and structural analysis as bridges to executive security. In this perspective, mediation in P1 moves away from pre-objective unity, approaching an act-intentionality. For P1, the body functions as a body-object under the monitoring of a consciousness that uses affective imagination to evoke states that are not immediately organic. 

 Implications

            The data indicate divergent phenomenological paths between "being" and "representing." It is suggested that expert proficiency can be individualized both by organic intuition and by the rigor of the constructed gesture. The distance between the self and the work constitutes, therefore, a space of technical and cognitive mediation where performative identity is deliberately forged, opening perspectives for future investigations into the plasticity of the expressive gesture in different contexts of enculturation.