"Desmemória"

report about the recriation of a song

Abstract

This text reports a creative journey that began based on the listening of the work Everywhere at the end of time by composer James Leyland Kirby. Kirby's composition, which he signed with the alias The Caretaker, is a musical representation of memory damage caused by Alzheimer's disease. One of the expressive resources used in the work was the electronic deterioration of a 1930s American love song named Heartaches. An exercise was proposed to me: that I should create new lyrics for this love song, approaching the same subject of Everywhere at the end of time - Alzheimer's effects - so that, after that, it could be arranged and performed as Choro. The exercise was developed based on procedures frequently employed by songwriter Chico Buarque to write song lyrics: these procedures were found in testimonials given by him through his musical career. Two test versions were created plus a definitive one, through partnership, named Desmemória (Unmemory): the three versions are about memory loss and the difficulty of registering new ones, treating Alzheimer on its potential analgesic effect by erasing, amongst many memories, heartaches from the past. One of the goals of the creative exercise is to reproduce Buarque's way of putting lyrics into melodies, so the main resources used in the process were the use of a thesaurus and a rhyming dictionary, followed by attention to some literary principles such as poetic forms and prosody. By the end of the report the access link to a recorded version of the choro song Desmemória (Unmemory) is made avaliable so the listening can be possible.