Helza Cameu
Helza Cameu | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 28, 1903 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil |
| Died | 1995 |
| Occupation(s) | Composer, Pianist |
Helza Cameu (March 28, 1903 – March 1995) was a Brazilian composer, pianist, musicologist, and author. Winning national competitions with her compositions, she worked as a musicologist at the National Museum, preserving indigenous music and cataloguing instruments. She also gave lectures at the National School of Music and was enrolled in the Brazilian Academy of Music in 1946.
Biography
Cameu was born on March 28, 1903, in the city
In 1929, Cameu recorded
Between 1955 and her retirement in 1973, Cameu served as program editor at Rádio MEC for the program Música e Músicos do Brasil (Music and Musicians of Brazil). Simultaneously, she lectured at the National School of Music and other civic organizations, and performed cataloguing and analysis at the National Museum.[1] With the use of bibliographic references and museum documents, Cameu was the first to write about many types of indigenous instruments in Portuguese, separating the instruments by percussion, wind, and strings.[3] The categories are further subdivided by how the instruments sound and the instrument's parts. Her style of writing, which proposes that comparisons of each ethnic group's music should be completed only after the music of those ethnic groups are understood, was considered innovative for Brazil. Brazilian ethnomusicologist Elizabeth Travassos wrote of Cameu in Music in Latin America and the Caribbean that the brief reference within the book could not "possibly do justice to the monumental contribution she made in her unprecedented effort at synthesis".[3]
Publications
Cameu wrote articles about indigenous music publishing in such journals as Revista Brasileira de Cultura, Revista Brasileira de Folclore, Revista do Conservatório Brasileiro de Música, and Jornal das Letras, among others. Her article Apontamentos sobre música indígena (Notes about Indigenous Music) was published in 1950 in the newspaper Tribuna da Imprensa. Another important work, Valor histórico de Brasílio Itiberê da Cunha e sua fantasia característica: A Sertaneja (The Historical Value of Brasílio Itiberê da Cunha and his characteristic fantasy: A Sertaneja), published in 1970 in the Brazilian Magazine of Culture. Her only published book, Introdução ao estudo da música indígena no Brasil (Introduction to the Study of Indigenous Music in Brazil, 1977), is one of the most complete studies undertaken on indigenous music in the country.[1]
References
- ^ a b c d "Helza Camêu". abmusica.org.br (in Portuguese). Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Brazilian Academy of Music. 2016. Archived from the original on 7 September 2018. Retrieved 6 November 2018.
- ^ Sadie & Samuel 1995, p. 100.
- ^ a b Travassos 2010, p. 56.
Sources
- Sadie, Julie Anne; Samuel, Rhian (1995). The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. New York, New York: ISBN 978-0-393-03487-5.
- Travassos, Elizabeth (2010). "Brazil's Indigenous Universe (to ca. 1990): The Xavante, Kamayurá and Suyá". In Kuss, Malena (ed.). Music in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Encyclopedic History. Vol. 1: Performing Beliefs: Indigenous Peoples of South America, Central America, and Mexico. Austin, Texas: ISBN 978-0-292-78840-4.
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