"Music and Society: Transformations in Brazilian Popular Music and Modernist Compositional Technique" (An Informal Talk by Fabio Akcelrud Durao)

Monday March 24th, 3:30 to 5:00 PM
Where: 8th Floor, H Building

Professor Fabio Akcelrud Durao (State University of Campinas [Brazil]) will speak on recent developments in Brazilian popular music, and the discussion should be interesting.

Professor Durao will describe what happens when the most advanced, formal, modernist compositional technique--twelve tone composition--sometimes synonymous with modern music itself, crosses the Atlantic and takes harbor in Brazilian popular music.

Can “popular music” be “advanced” music? What happens when it tries to be? What happens when the composer hardly knows what he is doing with these complex techniques? And what controversies can “serious” composers find themselves mixed up in when confronted with the strange artifact of advanced popular composition?

Fabio Akcelrud Durao is professor of literary theory at the State University of Campinas (Brazil) and author of Modernism and Coherence: Four Chapters of a Negative Aesthetics.

Professor Robert Hullot-Kentor (English) is hosting this event. For more information, contact Professor Hullot-Kentor by email at:

Robert.Hullot-Kentor@liu.edu.