(2027) Três Pequenas Canções Tradicionais

For String Orchestra (Grade 3)

Written for the 2027 California Orchestra Directors Association Composition Consortium

I. Ao Passar da Barca
II. Constância
III. Vamos, Maninha

Violin I, Violin II, Viola, Cello and Double Bass
Grade 3 · 5 minutes · Written for young players
Premiere: Junior High School All-State String Orchestra, California All-State Music Education Conference (CASMEC), 2027

Program Notes

These three songs come from the world of Brazilian children’s games: circle songs and choosing games, passed from voice to voice for generations. Like much of this repertoire, they arrived in Brazil from Portugal and became Brazilian through being sung.

I first learned them in my early teens, traveling around Brazil with a group called Showcante Que Encante. There, in the early 1990s, I met Joaquim de Paula, a musician and music therapist who spent more than four decades writing down the songs he heard in northern Minas Gerais and along the São Francisco River. We recorded these songs together on an album that is no longer available anywhere.

Two of the tunes are about boats. “Ao Passar da Barca” is an old Iberian melody Joaquim heard in the river town of Pirapora. “Vamos, Maninha” invites a little sister to the beach to see the barca nova, the new boat. In the river towns, that meant the steamboat that carried people up and down the São Francisco. Between them sits “Constância,” a choosing song about staying faithful. Its melody is so lovely that people sing it on its own as a serenade, and Villa-Lobos returned to it more than once.

I kept the melodies close to how I learned them, and let them travel through the orchestra so every section gets a turn to sing.

Some of these songs still live on in Brazil in one form or another, but the versions I learned are rarely heard now. My hope is that by playing them, young musicians become part of keeping them alive.

Written for the 2027 California Orchestra Directors Association Composition Consortium.