Symphony No. 6 (Villa-Lobos)

Villa-Lobos composed his Sixth Symphony in Rio de Janeiro in 1944. It was first performed in Rio de Janeiro on 29 April 1950 by the Orquestra do Theatro Municipal, conducted by the composer. The score is dedicated to Mindinha (Villa-Lobos, sua obra 2009, 44–45).

An early report, based on conversations with Villa-Lobos in Paris in 1928–29, said that a Sixth Symphony (subtitled Symphonie indienne and based on Brazilian indigenous themes) had been written shortly after the Fifth Symphony, at about the same time as Villa-Lobos's opera Malazarte (1921), but had never been performed (Demarquez 1929, 11–12). No reference to such a work is found in the official catalogue of the composer's works, however.

The symphony is scored for an orchestra consisting of 2 piccolos, 3 flutes, 2 oboes, cor anglais, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, tuba, timpani, tam-tam, bass drum, large side drum, Indian drum, side drum, cymbals, vibraphone, celesta, 2 harps, and strings.

The symphony consists of four movements:

1. Allegro non troppo
2. Lento
3. Allegretto quasi animato
4. Allegro

The main theme of the symphony was devised by projecting the outline of mountains at Belo Horizonte, Brazil, onto graph paper and transcribing the result as a melody. Villa-Lobos called this technique milimetrazação (graphing), sometimes rendered in English as "millimetrization" (Slonimsky 1945, 6) or "milmeterization" (Enyart 1984, 188). A harmonized version of this melody for piano, together with a similar treatment titled New York Skyline, was initially published in the October 1942 issue of New Music, devoted to works by Brazilian composers (Slonimsky 1945, 150).

The first movement is in a slightly unconventional sonata-allegro form which, according to the composer's usual methods, omits the second theme from the recapitulation. The overall tonal centre is on C, with secondary key areas on D and G (Enyart 1984, 195–97).

In the second movement, Villa-Lobos utilizes a technique of drawing attention to a pitch through its exclusion, in an arguably atonal passage in b. 33–47 where a clarinet solo weaves a long melody repeatedly using eleven chromatic notes, with the omission of the note G. This pitch is then introduced emphatically in the viola entrance at b. 47 (Salles 2009, 154).

• Béhague, Gerard. 1994. Villa-Lobos: The Search for Brazil's Musical Soul. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1994. ISBN 0-292-70823-8.
• Demarquez, Suzanne. 1929. "Villa-Lobos". Revue Musicale 10, no. 10 (November): 1–22.
• Enyart, John William. 1984. "The Symphonies of Heitor Villa-Lobos". PhD diss. Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati.
• Paz, Ermelinda A. 1988. Heitor Villa-Lobos, o educador. Prêmio Grandes Educadores Brasileiros. Monografias Premiadas, 1988, Segunda Parte. Brasília: Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas Educacionais. (Archive from 5 August 2016, accessed 14 February 2018.)
• Salles, Paulo de Tarso. 2009. Villa-Lobos: processos composicionais. Campinas, SP: Editora da Unicamp. ISBN 978-85-268-0853-9.
• Slonimsky, Nicolas. 1945. Music in Latin America. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.
• Villa-Lobos, sua obra. 2009. Version 1.0. MinC / IBRAM, and the Museu Villa-Lobos. Based on the third edition, 1989.