Birds of the Amazon taught Villa-Lobos music

Primarily self-taught, Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959) spent his early years absorbing the styles of Brazilian popular music as a guitarist in street bands.

He left home at age 18 due to his mother opposing his musical choice and wanted him to become a doctor. Instead, he turned to a life of a musical vagabond, playing cello and guitar to support himself while travelling throughout the states of Espírito Santo, Bahia, and Pernambuco, absorbing Brazilian folk music and composing his own pieces.

Villa-Lobos said that his first harmony teacher was a map of Brazil, and his life in music has been a reflection of the expansive, explosive cultural, geographical, and musical diversity of his country.

"I learned music from a bird in the jungles of Brazil, not from academies."

His works are constantly criticized, with the common point that Villa-Lobos simply wrote too much music, that he lacked a critical filter which would allow him to hone his craft, and instead gave full rein to his natural musical effulgence.

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For example, renowned guitarist John Williams talked about the Guitar Concerto written by Villa-Lobos towards the end of his career:

"...just isn't a very good piece, technically or musically, with its underdeveloped ideas, its sense of being written in a hurry, and its lack of a real relationship between the soloist and the orchestra."

But such critical carping rather misses the point of a musician who, arguably more than any other composer of the 20th century, summed up an entire country in his music.

After becoming the most famous and most avant-garde composer at home, Villa-Lobos happily entered Brazil's national music education project to shape the country's musical identity in its compositions.

Listen to Villa-Lobos' Prelude No. 5 performed by Julian Bream. The piece has subtitle Homenagem à vida social (Homage to Social Life):

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