Classical Guitar
Birds of the Amazon taught Villa-Lobos music
![Villa-Lobos on a 500 Brazilian cruzados banknote](https://musictales.club/sites/musictales.club/files/styles/mt_amp_420/public/field/image/villa-lobos_on_a_500_brazilian_cruzados_banknote.jpg)
Villa-Lobos on a 500 Brazilian cruzados banknote
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.
![](/sites/musictales.club/files/imce/Heitor-Villa-Lobos_0.jpg)
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):
![](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0y3Ym1v4Ly0/hqdefault.jpg)