Eunice Katunda’s Quinteto Schoenberg: a tribute to the creator of dodecaphonism

Abstract

Eunice Katunda (1915-1990) was an important 20^th century Brazilian musician. She lived and performed intensely in the musical field for almost the entire century, executing activities as a pianist, composer, conductor, researcher, teacher, critic, among others. She was responsible for both the premiere and dissemination of numerous Brazilian and foreign pieces of work until unknown in the musical environment up to that time, as well as for the creation of music using modern composition techniques. In this article, we will discuss the composer’s use of the dodecaphonic technique created by the Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), whom she paid tribute to in ger Quinteto Schoenberg. Through musical analysis, we will show, among other procedures, how the composer used in the initial series of her work the inversionally symmetric hexachord cataloged by Allen Forte as 6-20, used by Schoenberg in his own quintet Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte Op 41. In a parallel movement, the musician inserted national folk-inspired melodies in order to give the composition a humanist and critical character of the period in which was created.