Maria Helena Rosas Fernandes (born 8 July 1933) is a Brazilian composer, pianist, conductor, music educator and musicologist. She has written solo, chamber, orchestral, choral, vocal and operatic music. From the late 1970s, Indigenous Brazilian songs, ritual accounts and instrumental sounds became recurring materials in her compositions. She worked from recordings and transcriptions gathered by anthropologists, adapting the material for concert instruments and voices.
Fernandes completed the higher piano course at the Conservatório Brasileiro de Música in 1964 and graduated in composition and conducting from the Escola Superior de Música Santa Marcelina in 1977. She taught music in Campinas from 1964 to 1993 and began composing in 1970. Her early scores consist mainly of short piano and choral works. Later compositions use changing metres, polyrhythm, dissonance, birdsong and extended instrumental techniques. The five-part orchestral work Wãnĩ A'Ama (1982), which she called an "Indigenous symphony", combines material attributed to six Indigenous peoples with dense orchestral textures and an unstable pulse.
Three of her compositions received prizes in 1979: the piano work Ciclo, the chamber work Territórios e ocas and Dawawa Tsawidi for winds and percussion. Her wind quintet Nakutnak won a Latin American composition competition in Montevideo in 1988. The opera Marília de Dirceu received the Nancy Van de Vate International Composition Prize for Opera in 2006. Fernandes wrote two further operas, Anita Garibaldi and Leopoldina, a Imperatriz do Brasil, using her own librettos. In 1993, she founded the Encontro Internacional de Mulheres Compositoras, which brought composers together for concerts, lectures and discussions in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Poços de Caldas.
Fernandes moved to Poços de Caldas in 2002 and founded the free concert program Encontros com a Música there in 2006. She received the APCA award for her career in 2013, honorary citizenship of Poços de Caldas in 2023 and the Funarte Mestras e Mestres das Artes Prize the same year. At the age of 90, she was still composing and curating concerts. The University of Campinas holds more than sixty of her scores, donated to its contemporary-music documentation centre in 2018. The archive has supported performances, musicological studies and new editions of her music.
Early life and education
Fernandes was born on 8 July 1933 in Brazópolis, in southern Minas Gerais. Her mother, an amateur pianist, gave her first piano lessons when she was about six years old. Music was a familiar part of her mother's family life: relatives played instruments, sang at home and collected piano reductions of operas.
She spent part of her childhood in Paraisópolis, Minas Gerais, returned to Brazópolis in 1944 and moved to Itajubá in 1950, where she completed a normal-school course at the Escola Normal Sagrado Coração de Jesus. Seeking more advanced musical training, she studied at conservatories in Minas Gerais and completed the professional piano course of the Conservatório Brasileiro de Música in 1958.
Fernandes initially travelled to Rio de Janeiro for lessons before moving there in 1960. At the Conservatório Brasileiro de Música she studied piano with Elzira Amabile and musical initiation with Liddy Chiaffarelli Mignone, who arranged a scholarship for her. Fernandes completed the conservatory's higher piano course in 1964 and then settled in Campinas.
Her composition studies began in 1966 with Osvaldo Lacerda, whose free course she attended in Campinas and São Paulo until 1977. She also took advanced piano lessons with João de Sousa Lima from 1970 to 1973. At the University of Campinas, she attended extension courses in music education, conducting, harmony and composition with Hans-Joachim Koellreutter in 1971, followed by composition classes with Almeida Prado from 1976 to 1978. While pursuing these courses, she completed a bachelor's degree in composition and conducting at the Escola Superior de Música Santa Marcelina in 1977.
Career
Teaching and first compositions, 1964–1977
Fernandes taught music in Campinas from 1964 to 1993. She worked at the Conservatório Musical de Campinas, Conservatório Musical Carlos Gomes, Instituto Educacional Ave Maria, Escola de Artes Pró-Música and the music faculty of the Catholic University of Campinas. She taught harmony and musical analysis at the conservatories and, in 1968, theory and practice of musical initiation at the university. She also conducted children's choirs and trained teachers in methods of early music education. She served as president of the Grêmio Campinas Cultura e Arte and wrote and presented theatre pieces for children.
Her first compositions date from 1970, when she was still studying with Lacerda. Her output through 1977 consisted chiefly of short piano pieces using established forms alongside chromatic, atonal and twelve-note materials. Works from these years include Prelúdio (1973), Polca (1974), Modinha (1975) and Imagens (1977), her first orchestral score.
Indigenous music and composition prizes, 1977–1992
Fernandes's engagement with Indigenous Brazilian music began in 1977. Lacerda had asked her to write an instrumental quartet based on a Brazilian theme, and her search for source material brought her to the research archive of the Hungarian-born anthropologist Desidério Aytai. She used material from the archive in Territórios e ocas, for string quartet and percussion, and returned to Indigenous subjects in Maráwawa, Dapraba, Dawawa Tsawidi, Wamarĩ and the orchestral works Wãnĩ A'Ama and Tainahyky.
Her sources were writings, transcriptions and field recordings made by Aytai and other anthropologists, including Vera Penteado Coelho and César Albisetti. They contained music recorded among Xavante, Karajá and Tiriyó communities. Fernandes did not carry out anthropological or ethnomusicological fieldwork herself. She studied the material, wrote about Indigenous vocal polyphony and spoke at musical and anthropological meetings in Brazil and abroad.
Three compositions earned prizes in 1979. Ciclo received second place and publication in the first Brazilian competition for classical piano or guitar composition, organized by Funarte and Irmãos Vitale. Territórios e ocas took second place in the Esso Classical Music Prize, while Dawawa Tsawidi won the first Latin American composition competition held by the Música Nova Ensemble at the Federal University of Bahia. In 1988, her wind quintet Nakutnak won the III Latin American Composition Competition organized by Uruguay's SODRE in Montevideo.
Her work was presented at editions of the Panorama da Música Brasileira Atual and the Brazilian Contemporary Music Biennial. In 1992 she took part in the Internationales Festival Komponistinnen in Heidelberg, a festival devoted to music by women composers.
International activity and women composers, 1993–2001
In 1993, Fernandes founded the Encontro Internacional de Mulheres Compositoras in Rio de Janeiro. The meeting gave Brazilian and foreign composers a place to present their music through concerts, lectures, papers and round-table discussions. Further editions were held in São Paulo in 1995 and Poços de Caldas in 2004.
Fernandes completed the three-act opera Marília de Dirceu in 1994, to a libretto by Isolde Helena Brans. The opera is based on the life of Maria Doroteia Joaquina de Seixas Brandão, the woman addressed in Tomás António Gonzaga's poems.
At the international Brazil–Europe 500 Years congress in Cologne in September 1999, Fernandes presented a paper on polyphony in the music of Indigenous Brazilian peoples. The congress also held a workshop devoted to Brazilian women composers whose music drew on Indigenous subjects; Ensemble Brasil-Europa performed Dawawa Tsawidi. Her paper was published the following year.
Poços de Caldas and later career
Fernandes moved to Poços de Caldas in 2002. In 2006, Marília de Dirceu won the Nancy Van de Vate International Composition Prize for Opera. The award carried a cash prize and publication of the score; entries had been submitted by women composers of sixteen nationalities from five continents.
That year she created Encontros com a Música, a Poços de Caldas concert project offering free performances of classical music. Fernandes remained its curator through its 2024 season, when concerts were given at the Thermas Antônio Carlos and the city's historical and geographical museum.
Her compositions from the 2000s and 2010s encompass orchestral, chamber and stage works. She wrote two more operas, Anita Garibaldi and Leopoldina, a Imperatriz do Brasil, setting her own librettos. At the age of 90 in 2023, she was still composing, curating concerts and arranging exchanges between Brazilian and foreign women composers.
Music
Fernandes has written for a wide range of performers, from solo instruments and chamber groups to chorus, symphonic band, orchestra and opera. Many of her works grow from an idea beyond music itself, such as an Indigenous song, a landscape, a historical event, a religious text or the call of a bird. She then uses that starting point to form the work's rhythms, form and instrumental colours.
Style and compositional periods
In her 2016 study of Fernandes's music, Olivato groups the works into three periods: “initiation” (1970–1977), “experimentation” (1977–1982) and “liberation” (from 1983). These names were chosen by Olivato to describe the development of Fernandes's music; they do not appear in the scores themselves.
The first period is made up mainly of short piano pieces and unaccompanied choral works. In pieces such as Prelúdio (1973) and Modinha (1975), familiar forms sit alongside chromatic, modal and non-tonal writing. Short musical ideas often return in altered or fragmented form, and changes of metre allow the music to follow the shape of the melody. Many of the pieces have a three-part design. Her earliest choruses—Nigue-Ninhas (1970), Tatu é caboclo do sul (1970) and Pedreiros (1971)—draw on folk material from Paraíba, Ceará and Rio de Janeiro. Olivato found little comparable use of Brazilian folklore in her later music, despite Fernandes's long period of study with the nationalist composer Osvaldo Lacerda. The period closes with larger works, particularly Imagens (1977), for orchestra, mixed chorus and narrator. Its eight sections set passages from Cecília Meireles's Romanceiro da Inconfidência. The work also anticipates features that Fernandes would return to, including historical subjects, spoken narration and forms built from a series of contrasting scenes.
Her music changed noticeably during the second period, beginning with Territórios e ocas (1977), which she composed after consulting the archive of the anthropologist Desidério Aytai. The works became longer and were often arranged in named sections. Dissonance, overlapping musical lines, polyrhythm, changing metres and transcribed bird calls all became more prominent. Nine of the twelve works that Olivato places in this period draw on Indigenous subjects or musical material. Among them are Maráwawa (1978), Dapraba and Dawawa Tsawidi (both 1979), Wamarĩ (1982) and Wãnĩ A'Ama (1982). She also began returning to earlier pieces and adapting them for different performers; Dawawa Tsawidi, for example, exists in both instrumental and choral versions.