6 - Emanuel Pimenta

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6
Months passed and I became very friendly with almost
everyone in the college.
During a period of time, almost every Friday night,
when the Koellreutter was in São Paulo, we all joined for a
pizza in a famous restaurant in Bixiga, Cantina Speranza, at
the street Treze de Maio.
He loved to made jokes and puns with the name of the
restaurant, which means “hope”.

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He always was the last one to arrive at those dinners.
Then, everything should be well organized in advance, and
he did not have to request to be like that. Otherwise, we all
considered that it could be the last time.
His presence in those dinners was a tremendous honor
for all his students. We were all very aware of how important
he was, in the deepest sense of the term.
Every time he entered in my car, he looked at the back
seat, which, not infrequently, was crammed with books and
notebooks when I had no time to organize them.
- My friend, do you see how the back seat of
your car is? It is like your head inside today.
– and laugh.
When the books and notebooks were organized, he
did the same, but said:

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- Well ... today your head is much betterrr.
– laughing, always with a strong German
accent.
Hans Joachim Koellreutter - photo by
Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta in São
Paulo, in 1999
The lessons of aesthetics that, in some way, represented
less commitments, always unleashed magic moments. The
number of students was restricted. And the classes would

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begin strictly on time.
- When someone arrives late, he or she is
occupying the time of the other. It is an
authoritarian behavior – he said, insistently.
Nobody had the right to occupy the time of
the other. Everything should go through a
democratic criterion. – My friend, you are not
used to live in democracy? To live in democracy
you must respect the other. – he said to anyone
who arrived after hours.
One of the concepts that characterized not only the
lessons on aesthetics, but virtually all others was that according
to which only the difference produces consciousness.
It is an ancient Vedic principle, registered in the
Indian philosophical universe thousands of years ago, which
Koellreutter heard hundreds of times during the time he
lived in India.

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Beyond the time, another key element that seems
to have designed his entire life was the concern about the
consciousness.
Everything in the consciousness is formed by elements
of differentiation. These principles are fundamental both the
analysis as in the preparation of a work – musical or not.
Even more evident than what happened in the classes
on composition, his lessons on aesthetics were attended not
exclusively by people related to music. There were teachers,
scientists and professionals from the most diverse areas.
Thus, especially those classes on aesthetics quickly
became a truly transdisciplinary meeting point.
Another concept – which he repeated in different
contexts – was that the Occident is an accident, formulated

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by the French philosopher Roger Garaudy, for many years a
member of the French Communist Party and who had been
in contact with Koellreutter in the 1960s.
Koellreutter liked to repeat, with his heavy German
accent – “the Occident is an accident” and provoked a long
debate on that statement.
Why the West appeared? What are the conflicts with
the East? They exist in fact? – in addition to an endless series
on several other similar questions.
In late 1990, Garaudy assumed a political position that
would have been frontally rejected by Koellreutter. Then,
the French philosopher published the negationist book
Foundational Myths of the Politics of Israel advocating a
historical revisionism, denying the fact of the Holocaust have
actually existed and converting himself to Islam.
Koellreutter directly experienced the atrocities of

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Nazism. He was forced to flee Germany. He arrived to affront
the Nazi army with an aggressive letter when he was young.
Organized a group of protest against Hitler when he still was
living in Germany. His great master, Hermann Scherchen was
a Jew. His first wife was Jewish. He lost many friends in the
War and was a radical defender of individual liberties.
life.
Many things have changed in the world during his
After some months studying with him at the college,
the lessons on composition were transferred to his home, a
beautiful apartment at the São Luiz Avenue, in the central
zone of São Paulo, in front of the famous landmark building
Italia.
I began to regularly go to his house. And often went
out to have a lunch, just the both.

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In the beginning, we went to a small and austere
German restaurant near there – which was his preferred
at that time. I already was vegetarian. In those days he was
especially loved steaks of veal, and the lunches, always
accompanied by an austere glass of water, not rarely ran
in absolute silence. None of us said anything for several
minutes.
- We need time to think, to observe. – he said,
without hiding the great pleasure he wad to
be in silence – People talk too much! They
become without time to think.
We went and came back from the restaurant walking,
almost all the time in silence. We crossed Praça da República.
He just looked with curiosity, without stopping, the market
of colored objects scattered on the floor.
I always left the radio on in my car. In cars, radio
equipment consumed very little electrical power and I joked

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saying that it was a way for the car to not feel too lonely
when I was not around. Later, in my homes, there was always
music from morning to night – in every room.
That habit made him surprised. Like John Cage, he
never listened to music when it not a moment for this specific
purpose.
To him, music could not happen as a continuum, as
something belonging to the world. It should be something
special. To me, music, the sounds from cities or from the
countryside always were only one thing, something like the
soundtrack of a movie.
- To listen to music is not something unimportant.
What happens non-stop cannot be important.
Music is something very special. We need to
give attention to it. Give it time. To respect it.
It makes no sense to have music all the time. If
it is happening all the time, so it simply doesn’t

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happen! There is no consciousness.
Once, when we walked back to his home, as soon as
we had arrived at to São Luiz Avenue, he suddenly stopped
and made a curious observation:
- Do you see this avenue? Do you see the people
who are walking? Can you remember how it
was only fifteen years ago? People were very
different. Imagine how it was fifty years ago.
But it seems like yesterday. It’s amazing. I
observe and I’m surprised. They dressed quite
differently. There were many people with suit
and tie. Today there are many races, wearing
other clothes, much more colorful. Everything
became more relaxed, less formal. People
changed. The world changed. This is not to say
that is better or worse, but only that everything
is transformed and that transformation will
continue. It is an amazing metamorphosis.

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I asked if Brazil seemed him to be closer to India after
such a metamorphosis.
- My friend, in a sense it is true. Brazil has the
same perfume of India. But they are very
different countries. India has a history of
thousands of years. This history is reflected
in people, what they are. Indians believe in
general that Brazilians are very uneducated in
general. If we compare the histories, they are
right. Moreover, there is a freedom in Brazil
that does not exist elsewhere. Sometimes,
this freedom also means less respect. But here
education should not be like it is in Europe.
Here, we have different needs. Education
must respect the place, it is a social issue. And,
after all, the metamorphosis did not end. It is
continuing.

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This conversation happened in early 1980s.
I also asked, if he thought that Brazil would live a
revolution, an armed revolt. In those days we lived the last
years of the dictatorship, then at the beginning of a transition
to a democratic regime. There was a lot of tension, corruption
seemed to be widespread – we could not even imagine the
levels it would reach in the future – and for many the only
solution seemed to be an armed revolt.
It was incomprehensible and unacceptable a rich
country like Brazil has such a quantity of miserable people.
Even I wondered if it wouldn’t be that the only way out for
the country, even considering seriously the terrible social
costs that a revolution always represents.
- There are two ways to Brazil. It may be a
revolution, it is true... it is not impossible. But
I do not believe very much in this scenario.
Chances are that Brazil will develop, in some
sense, like India, not through revolutions but

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yes through evolutions. If so, everything will
take many generations, it will be slow, poverty
or corruption will not end quickly. That seems
me more coherent with the Brazilian spirit. If it
is good or bad? There is no good or bad in this
kind of things.
In all of his classes, whatever they were, the formation
of the human being, the social function and the relativity of
everything were always present.
In the lessons of perception he sought to make us to
understand the relations between sounds.
- Music is not memorization, but understanding.
And understanding can be non-verbal. You have
to listen and to understand. But I cannot explain
those relationships in words, just because it is
something not verbal. Pay attention. People
give up to understand the relations between

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John Cage, Aria, 1960
things because they do not pay attention, and
get quickly discouraged. Understanding is only
to be free and attentive.
Musical analysis was something fundamental for him;
something that should be taken as an essential element not
only by composers but also by performers, teachers and,
finally, by anyone else.

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- Many times, you know an interpreter for
the score, if it is annotated or not, and how
the annotation is – the musician’s musical
calligraphy. I mean, what was the energy
he spent to analyze and to understand the
process.
Another key element was the style. Typically, people
took – and many still take – the word style as something
pejorative, negative. That is, they consider that the style is
a kind of prison, hindering free expression. Nobody wanted
to play in this or that style, and when someone had a unique
style, was seen as stylized as caricature.
But for Koellreutter, the question of style was central,
without which it wouldn’t be possible to know a great
composer or a great performer.
- All serious composers, all composers with
value, honest, have a style. The style is linked

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to honesty. Sometimes there are people who
question it, but it is the reality. The style of
a person is like your handwriting, like your
fingerprint, like their way of walking. Only
when we know this kind of fingerprint identity,
we begin to understand the design of the
composer, his great work. Generally, each
composer has one work that is, in some sense,
the synthesis of his life. A work that bring in
itself all the elements of his style, of who he
is. For Beethoven, it was the Piano Concerto
No. 1 in C Major, opus 15; for Franz Schubert,
his eighth symphony in B minor, unfinished;
for Claude Debussy, his formidable Jeux; to
Gustav Mahler, the second movement his
Fourth Symphony.
When I asked him about Das Lied von der Erde, the
Song of the Earth - and I especially loved a recording with

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Kathleen Ferrier, Julius Patzak and direction by Bruno Walter
– he replied:
- It’s a great work, but it doesn’t synthesize the
life of Mahler, his genesis. You can even say
that in your point of view the Song of the Earth
is the synthesis of Gustav Mahler’s thought.
But I’m not talking about points of view. I’m
talking about analysis. When we analyze the
sequence of cadences in the disintegration
of the principle of tonality in that movement,
we have the most complete construction
of everything he did, before and after. It’s a
mystery how it happens. But in general, every
great composer has a great work, which is
present in all others, as it were, in a sense, the
image of his thought.
And when we talked about Gustav Mahler, we
spiritually traveled to Vienna, to his beautiful wife Alma,

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considered by many the most beautiful woman of her time;
to Oskar Kokoschka, the great painter and her lover; to his
despair and death.
- Mahler knew exactly he was going to die.
Nothing else existed for him.
And we listened to the adagio of his unfinished tenth
symphony.
Hans Joachim
Koellreutter,
Tanka II, 1972

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In the classes of counterpoint, we had to dig in and
understand with deepness the method of different medieval
composers, as if our work was to decipher their logic and to
rebuild the musician. Only in this way, penetrating his soul,
we could understand his dilemmas, his anxieties, and the
questions of an epoch.
If we were writing something like Guillaume de
Mauchault, for example, we should go beyond to understand
how he thought – we should in some way to become part of
his thought.
Koellreutter dictated, patiently, line by line the rules of
composition by Machault or Palestrina, among others. We
had to understand all those relations and to compose pieces
as they did.
Then Koellreutter patiently corrected all errors,
pointing out the relationship between the notes, the system

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as a whole, always extremely challenging, along hours and
hours.
Some times I thought we were back in time, as if we
were in a medieval monastery with the master, patiently
correcting the slips of the student.
- It is not possible for you to go back in time.
Today, we are all other human beings, different.
It is impossible to think like Machault, Josqin
des Prés or Palestrina. But they left us rules,
tracks, vestiges. From them we can imagine
that world and, in a sense, we can rebuild it
in imagination. Follow the rules, which for
them were the order of the world. With them,
understand that music. It is not easy.
Sometimes they were extremely tiring exercises, which
took hours and hours and that seemed to never end. He was
correcting, severely and strictly, up to the smallest detail.

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So it also happened the exercises of harmony.
Everything was a lot of work and action, at all the time.
When a series of lessons ended, we were all exhausted.
When the lesson had only one student, as it was my case
in composition, counterpoint as well as in other disciplines,
sometimes the lesson ended but there was still much work
to do. When this happened, I changed to another classroom
and Koellreutter started another lesson to different group
or student. When he finished, he came to check in what
point I was. This did not happen only with me but also with
other students. He put everyone to work and was extremely
dedicated to each one.
Koellreutter had been a great flautist, recognized
around the world. He had been a student of the legendary
Marcel Moyse, and classmate with Jean-Pierre Rampal.

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Like Rampal, he represented a direct line with the
genial Paul Taffanel, considered the founder of the French
school of flute, still in the nineteenth century.
I began studying flute in the second half of the 1970s
with a teacher of the Italian school. At that time and in the
conditions I had to study, I still was not able to distinguish the
profound difference between the Italian and French schools
for flute.
I believe that my first teacher – though he became
a conductor with some recognition – was also not able to
distinguish them.
In the Italian school, we block the glottis and strongly
tense the muscles of the face. Everything is tension. The flow
of air acquires pressure and speed by reducing the opening
lip.

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In a radically different way, French school works
everything naturally, by relaxing the facial muscles, releasing
the glottis and hard working the diaphragm. In the French
school, everything is distension. The airflow picks up speed
through the work of the diaphragm and the sound quality is
designed by the accuracy of the form of the opening lip.
They are totally different ways of playing the same
instrument.
In the Italian school, the sound is “small”. In the French,
the sound is full of harmonics acquiring a magnificent body,
what we call round and it can be heard over long distances,
even when it is played piano.
As a terrible and tragic accident in my life, I studied
my first two years of flute following the Italian school.
Mechanically, I arrived to develop well, but the sound was
terrible, hopelessly small.

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One day I met a great master: Demétrio Lima, who
taught according to the French school.
Demétrio essentially is a jazz musician, a great
musician. It was said by everyone that the first requirement
of important composers like Burt Bacharach was to have him
as head of the orchestra when they went to Brazil.
I studied with Demétrio before starting my lessons
with Koellreutter.
I was desperate when I met Demetrius – who was also
called, in humorous tone, in the jazz world of São Paulo as
Satanas, because he had his head shaved.
I noticed that something was going wrong.
On the first day of class, Demétrio was extremely hard
with me. He showed me the great differences between those
schools. But, I would be obliged to submit myself to a long

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process of muscular deautomatization, exercises to erase
the memory of the body.
Along an entire year, I was obliged to stop playing and
to start over again with painful daily exercises to eliminate
the vices. For several months I was forced to do strenuous
exercises in front of a mirror, using only the mouthpiece of
the instrument.
It was terrible, but I will always be grateful to him.