Music HERstory: Eunice Katunda (1915-1990)

Eunice Katunda (1915-1990)

By Polymnia

Eunice do Monte Lima Catunda was born in Rio de Janeiro on March 14, 1915. At the age of five she began taking piano classes and musical theory lessons. The development of these musical studies led her to perform her first piano concert at the age of twelve.

Eunice de Monte Lima Katunda was a Brazilian pianist, composer, conductor, and educator. She was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1915 and died in the state of São Paulo in 1990. Catunda began her piano studies at the age of five with Mima Osward and later studied piano with Branca Bilhar and composition with Oscar Guanabarino. At the age of twelve she gave her debut recital at the Salão Nobre of the Instituto Nacional de Música in her hometown, and five years later entered the concert scene performing Moskowsky’s Concerto in E Major, Op. 59 with the Orquestra Sinfônica Municipal do Rio de Janeiro, to critical acclaim. In 1934 she married Omar Catunda and the couple moved to São Paulo, beginning a new and important chapter in Mrs. Catunda’s artistic career.

In 1934 Eunice married Omar Catunda, mathematician, and they moved to São Paulo (in a marriage that lasted until 1960, when she adopted the surname Katunda with a “k”). Between these two cultural centers, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Eunice developed her professional career in a series of musical (and personal) moments of gatherings and disruptions until her death in 1990.

In 1942 she seriously engaged through the composition path, when she started her musical studies with the renowned composer and maestro Camargo Guarnieri. At that point Eunice had embraced the Brazilian classical music ‘cause’ and started to play, among other pieces, Heitor Villa-Lobos’s works that still were to be premiered in Brazil and abroad.

Eunice returned with her two children to Rio in 1946, by the time her husband was in the USA conducting academic studies. After settling down in her home town Eunice was introduced to the German classical musician Hans Joachim Koellreutter and decided to participate in his group called Música Viva (‘Living Music’).

The Música Viva group was focused in disclosing and promoting little-known and contemporary classical music. The group was dedicated to the organisation of events, radio programs broadcasting and even specialised newspapers publishing with that objective. It aimed to ease the public access to the most recent and elaborated Brazilian and international classical compositions, including the pieces composed with the dodecaphonic technique.

With her passionate and radical character Eunice deeply dove into the group’s activities. She started to present new and unpublished pieces under the Música Viva’s patterns in live concerts and radio programs. She also wrote and published essays about the atonal technique and promoted statements supporting the vanguard classical music.

The separation of the group came in 1948 when several of its members attended the ‘International Congress of Prague’ and returned influenced by the music produced under the ‘lights’ of the socialist movements. The groups’ core - which included master members Cláudio Santoro, Cesar Guerra-Peixe, Edino Krieger, Eunice Katunda and H.J. Koellreutter - split and Eunice decided to travel to the state of Bahia to lead a field research on the Candomblé ritualistic music.

While staying in Salvador the composer collected chants and rhythmic styles performed in the religious rituals as inspiring material for her future compositions. Nonetheless the influence from that special universe went beyond that level: Eunice developed important friendship ties with other artists present at the cults and was even entitled ‘daughter of Oxum’, a popular religious deity. From that point on Eunice abandoned the dodecaphonic, vanguard musical techniques and adopted nationalist and popular elements in her works. Only in the 70’s Eunice came to synthesize all these different aesthetics into her compositions, revealing a final mature musical production phase.

Sonata de Louvação - Eunice Katunda - 1967

Canto de Reis - Eunice Katunda - 1952

Compositions

Some of Eunice Katunda’s main works were composed during her period as a member of the Música Viva group, such as ‘O Negrinho do Pastoreio’ (Prize Música Viva 1946), ‘Quatro cantos à morte’ (premiered in Switzerland and conducted by Hermann Scherchen) and ‘Quintet Schoenberg’ (premiered in Brussels). The composer worked on her dodecaphonic series with excellence and mathematics strictness.

In the ‘piano version’ of Eunice’s ‘Quatro cantos à morte’, entitled ‘Quatro epígrafes’, the composition evolves from a series of symmetric hexachords. She shows dominance of the ‘counterpoint’ technique learned with Guarnieri and intensified during her travel to Europe (when she met Luigi Nono e Bruno Maderna).

During the period she lived in Bahia, in the 1950’s, she composed ‘Dois estudos folclóricos’, ‘A negrinha e Iemanjá’ and ‘Impressões de candomblé’, among other pieces. In all of them the polyrhythmic aesthetics and the superimposition of modal melodies (derived from the African-Brazilian folklore) give special colors to day-to-day scenes, popular local feasts and traditional working chants.

In 1970, during the 40th anniversary celebration of the Música Viva group, Eunice Katunda recomposed past works that had premiered in contemporary music festivals. It is worth-remembering the piece ‘Três peças para dois pianos e percussão’, premiered in 1979 with a performance by the composer joined by her friend Beatriz Balzi (the two pianos) and Flávio Barros (percussion). The piece redeems parts of the older piece by Eunice ‘Concerto Negro’, in which were added rich movements, tone colors and textural effects.