Maria Helena Rosas Fernandes

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.

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.

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.

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. Her paper was published the following year.

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.

Her early flute works include Cantilena n.º 1 (1974), for flute and piano, and Cantilena n.º 2 (1974), for flute and cello. In the first, a long flute melody unfolds over a piano part that gradually becomes more active. The second combines a chromatically blurred tonal centre with cello glissandi, pizzicato and arpeggios.

The University of Campinas Symphony Orchestra returned to Wãnĩ A'Ama in October 2019 during the symposium marking the CDMC's thirtieth anniversary, with Cinthia Alireti conducting. In 2022, the Quarteto Boulanger performed and recorded the three-part Celebração. The recording, on the album Entre brumas e fúrias, was the work's first commercial release.

On 8 March 2024, the Minas Gerais Symphony Orchestra performed Wãnĩ A'Ama at the Palácio das Artes in Belo Horizonte under Ligia Amadio. The same program included the prologue from Marília de Dirceu, sung by Melina Peixoto, and drew an estimated audience of 1,000.

The released recordings cover only a small portion of the catalogue. Ruth Serrão recorded Ciclo for a 1984 Funarte LP devoted to prize-winning Brazilian piano music. Ensemble Octandre recorded “Comunhão”, the final section of Akauá-se, for the Bologna release Nuove canzoni per il Natale in 2000. Camila Fresca's review of the Quarteto Boulanger's 2022 concerts placed Entre brumas e fúrias within the growing performance and recording of concert music by women, though it discussed the album as a whole rather than assessing Celebração separately.

The CDMC at the University of Campinas received more than sixty of Fernandes's scores in 2018. Its catalogue records can be searched through Unicamp's Acervus system. The CDMC permits on-site consultation by the public; materials that have not undergone technical processing are available only at the centre, and reproduction of works under copyright requires authorization.

The manuscripts have supported subsequent research, performance and publication. For CIDDIC's 2019 symposium marking the CDMC's thirtieth anniversary, conductor and researcher Cinthia Pinheiro Alireti selected Wãnĩ A'Ama from the donated scores for performance and musicological study. CIDDIC and the CDMC also issued an electronic edition of the piano work Vales e vales II in 2024, edited by Tadeu Moraes Taffarello with a preface by Olivato. The three-day meetings combined concerts with lectures, research papers and round-table discussions, bringing together composers from Brazil and other countries. 2023 Funarte Mestras e Mestres das Artes Prize Funarte Fernandes was one of nine music recipients selected from 182 nominations in that field. The national program honoured fifty arts professionals aged sixty or older. The recipients were formally presented with the award in July 2024. 1986 Natum Est SATB chorus and orchestra Oratorio in ten sections. About 15 minutes.