I was born in São Paulo, Brazil, during the military dictatorship. The military took over in 1964, and it was not until 1989 that we were able to choose a democratically elected president. As a result, my mother and I voted for president, for the first time, together in 1989. 1964 is a piece that revisits a pivotal moment in Brazilian history, through a 1961 campaign speech by Jânio Quadros, the then soon to be the democratically elected President of Brazil. The politically unsavvy Jânio Quadros became a lame duck president shortly after being elected in 1961, and, in his narcissistic delusion, decided to renounce the presidency, in a power-grabbing gamble that did not pay off. He believed the people would flood the streets claiming for his reinstatement to the presidency, and he would come back more powerful. That never happened, but the move spiraled Brazil into a period of great political instability in 1961, that culminated in a military takeover in 1964.

The perfect storm of social unrest, due to a popular demand for redistribution of land and the creation of unions, allied to the fact that Jânio’s vice president, João Goulart, a socialist, was in China at the time of his renouncing, created a power vacuum and enough instability that the Brazilian military, encouraged by the C.I.A., decided to take over. To understand today’s reality, we need to go back in history and revisit periods of great instability, to hopefully avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

In this piece, I use the recording of one of Jânio’s speeches as a sound file, creating rhythms and musical phrasing through sound file edits. I transcribed these rhythms and melodies and used them as the thematic material for the piece. At times, the sound files are used as cues, and the ensemble plays a musical rendition of the speech along with them. At other times, the ensemble transitions between different materials derived from the speech. Pedantic and selfaggrandizing, the speech is projected behind the musicians, with translation, along with pictures from the era, which show the story of the social and political unrest. The intent is to show, through cognitive dissonance, how sinister a combination of both ridiculous and dangerous can be, and how this kind of populism can destroy the future of a country.