Oliveira, Joey de

Oliveira, Joey de, Brazilian pianist and composer of French and Portuguese descent; b. Curitiba-Parana, April 11, 1936. She studied piano in São Paulo with }. Kliass, in Paris with Marguerite Long, and at Washington Univ. in St. Louis (M.A., 1968). She appeared as a piano soloist with major orchs. in Europe and America, specializing in the modern repertoire; in 1966 she played the piano part in Stravinsky’s Capriccio in St. Louis, under Stravinsky’s direction. As a composer, she occupies the aphelion of ultra-modernism, experimenting in electronic, environmental, theatrical, cinematic, and television media, as exemplified by her Probabilistic Theater I, II, and III for Musicians, Actors, Dancers, Television and Traffic Conductor, and other environmental manifestations. Her Polinteracões I, II, III present the culmination of “total music” involving the visual, aural, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory senses, with an anatomic chart serving as a score for guidance of the participants, supplemented by a phonemic table indicating the proper verbalization of vocal parts. (Complete score and illustrations were reproduced in Source, no. 7, Sacramento, Calif., 1970.) A performance of Polinteracoes was attempted on the occasion of the Catalytic Celebration of the 10^th Anniversary Festival of the New Music Circle in St. Louis on April 7, 1970, but was stopped by the management as a noisy, noisome nuisance. She also composed a number of advanced sambas, precipitating the vogue of the Brazilian bossa nova. Active in belles-lettres, she penned a sociological fantasy, O 3 Mundo (The Third World), a controversial play, Apague meu (Spotlight), poetical works, etc. She married Eleazar de Carvalho.

—Nicolas Slominsky/Laura Kaun/Dennis McIntire