Exu e música: rupturas, resiliências e transgressões nas encruzilhadas da vida de Yerko Tabilo

Abstract

The Chilean Yerko Francisco Pinto Tabilo began his violin studies in the Escuela Experimental de Música de La Serena, the first music social project in Latin America. During his undergraduate studies in Music in Santiago, he was invited to be a teacher in the Brazilian state of Paraíba, where he arrived in 1979 right after the creation of the Music Department at the Universidade Federal da Paraíba (UFPB). Although he had never been a teacher before, Yerko gradually conquered his space in Paraíba‘s music scenario as a teacher and a violinist. Today, he is known and recognized nacionally, having students and former students involved in the most diverse music environments, not only in Brazil, but also abroad. In order to build the understanding of Yerko‘s music path, including the actions and thoughts involved, I used the etnographic tool through Yerko‘s reports and also through the reports of some of those who used to interact with him. From the knowledge of this teacher‘s history and these reports, it is possible to see that his trajectory was filled of attitudes and thoughts that, at times, diverged from the traditional canons settled by a behavioral heritage established by the colonial thinking within the field of Western classical music. In this manner, this work aims to understand where, how and to what extent the crossroads in this teacher‘s life led him to paths different from the canons of the violin teaching-learning system in concert music and in what aspects these paths constituted an influence for the Paraíba violin scene. I examined Yerko‘s actions inspired by Luiz Rufino‘s Pedagogia das Encruzilhadas (2017), which deals with the different possibilities of paths in any story or trajectory. These paths are governed by the dynamics and powers of the Orixá Exu, the one who gives movement to life, reigns in all forms of communication and, due to its ability to act between the gaps in events, makes it possible to transgress any system established by human beings. In the field of music, the main references used for this work were based on the concepts of authors such as Christopher Small (1998), Jeff Todd Titon (2008), Samuel Araújo and Gaspar Paz (2011), among others. I also needed to study the processes of coloniality in European concert music to understand the extent to which Yerko‘s attitudes transgressed this system. In order to sew this written fabric, I started from the understanding that music, being a language, a movement, an exchange, possibilities, ancestry and diversity is the kingdom of Exu, which is part of it as a creative action that creates the most diverse ways of feeling and experiencing it. The people who practice in it, incorporating it, manifest the strength of the Orixá in their countless practices, faithful or transgressive to the cultural systems in which they are inserted.