REPRINT SERIES

Chôros No. 8 was composed in Rio de Janeiro in 1925, and the score is dedicated to the pianist Tomás Terán. It was premiered in Paris on 24 October 1927, at the Salle Gaveau, with the composer conducting the Orchestra of the Concerts Colonne and Aline van Barentzen and Tomás Terán, pianos.

At the time of its Paris premiere, this Chôros was called "Le fou huitième" (The Mad Eighth), for its extravagant scoring and unconventional performing techniques, as well as for its superimposition of multiple opposing rhythms and tonalities. It has been described as Villa-Lobos's most fauvist and "modern" composition from the 1920s, formally the most irregular, most violent, and "tropical" of all Villa-Lobos's works, whose leading feature is its almost complete atonality and dissonance. It has been claimed there is virtually nothing in this work that could be called a "theme", and the work "is not about thematic groups and their symphonic development". Instead, its material consists of motifs, phrases, and thematic fragments, mostly consisting of between three and five diatonic or chromatic notes and note repetitions.

Both of these positions have been challenged. While it is conceded to be Villa-Lobos's most dissonant work, analysis shows this is a case of polytonality, rather than atonality, and while the use of short repeated motifs with variations and rhythmic transformations are the essence of primitive rhythmic animation, these procedures are also the very definition of symphonic thematic development.

The composer characterized the work as the "Dance Chôros", and construed the fragmented and contrapuntally intertwined opening themes as "sensually complex and atonal in order to deliberately give the feeling of nervousness of a crowd that is gathering to dance". The work appears to be conceived as an exploration of the possibilities of concatenation of sound blocks assembled from ostinato figurations. In fact, there are something like thirty-six different ostinatos, which are used to coordinate a complex stream of sounds.