[5] Clayton Juliano Rodrigues Miranda notes in his dissertation that piano and voice, the two instruments that the composer studied when he was young, would eventually become areas of compositional strength for Lacerda.
[8] Alongside his studies with Guarnieri, Lacerda also attended law school at the University of São Paulo, graduating in 1961; after earning his degree he focused mainly on composition.
[11] In 1962 Lacerda received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and traveled to the U.S. to study with Vittorio Giannini in New York and Aaron Copland at Tanglewood.
[21] The Brazilian nationalist musical style that Guarnieri imparted to Lacerda had roots in the writings of aesthetician Mario de Andrade and continued in the vein of composers such as Heitor Villa-Lobos and Francisco Mignone.
[23] This nationalist style can generally be described as neoclassical because it draws from the approaches to form, harmony, and melody of the classical Western tradition, combining these with Brazilian and contemporary European sources of inspiration.
[30] In his dissertation, Carlos Audi provides a thorough list of “national elements” in Lacerda’s style that come from Brazilian folk and popular genres, including (but not limited to) use of modes, pentatonic scales, melodies with a narrow range, syncopations, ostinatos, and parallel thirds.
[32] Like Guarnieri, Lacerda also drew from broader currents in twentieth-century Western art music, including contemporary techniques in areas of harmony, rhythm, and atonality.
[34] A list of Lacerda’s works can be found in Gerard Béhague’s entry on the composer in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.