The name A Revolta dos Xapiri (Xapiri’s rebellion), can serve as an input for the audience’s listening experience. My intention with this work was to amplify the unheard voices of indigenous people, especially those of Yanomami tribes in my home country, Brazil. For them, the Xapiris Spirits are the real owners of nature.

This piece is a kind of continuity of a previous composition named Screaming Trees. Both of them are inspired by a book of David Kopenawa, one of nowadays most important indigenous leader in Brazil. When looking for indigenous recordings in the internet, I accidently ran into a recording of David Kopenawa himself, singing in a kind of Xapiri’s ritual. I, then, incorporated some samples of this singing in the work, and it became its main material. All voice sounds are from this particular recording.

Through the use of recognizable sounds, I tried to build a musical structure full of symbolism and analogies with the real world. I explored the constant tension between oppositions such as culture-nature, sacred-profane, scholar-popular, and civilization-wildness. Even though the piece is full of real sounds, it is highly abstract in the sense that it represents no linear narrative whatsoever.

At the same time, a sense of urgency, that is currently present in our global society, drove me during the whole compositional process. Since the whole idea of the piece is to spread Yanomami’s word, I selected the following excerpts from David Kopenawa’s life-changer book The Falling Sky as representatives of what I’m (or at least, trying to) referring to with this work:


“... For us, the xapiri are the true owners of “nature,” not human beings. The toad, caiman, and fish spirits—these children of the underwater being Tëpërësiki—are the masters of the rivers. The macaw, parrot, tapir, and deer spirits, and all the other game spirits, are the masters of the forest. It is so. The xapiri are continually moving around the entire forest without our knowing.”

“... these are words that white people do not understand. They think forests are dead and empty, that nature is out there for no reason, and that it is mute. They don’t want to listen to either our’s or spirit’s words. They prefer deafness.”

“...The forest is alive. It can only die if white people persist in destroying it. If they succeed, the rivers will disappear underground, the soil will crumble, the trees will shrivel up, and the stones will crack in the heat. The dried-up earth will become empty and silent. The xapiri spirits who come down from the mountains to play on their mirrors in the forest will escape far away. Their shaman fathers will no longer be able to call them and make them dance to protect us. They will be powerless to repel the epidemic fumes which devour us. They will no longer be able to hold back the evil beings who will turn the forest to chaos. We will die one after the other, the white people as well as us. All the shamans will nally perish. Then, if none of them survive to hold it up, the sky will fall.”