In 1985, deep in the rivers and caves of PETAR (Parque Estadual Turístico do Alto Ribeira, São Paulo), a small group of musicians waded waist-high into the water. They weren’t there for ritual bathing, nor for leisure. Led by the wild-haired, white-bearded figure of Hermeto Pascoal, Brazil’s most fearless multi-instrumentalist, they were about to perform Música da Lagoa—a piece that would dissolve the border between composition and environment, score and improvisation, musician and landscape.

Captured in the documentary Sinfonia do Alto Ribeira, the performance has since entered the mythology of experimental music. Pascoal, half submerged, plays flutes and horns, splashes water as percussion, and transforms the lagoon itself into an instrument. The band follows, their bodies awkwardly balanced against the current, improvising not only with each other but with the echoes of stone walls and the reverberations of liquid surfaces. It is both music and ecosystem, both experiment and trance.

The Anti-Genre Genius

Hermeto Pascoal, born in 1936 in Lagoa da Canoa, Alagoas, has long resisted categories. A self-taught prodigy often described as O Bruxo—the sorcerer—he emerged from Brazil’s Northeast with an ear tuned as much to the cries of animals and the rhythms of rain as to the tempered scales of the piano. In his universe, anything that makes sound can be an instrument: teapots, children’s toys, his own voice filtered through pipes and water, even the squealing of pigs.

Yet to label this merely as eccentricity would miss the architecture of Pascoal’s vision. He threads together the fluid syncopation of Brazilian choro, the deep harmonic language of jazz, the ritual cadences of Afro-Brazilian percussion, and a cosmic curiosity that borders on the metaphysical. Where others codify genres, Hermeto unravels them, insisting that music exists in the totality of experience, not in the subdivisions of market categories.

Improvisation as Ecology

What made Música da Lagoa so radical was not just the daring of playing in water, but the philosophical proposition it embodied. The lagoon was not a backdrop; it was an active collaborator. Each splash altered the meter, each echo folded into the improvisation. For Pascoal, nature was not to be represented in music—it was to be inseparable from it.

This ecological improvisation anticipated what today’s sound artists and field recordists take as foundational practice: that soundscapes are never static, and that human and nonhuman voices share the same spectrum. Long before environmental art became institutionalized, Pascoal was fusing the rainforest with free jazz, proposing an acoustic cosmology where music was both planetary and personal.

The Global Resonance

Within the canon of experimental music, Pascoal sits in a peculiar place. To the Brazilian mainstream, he has always been an eccentric outsider, admired but rarely commodified. To the global avant-garde, he is a reference point, cited by Miles Davis—who once called him “the most impressive musician in the world”—yet often overlooked in Western histories of experimental sound.

The PETAR performance crystallizes this paradox. It is as radical as John Cage’s prepared piano or Pauline Oliveros’s deep listening practice, yet anchored in a lineage that is unmistakably Brazilian—syncopated, playful, irreverent, but also profoundly serious about the metaphysics of sound.

Beyond the Lagoon

Forty years later, watching Hermeto half-naked in the water still feels uncanny, as if one is witnessing the birth of a new grammar. The lagoon has become archival footage, but the principle remains urgent: music as a site where categories dissolve, where environment and improvisation converge, where resistance to order becomes the condition for freedom.

Hermeto Pascoal’s legacy is not just the hundreds of compositions, the orchestral experiments, or the improbable longevity of his career. It is the insistence that music can—and must—be porous, unstable, and alive to the world around it.

In an era where climate catastrophe forces us to reconsider our relationship with nature, Música da Lagoa reads like a manifesto from the past: that listening is not passive, that creation is collaboration with forces larger than ourselves, and that sound can still enchant the world into feeling whole again.