Villa-Lobos = Cool Dude

Photo: Museu Villa-Lobos

Here Villa-Lobos demonstrates manossolfa, the Portuguese term for tonic sol fa, the system of representing tones with hand signals. He used this technique to conduct massive choirs of children (up to 40,000 of them).

And this is someone nearly as cool, François Truffaut, doing the same kind of thing in this scene from Steven Spielberg's great film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Some of those mass choir events were so large Villa had to use flags. Here he is at Estádio de São Januário in Rio de Janeiro, in June of 1942.

The original caption of this picture: "Thousands of voices are awaiting the arrival of Villa-Lobos in São Januário stadium."