An Overview

Music in Brazil has clearly developed through two distinct movements: the written tradition (transposed from European music), also called "learned" or "concert", and the non-written tradition (resulting from the mixing of European, indigenous and African music). Both have developed in their own way and, as has also happened in many other countries, they have converged at certain points. In Brazil, those encounters between the popular and learned traditions have a specific importance because there is no doubt that therein lies one of the extraordinary features of Brazilian musical production.

The São Paulo State Symphony

Popular and Learned Music

The first document which records contact between the Portuguese and the Indians on American soil is a letter from the scribe Pero Vaz de Caminha to the King of Portugal, in 1500, recording, at a particular moment in time, the musical mixing of Europeans and natives in the sound of the gaita (pipes). From the first century of colonization onwards, Jesuit teaching appealed to music, encouraging the combination between elements of tribal music and dance with chants and instrumentation linked to a religious theatre with a medieval basis, a combination which is the origin of many popular festivals and dances that have survived through the ages.

In seventeenth century Bahia, it was said that Gregório de Matos, the greatest Brazilian of the baroque period, spent part of his life traveling around the Salvador region chanting verses.

In the eighteenth century, the first appearance of modinha and lundu revealed the custom of syncopation, a certain melodic malevolence and a certain sensuality, somewhere between implied and explicit, which appeared to European travelers as clear signs of their own feelings. The characteristics of those two musical genres in some way anticipated the mournful song and the samba, which was to become the genre par excellence of modern popular Brazilian music. But the modinha and the lundu were also reflected in Portugal, in the eighteenth century, via the poet and mixed-race priest Domingos Caldas Barbosa (1740? - 1800), also appearing as stories in literature, in a representative example of interpenetration between the oral and the written, the learned and the popular traditions.

The three most representative composers of Brazilian music in the written tradition, in the various phases of its development, were the mixed-race priest José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767 - 1830) at the end of the colonial period, Carlos Gomes (1836 - 1896) in the romantic period and Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887 - 1959) in the modern period. José Maurício, who produced essentially religious music at the time King João VI was in Brazil immediately before Independence, was a mixed-race priest (like Caldas Barbosa) who also composed modinhas. Carlos Gomes, who achieved great success in Europe with the opera "Il Guarany" (1870), written in the style of the day, but with an Indian theme, composed a little known collection of popular songs before his departure for Europe. Villa-Lobos, a classically trained cellist, who had experienced the modernist innovations of the Twenties, was familiar with the popular Rio musicians, serenaders, samba dancers and "chorões", a closeness that is reflected in the ambitious collections of the "Choros" and the "Bachianas Brasileiras".

The French composer, Darius Milhaud, who lived in Brazil at the end of the 1800's, drew attention to the music of Ernesto Nazareth (1863 - 1943), who combined Chopin and the popular pianists in a finely written collection of polkas and maxixes (lively dances), with traces of habanera (Cuban dance music), which he generally called "Brazilian tangos", becoming part of popular culture and also, after initial resistance, of concert repertoire.

It could be said that the permeability between different cultural layers relates to a social life in which the world of the family and the world of routine work co-exist - amongst the folds of slave culture - with casual work, the uncertainty of a dissolute life and popular festival culture, often both sacred and profane, Catholic and pagan. The inter-penetration between the worlds of "order" and "disorder", that the literary critic and theorist, Antonio Cândido called "dialectic and malandragem (roguery)", formed the shifting sand of a fellowship and a culture in which the oral and the written, the "learned" and the "popular" were constantly being rearranged in an unusual manner.

If movements for the creation of concert music very often led to a connection with popular music, the more recent developments of refined popular music indicated a link with written music and literature, confirming the dynamic interaction between those levels.

Antonio Carlos Jobim (1927 - 1994), the great composer of the bossa nova, took as his example Villa-Lobos, even leaving his classical training to compose arrangements for Brazil's Rádio Nacional and, eventually, the sambas and songs that became known by the whole world. The work of Tom Jobim followed a parallel path with that of João Gilberto (1931), the great performer and modern re-creator of the samba, and also with the work of Vinícius de Moraes (1913 - 1980), a poet acknowledged in literary circles since the 1930s, who migrated to popular song at the end of the Fifties. The bossa nova formed a generation of musicians and song-writers who had grown up with samba, the literary tradition and even that of concert music, as well as being open to other influences, ranging from Jorge Benjor to Roberto Carlos, from Chico Buarque, Edu Lobo and Milton Nascimento to Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil.

That tradition is what constitutes modern Brazilian popular music, on which the tropicalist movement left its mark at the end of the Sixties, through Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, in particular. By means of collages, dislocations and parodied quotations, tropicalismo brings face to face the worlds of Brazilian popular music, the romanticism of the masses in the so-called "tacky" pop music and avant-garde experiments, in a dialogue with literature, turning this disparate convergence of eras, including craftsmanship, urban-industrial and post pop, into an amazingly complex manifestation of the Brazilian experience within the context of cultural transnationalization.

Works of a more instrumental type, open to classical, indigenous, oriental and jazz influence, such as those by Egberto Gismonti, the experimentalism of Hermeto Paschoal, the dodecaphonic incursions of Arrigo Barnabé into the raw urban pop world, are also signs of that receptiveness to differences, elevated by tropicalismo to the status of being Brazil's interpretive feature.

In conclusion, it could be said that Brazilian music does not occupy a water-tight place within the framework of globalization, aligned with the field of native and ethnic cultures or those that are purely cosmopolitan, but rather it is positioned within a field of experience and creation in relation to the breaking down of cultural frontiers in the modern world.

Written Tradition

The tradition of written music had been implanted slowly during the colonial period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) in a reluctant environment. In that period, its position was basically linked to Catholic religious culture in Bahia, Olinda (Pernambuco), Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Minas Gerais. The musicians were generally mixed-race artisans who sometimes came together in groups. In general, their music was of historic interest rather than aesthetic. An exception was the eighteenth century music from Minas Gerais: rediscovered by the musicologist Curt Lange after it had been lost in partial copies that were scattered and altered in the nineteenth century, it reveals a certain systematic character. This is on account of its significant presence in local culture, because of its method of execution and by the presence of a small but important group of inter-influent composers.

The transfer of the court of King João VI to Brazil in 1808 because of the Napoleonic invasion gave a considerable boost to musical life in Rio de Janeiro, encouraging instrumentalists and choirs that had previously focused chiefly on religious music. This period was characterized by the work of the priest, José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767 - 1830).

The establishment of the Music Conservatoire in 1842 encouraged the development of non-religious instrumental music, with contributions from Francisco Manuel da Silva (1795 - 1865) who composed the Brazilian National Anthem. The first composer to become known internationally, however, was Carlos Gomes (1836 - 1896), whose opera, "Il Guarany" was first performed at La Scala in Milan, highlighting the combination of the characteristics of Italian opera with the uncivilized world of the Americas. In the nineteenth century, certain romantic nationalists such as Alexandre Levy (1864 - 1892) and Alberto Nepomuceno (1864 - 1920) attempted to adapt chamber and symphonic music to the local environment, using certain rhythms and themes taken from popular music (that is, from the non-written tradition). Together with these were composers who were very close to European music at the end of the century, such as Henrique Oswald (1852 - 1931) and Glauco Velasquez (1884 - 1914), moving away from any tendency towards localism.

Around 1920, the composition of concert music that was characteristically Brazilian gained new force with Villa-Lobos (1887 - 1959) and the first generations of composers focused on modernist nationalism, seeking a synthesis between modern European music and elements of popular music in order to form a kind of vast musical picture of the "new country". The force of modernist musical nationalism, headed by the writer and musicologist, Mário de Andrade (1893 - 1945), between the Twenties and the Forties, concentrated on the dominant notion of the period, of pragmatically overcoming the gulf between the written and the non-written tradition by means of the research for and systematic incorporation of the themes and techniques of a culture that was popular, rural, anonymous and collective. It involved the programmatic integration of folklore and learned composition.

In addition to the aesthetic problems implied in that search for stylization, the nationalist effort was also an indication of the lack of consolidation that in different ways, has dogged the tradition of written music in Brazil since its origin: the absence of a stable public, of stable orchestras, of a strong chamber culture and the means of publishing and performing the works produced. This led Mário de Andrade and Villa-Lobos to become committed to projects of an educational nature (in the case of Villa-Lobos, these were directly linked to the New State of former President, Getúlio Vargas and right-wing rhetoric, whilst those of Mário de Andrade tended towards the left).

The introduction of dodecaphonism, as well as debates on the new technologies of sound production and the industrialization of music, put into practice by the German teacher and composer Hans Joachim Koellreutter (1915) and the group Música Viva (Live Music), at the end of the Thirties and the Forties, opened up a controversial movement with a tradition that until then had dominated musical nationalism. In 1950 there were areas of sharp polarization between nationalism founded on folklore and internationalized experimental music. It was as if the justification of the learned tradition in Brazil was on a systematic seesaw, sometimes by the exoneration of rural roots, sometimes by the latest forms of the refined and cosmopolitan world, without prejudice to the fact that artists sometimes had to face the crossfire of aesthetic and political discussion, from one key to another.

The affirmation and radicalization of the avant-garde was taken over during the Sixties by the São Paulo group, Música Nova (New Music), which was later to become divided between anti mass market experimentation on the one hand, and the supporting of mass market music hailed as the end of artisan music, on the other.

Parallel with the radical oscillations between the avant-garde and the mass market, nationalism and internationalism, the work of Marlos Nobre (1939 -) has achieved a relative re-assimilation from the world of folklore to the cosmopolitan world, integrating the formation or the information of local cultures with elements of contemporary music later than those mobilized by the time of Villa-Lobos. The work of Almeida Prado (1943) can also be catalogued in that divided territory.
In latter years, the production has developed - more scriptural than written - of electronic and electro-acoustic music.

Non-Written Tradition

The origins of popular music relate to a period of change within Portuguese, indigenous and African culture during the early centuries of the Colony, which could be considered as having been unconscious in two senses: little studied and almost inaccessible to historiographic work, at the same time as containing certain defining and permanent traces of Brazilian culture.

On the African presence, it should be said that the contingent of African slaves brought a rhythmic infrastructure linked to dancing and vocal movement that went through centuries of syncretism. This, together with the ambivalent strategies of adaptation and resistance on the part of the slave, as well as a certain cultural porosity within Brazilian slavery that continued until the end of the nineteenth century, was the keynote for the formation of Brazilian music.

The modinha, recognizable in the eighteenth century by its languid and sensual swaying interspersed with syncopated melodic motifs, and the lundu, a genre of dance music originating from the batuques (Negro dances), comprised the sub-stratum of Brazilian music that was both lyrical and choreographic. Symptomatically, the modinha, originating from Court dances that acquired Brazilian form by their expression, became popular amongst the different layers of society in that poetic climate and with its rhythmic-melodic designs, whilst the lundu, intrinsically popular in origin, was adopted as an instrumental genre and became a movement of relative assimilation within the cultural media where it was present in the form of instrumental music. That movement, crossed by encounters between the popular and learned traditions, indicates the permeable nature of music in Brazil, at the same time as refuting the fact that non-written tradition may often develop separately in the fringes of the written tradition, or take the written form as the instrument of development.

In the nineteenth century, the polka, introduced as a salon dance in 1844, was progressively adapted to a manner of execution that bore witness to the expression, the ornamental inflections and rhythm linked with the profiles that are much praised in Brazilian popular tradition. Played by the so-called "pianists", who interpreted it according to the syncopated motifs of the lundu, or by instrumental groups linked with the ancient music of the "barbers", consisting of flute and clarinet, the polka was the origin of the maxixe and the choro, two basic genres in the birth of popular foreign modern music. In an analogous process, the European waltz was assimilated into the environment of the mournful tones of the choro and the serenade.

Overlaid with traces of maxixe, the polka spread through the middle classes by means of a flourishing market in scores that met the demands of repertoire for girl pianists confined to the domestic area. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the polka was the forerunner of the maxixes that were common in carnival clubs and review theatres, linked to a Bohemian lifestyle and a socio-cultural environment consisting of poor Negroes and people of mixed race. Therefore, that popular refined music that had formed an element of attraction for the elite and middle classes (when assimilated under cover of the polka or the "Brazilian tango" adapted for the piano), was simultaneously and ambiguously rejected, often persecuted and prohibited by the police (maxixe or batuque was associated with "low-class amusement" and synonymous with sexual disarray, a threat to society and recent slavery). The contradictory movements of the rejection and acceptance of the maxixe and the samba by the elite and by official institutions are an example of that "dialectic of malandragem (roguery)" by means of which popular music, as a marginal phenomenon, was gradually transformed into the sign and symbol of modern Brazil.

However, in the twentieth century, the introduction of the gramophone, the record and the radio made way for a major expansion of the flow of popular refined music, galvanized by support from the samba, a genre of song that brought to the surface the rhythmic basis of Negro music, very often improvised using group refrains, condensed and compacted with a view to its new status as an industrialized market. Acknowledged since 1917 following the success of "Pelo telefone (by the telephone)", a composition by Donga that adapted already familiar and anonymous themes, the samba gradually established itself, especially at the end of the Thirties, as a true symbol of modern popular Brazilian culture, already able to acknowledge the signs of what it had been until recently - the mark and stigma of a slavery that was scarcely acknowledged.

The tradition of the samba developed throughout the Twenties (with Sinhô, João da Baiana, Donga himself, Pixinguinha), the Thirties (with Ismael Silva, Wilson Batista, Noel Rosa, Assis Valente), the Forties (with Dorival Caymmi and Ari Barroso), the Fifties (Geraldo Pereira), in addition to its citizenship gaining status as an emblem - between that of a rogue and an apologetic - of Brazil. Its poetic decantation continues in the work of contemporary composers such as Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso, defining the general profile of the career of Paulinho da Viola. At times forgotten and at others taken up again for mass consumption, it has returned from time to time in a variety of forms, as in the case of the "pagoda".

During the Forties, popular music centered on Rio, particularly promoted by National Radio, and was also important in Bahia, through Caymmi and Ari Barroso, in the North East with the baioes (popular North East dances) of Luiz Gonzaga, and in the South also represented more discreetly and less regionalistically, by the intimacy of Lupicínio Rodrigues.

The development of popular refined music was closely linked to the phenomenon of street Carnival, that gained forced with the urbanistic modernization of Rio, linked to the festival in a kind of social kaleidoscope before being separated from the rich (in clubs), from the poor (in carnival groups) and the better off (in crowds). By the Fifties, a large number of the recordings of sambas and marchinhas had taken the form of the spirit of Carnaval or were directly intended for such use.

At the end of the Fifties, the bossa nova revolutionized popular Brazilian music by incorporating complex harmonies inspired by impressionism or jazz, closely linked to shades and modulations of melody, sung in a colloquial and lyrically ironic way with rhythms following a beat that had a radical effect on the suspensively syncopated nature of the samba. That synthesis resulted in particular from the poetry of Vinícius de Moraes, from the melodic-harmonic imagination of Tom Jobim and the strict interpretation of the minimal inflexions of the song and rhythmic solution used by João Gilberto. It should also be remembered that certain of Jobim's more important songs, such as "Desafinado (Off-key)" and "Samba de uma nota só (Samba on a single note)", were in association with Newton Mendonça.

The conquests of the bossa-nova (its impact on a Brazil that was becoming modernized with the speed of expansionism by Juscelino Kubistcheck and the inauguration of Brasília, in parallel with its international success) encouraged a great national upsurge in song during the Sixties amongst university youth, which also incorporated the criticism of social injustice and the restriction of democratic liberty, with the movement known as MPB.

Within it and the popular music festivals marking the period on television, the tropicalista movement emerged to criticize the strict populism and nationalism that were seeking to deny the force of mass media, technology and behavioral changes implied in contemporary culture.

Later decades were distinguished by the presence of those who continued the conquests of the Sixties, such as Luiz Melodia, João Bosco, Djavan and Alceu Valença who emerged in the Seventies together with composers of mainly instrumental music such as Hermeto Paschoal and Egberto Gismonti, singers such as Tim Maia, radical exponents of tropicalista experiments such as Arrigo Barnabé who appeared side by side with Itamar Assumpção and the rock group, Rumo in the movement known as the "São Paulo avant-garde". The Eighties featured notable Brazilian rock groups such as "Os Titãs", "Paralamas do Sucesso", "Legião Urbana" and creators of new poetics, during the Nineties, with Arnaldo Antunes from São Paulo (who was with "Os Titãs"), the Bahian, Carlinhos Brown and the Pernambucan Chico Science (leader of the short-lived Mangue Beat Movement).

by José Miguel Wisnik

Brazilian Music on the Radio

WPFW 89.3 FM Sounds of Brazil- Hosted by Tony Regusters on Sundays at 22:30 to 0:00. Listen Live: http://www.wpfw.org/index.php?db=content/WPFW_Radio&tbl=WPFW_Radio&id=1

KPFK 90.7  Global village FM Fridays 11 a.m- 12:30 p.m. Listen Live: http://www.kpfk.org/listen-live.html hosted and produced by Sergio Mielniczenko

88.1 WMBR, Boston, MA- Listen live 12-2 p.m Hosted by Brutus Leaderson : Program is called World Beats http://wmbr.org/

WHPK 88.5 FM, program Gateway to Brazil University of Chicago, Chicago, IL hosts :Steve and Marcos Fridays 4-5 p.m. Listen Live: http://www.whpk.org/stream/

WLFM-LM 87.7 program Sounds of Brazil on Saturdays midnight to 2 am host is scott adams. Listen live http://www.877chicagosmoothjazz.com/IS.aspx Site includes a “just played” section where listeners can find the song name, artist, and itunes purchase. 

Podcasts: http://www.miscelaneavanguardiosa.com/english/