Brazil

Introduction

Brazil is the largest and most populous country in Latin America; it is also fifth in the world in terms of territory (3,287,597 sq mi) and seventh in population (estimated at 217 million in 2024). This giant country is the homeland of peoples from a variety of ethnicities and backgrounds and Brazilians are particularly proud of their rich musical heritage, which draws from musics of Amerindian, European, and African origins, among others. Brazilian performers and composers have blended and transformed these traditions to produce a myriad of commercial popular styles that continue to expand the local musical scene.  Within a large country populated by a variety of peoples, music making in Brazil has been particularly important as a channel for communal expression, as well as a marker of locality, regionalism, and nationality. Several Brazilian popular styles such as samba, bossa nova, Brazilian country music, and rock, have crossed the country’s borders to impact the international scene. Alongside other cultural icons such as soccer, music has served to showcase Brazilian culture abroad while at the same time helping to mediate communal participation and create internal bonds of citizenship.

Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking country in the Americas, and the language has served well over the years to unify the country’s large and diverse population. Nonetheless, other languages have co-existed with the “official” Portuguese and play roles in Brazil’s vibrant cultural diversity. Descendents of European immigrants have maintained German and Italian dialects in communities in the South and Central Brazil, and the huge influx of Japanese immigration in the first half of the 20^th century brought Japanese language and culture into the lives of residents of central Brazil, especially in the state of São Paulo. Although most commercial popular musics are sung in Portuguese, West African dialects are kept alive in Afro-Brazilian religious songs and in regional popular musics. In addition, some 180 native languages are spoken in contemporary Brazil. Amerindian words appear in the names of cities, rivers, and food, and in the lyrics of traditional songs. A national interest in reviving native cultures has also led popular musicians, such as singer and composer Marlui Miranda and metal bands Sepultura https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepultura  and Arandu Arakuaa, to record songs in Amerindian languages.

Brazil’s extensive territory is occupied by a myriad of landscapes, climates, flora, and fauna.  Have a close look at the map above and you will see, for example, that over 60% of the Amazon forest lies in the Brazilian Western territory, and that the country also enjoys 4,600 miles of Atlantic coastline. Brazil spans four time zones and hosts one of the world’s most extensive river systems. In addition, the country’s several climate regions range from a vast tropical area in the North and Northeast coast, to semi-arid areas in the Northeast and central states, to subtropical and temperate climates in the Central-South, where extensive coastal mountains are covered by subtropical forests.

Throughout the centuries, the splendor of the local landscape has appealed to European explorers and colonizers. When, in 1500, the Portuguese Pedro Alvares Cabral arrived on Brazil’s Northeast coast, his reports included enthralled descriptions of the “discovered” land’s grandeur, beauty and, of course, commercial potential. The country’s mesmerizing landscape has ever since been depicted in historical reports, poetry, and novels with an intense pride and has been transformed into an important icon of Brazilian culture. Landscape, nature, and its sounds were a vital source of inspiration for the romantic nationalistic music of 19^th– and early 20^th– century Brazilian classical composers. The country’s beauty has also been a unifying theme in the lyrics of Brazilian popular music, from urban sambas and Bossa Nova to rock and hip-hop songs.

But while landscape and language have served to promote shared feelings of Brazilian nationality, they have also set Brazil apart from the rest of the continent. Today social media allows people all over the world to communicate and learn about one another, but less than one hundred years ago communication and transportation systems could not overcome Brazil’s geographical hurdles. Although Brazil shares borders with most South American countries (Ecuador and Chile being the exceptions), the vast Amazon forest and the Andes mountains in the West have historically hindered Brazilians’ cultural exchanges with their Latin American neighbors. Furthermore, with the Amazon forest covering 1/3 of the country’s territory, the majority of the Brazilian population lives in large cities situated on or near the coast, where large ports maintain the country’s economic, political, and cultural ties to Europe and Africa, perhaps more so than to Spanish-speaking Latin America. Consequently, Brazil’s history is marked by a constant flow of European consumer goods, European and West-African cultures, and music.

Explored and settled by the Portuguese, Brazil’s colonial history (1500-1822) intensified this divide. With political and commercial policies that favored commerce and trade over settlement, throughout the colonial years the Portuguese exploited Brazil’s natural resources for the economical gain of the motherland, not for the benefit of the colony. As a result, colonial Brazil did not harbor strong cultural institutions that helped to recreate European music on its side of the Atlantic. No printing presses were allowed in the colony and no institutions of higher education were created in Brazil until the first decades of the 19^th century. The discovery and rush for gold in the second part of the 18^th century surely caused a large immigration to areas of central Brazil and boosted the local musical production, as we learned in Chapter 3. Even so, when compared to the richness of the European music that flourished in Spanish speaking countries during colonial times, Brazil lingered much behind.

In 1808, the Portuguese monarchs moved their court from Lisbon to the Brazilian capital, Rio de Janeiro, to avoid Napoleon’s army, then invading Portugal. The arrival of the court in Brazil was a unique political and historical event in the Americas. As the Portuguese royal family sought to foster a European empire in the New World, they drastically changed the policies that had restricted the growth of their South American colony.  Later, in 1822, it was Pedro I, heir to the Portuguese Braganza family, who declared Brazilian independence from Portugal. The monarchical regime continued when his son Pedro II ascended to the throne in 1840, and was not disbanded until the proclamation of the Brazilian republic in 1889. While, during the 19^th century, wars for independence in Spanish-speaking countries resulted in political and social unrest, Brazilian independence began on a politically stable foundation that favored the development of European-style institutions and a constant flow of the latest European musical trends to Brazilian cities. As a result, a myriad of European musics found fertile ground in Brazilian cities, from Italian opera to traditional musics derived from the Iberian Peninsula. Some of these traditions have been maintained almost unchanged, while others have been transformed into musical manifestations that reflect the new context of the country’s multicultural society.

But the Portuguese did share several practices with other European colonizers in the Americas. Like the Spanish, upon their arrival on Brazilian shores the Portuguese started by enslaving natives for agricultural work.  Cultural conflicts, forced labor, and widespread disease led to the deaths of millions of Amerindians. It is estimated that about four to five million natives from some 1,000 different cultural groups were living in Brazil when the Portuguese arrived. Only about 370,000 Amerindians from about 220 cultural groups remain today. The Brazilian natives, which are dispersed throughout the country, belong to four large ethnic groups, Tupi, Gê, Arawak, and Carib. Some communities were integrated into mainstream Brazilian society and settled in large cities, others have maintained indirect contact with the culture of the colonizers, while others, living in remote regions, have managed to keep their cultural and musical heritages almost intact.

Another similarity between Spanish and Portuguese colonization was the enslavement of Africans to work on sugar cane and coffee plantations in the Brazil’s Northeast and central coast. Under Portuguese colonial rule and as a monarchy during the 19^th century, Brazil imported and enslaved over 4 million Africans, more than any other single country in the Americas. Although the slave trade was formally abolished in 1850, illegal traffic continued for several decades and thus the actual number of Africans brought to Brazil is believed to have been well over 5 million. Although in the 19^th century African and Afro-Brazilians were a majority of the population, under a strong monarchical rule Brazilians managed to maintain the institution of slavery until 1888, decades after abolition in most Latin American countries and the U.S. According to the latest demographics, in today’s Brazil Afro-Brazilians, mulattos (descendants of African and European), caboclos (descendants of African and Amerindian), and mixed-race individuals account for some 45 % of Brazil’s population.

The Africans brought to Brazil were mostly from West African countries such as Nigeria, Benin, and the Portuguese colony of Angola. The majority belonged to Yoruba and Bantu-Ewe cultural groups and brought with them a wide gamut of African religious and secular musical practices. The large number of Africans taken to Brazil, the endurance of slavery, and a close and lasting interaction between Africans and white Europeans in urban areas resulted in a strong influence of African culture on mainstream Brazilian culture. African traditions are particularly felt in the Northeast, an area that holds the largest concentration of people of African descent outside Africa.  As in Cuba and other countries in the Caribbean, Brazilian culture is deeply marked by a long history of contrasts and clashes between the cultures of the Africans and Europeans. But Brazilian culture is also distinguished by a conspicuous intermingling of these cultures, a complex mix that characterizes the core of the country’s musical scene. This intermingling can be seen most clearly in a variety of popular musical styles that fuse West African musics, instrumentation, and performance practices with traditional musics inherited from Portugal and a myriad of European urban popular musics transplanted to Brazil during the 19^th century.

With the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the proclamation of the republic in 1889, Brazil finally got started on the process of breaking away from the Old World. Growing industrial production, the rise of the local economy, and the growth of a middle class concentrated in large cities helped shape the path towards modern Brazil. At the beginning of the 20^th century, and especially during the government of populist president Getulio Vargas (1930-1945), Brazil witnessed a strong wave of nationalism—a political and intellectual movement that supported artistic expressions symbolic of a new and unified nation. The movement was born as a formal celebration of the local mix of ethnicities and cultures, a mix in which the European and African elements were the main threads in the general fabric of a Brazilian national culture. Throughout the 20^th century, the idea of Brasilidade (Brazilianness), of something that identified the uniqueness of Brazilian culture, has been vital in the understanding of local musical traditions and has also been a constant force in the production and consumption of popular musics. Three generations of classical music composers also contributed to the dissemination of nationalism as they explored a variety of local traditions, and the Afro-Brazilian heritage in particular, to express musically the Brazilian culture.

Although a 1964 military intervention held Brazil back politically, the country re-emerged as a democracy in 1985 and continues to grow as a major political and economic power in the Americas. Today Brazil has the 8^th largest economy in the world, a wealth that is concentrated in the hands of a few. As a country of extreme richness and accentuated poverty, the harsh social divide has also become part of the Brazilian culture. If hybrid popular musical styles have contributed to symbolize a unified country within a nationalistic political agenda, a rich variety of regional musics have also played a role in highlighting Brazil’s social and ethnic divides. Finally, contemporary Brazil is a young country: 50 percent of its population ranges from 20 to 40 years of age, the great majority living in large cities where access to an increasingly advanced system of communications puts them side by side with other cosmopolitan youngsters around the world. Thus, contemporary Brazilian musical life reflects its youthful population’s desire to belong to and to contribute to the musical “global village.”

As we start to explore some of these musics, keep in mind Brazil’s ethnic and cultural richness, geography, history, and cosmopolitan experiences, as well as its ethnic mix and social divides. These elements overlap and interact in complex ways, and result in musical styles and performance practices that often cross the boundaries of traditional musical classifications, such as popular, religious, traditional, and classical musics. In addition, in urban settings Brazil’s Native, African, and European heritages appear diluted in a variety of original musics in which tradition and modernity go hand in hand.

Traditional and popular musics

A. Amerindian Music

In 1557, the French Calvinist missionary Jean de Léry ventured inland from the central Brazilian coast and lived among the Tupinambá Indians for almost a year. He wrote about what he saw and heard and in 1558 published a book that included reports about the lives, music, and dance of the Tupinambás. Léry’s publication is invaluable because it includes the earliest transcriptions of Amerindian songs in the Tupi language and thus gives us a glimpse of the nature of their music when European explorers first arrived in Brazil in the 16^th century. The song Canidé-ioune transcribed by Jean de Léry (Musical Example 5:1) is a Tupinambá homage to a bird with yellow feathers. The song has been re-printed in several publications over the centuries and continues to be revived in a variety of versions, the most famous of which is an arrangement for chorus done by 20^th-century Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. Thus, this Tupinambá song collected in the 16^th century continues to remind Brazilians about their native roots.

During colonial days and in the 19^th century, other explorers traveled to remote areas of Brazil and published reports on native musical practices, but the culture and music of the Brazilian Amerindian only began to be studied with academic rigor in the last fifty years or so, when a new wave of young ethnomusicologists has set out to explore the musical practices of individual Amerindian groups. However, considering the wide range of native cultures spread over an extensive and often rough territory, ethnomusicologists still have a lot of work ahead of them before we can fully comprehend such a rich musical culture. In this text we can just glance over an amazing variety of native musics. Nonetheless, there are some commonalities among the various Amerindian musical practices, especially among the groups living in the large Amazon basin, that can be studied as general traits tying various native musical cultures together.

In terms of performance practices, we know that music making is usually a social activity and serves to organize social interaction. As a result, there is a prevalence of communal singing and group instrumental performances in which there is no distinction between performers and audiences. Instances of solo performances are also found in the Amazon basin and are often associated with rituals to connect with the supernatural. In addition, the body is an essential part of the native’s musical expression, as there is an intrinsic link between musical performances, singing, and dance. Not unlike most cultures around the world, to the Brazilian natives the meaning attached to music is directly linked to the music’s role in specific ritualistic and social functions; thus, their rich musical tradition is comprised of repertories associated with celebrations, commemorations, fishing, hunting, work, religious rituals, and cure songs used to extract diseases believed to be caused by supernatural forces. The musical repertory is passed down orally from generation to generation, a job often performed by the Shaman, a religious and/or political leader. Music making is also a strong marker of gender roles. In several groups in the Amazon basin, for instance, women are not allowed to play flutes, and in some rituals, not even permitted to see their performances.

We can also identify characteristics common to the music itself as it is performed in the Amazon basin:

1. Melodic lines tend to move in descending and step-wise motion and have a narrow melodic range. While pentatonic melodic structures are prevalent, two or three-note motives in chanting and one-note drones in vocal and instrumental accompaniments are also quite common. These motives usually favor one pitch that is repeated several times and thus might be understood as a tonal center. These elements have been noted in recent transcriptions, but can also be easily seen in the early example provided by Léry (Musical Example 5:1), where the tune is comprised of three notes that move back and forth in step-wise motion.
2. There is a tendency towards a constant, regular pulse that is often marked by stomping tubes, foot stomping, and/or shakers. Short repeated rhythmic/melodic motives are frequently organized in isometric structures, but there is often a lot of rhythmic variation in spontaneous individual performances.
3. Repetition helps create longer sections that fit specific rituals or celebrations. In long celebrations several short sections are organized into larger structures that follow the ritual, lyrics, and choreography. Different parts are identified by specific texts, rhythmic and melodic patterns, and/or vocal and instrumental arrangements.
4. Sliding microtonal pitches in descending motion are quite common in solo and communal singing and in flute performances. As a result, the line between speech and singing, or between speech, blowing an instrument, and singing is often not clearly defined.
5. Monophonic singing is usually favored. Nonetheless, vocal and instrumental drones, pitch sliding, and spontaneous variations in both vocal and instrumental accompaniments during communal singing result in complex heterophonic textures that are hard to capture in traditional musical notation.

Our listening example is a field recording done by Jean-Pierre Estival. The Assurini (Surini) is a Tupi-Guarani-speaking group who live on the bank of the upper Xingu River, a large tributary of the Amazon in the Northern state of Para. The group’s economy is based on fishing, hunting, agriculture, and unique clay pottery produced by the women. The Tiwagawa ritual of the Assurini is one of several native rituals with song and dance that link animals as “guardian spirits” and humans. During the ritual the Assurini sing and dance to invoke the jaguar’s spirits (Tiwá=jaguar spirits) and prepare for war. Jaguars are a constant presence in the region and, as powerful hunters, they are quite respected. In this excerpt, you will hear two songs that are part of a long sequence of songs performed during the ritual. In this short example we can identify some of the musical characteristics noted above: communal singing; foot stomping to mark a constant pulse; pentatonic scale; constant repetition of a short melodic line; isometric structure; predominance of descending line with the lowest note of the refrain functioning as a tonal center; syllabic text setting interspersed with speech; heterophonic texture caused by individual variations of the melodic line; and an accompanying vocal drone.

Musical instruments are manufactured by hand and as a result they are not uniform and come in a multitude of sizes and shapes. They are made from a variety of local materials such as wood, clay, coconut shell, animal horn, bone, bamboo, and, when available, conch shell. A great deal of work and care is put into the construction of musical instruments. They are often ornately decorated with leaves and/or feathers, and colorful designs are drawn with paints extracted from seeds.  Among the groups living in the Amazon basin, there is a preference for musical instruments from the aerophone and idiophone families. Some scholars believe that cordophones were not introduced to Amerindian culture until the arrival of the Jesuits during colonization. Membranophones are also uncommon in the Amazon basin. Instead, hollow log drums serve to accompany celebratory and Shamanistic rituals. Although several kinds of drums with stretched animal skin are found in the North, the use of membranophones by Tupi groups living along the coast is believed to be the result of contact with Europeans.

Aerophones come in two generic types: those in which the sound is produced by agitating a material, usually wood in the air, and those where sound is produced by blowing. Examples of the earlier are the zumbidores, or zunidores, instruments made out of a hollow wood or bamboo stick linked by a string to a flat wood panel that is twisted several times in the air to produce a buzzing sound. Examples of the latter are flutes and whistles; vertical flutes, with and without reeds, and panpipes are the most common. There are also horizontal flutes and a variety of vessel flutes, like ocarinas, in which the sound resonates in the entire cavity of the instrument.

Flutes are special instruments to Amerindians because they can be used to imitate birds and other nature sounds. They are also essential in rituals associated with fish and fishing, a crucial activity to many communities in the Amazon basin. Flutes are widely used in religious rituals and are believed to connect humans to their spiritual ancestors. One group that uses flutes in several rituals is the Kamayuras (Kamaiurás, Camaiuras), a community of some 355 people who live on a large reservation in the area of the Upper Xingu River. The Kamayuras are known for their use of the uruá flutes, a long double-flute, the larger cane tube measuring approximately 7 feet, and the shorter about 5 feet. Uruás are used in rituals to reach the Kamayuras’ ancestral spirits and to honor the dead, to celebrate the rite of passage to puberty, and to collectively commemorate marriage. During these rituals, male performers move from house to house playing the uruá, and are joined by women and children during the final collective festivities.

Idiophones are also widely used by all Amerindian groups. They come in a wide variety of forms, but shakers are the most common. Attached to the ankles, wrist, or waist as bracelets and belts, they look like small ornaments made out of seeds, animal teeth, or claws. These small shakers can greatly expand the sound of foot stomping, and when attached to stamping tubes or a wooden stick they mark the rhythm as accompaniments to dancing and/or singing. Another very common shaker is the maracá (maraká, maraca), usually a gourd filled with seeds. This instrument, which continues to hold its original Tupi name throughout Brazil, is essential in music making to accompany dance, but is also vital in Shaman rituals where the instrument symbolizes spiritual power.

Amerindian music may be perceived as simplistic or monotonous by those used to an array of social media apparatus that exponentially expand sounds and musical possibilities. Nonetheless, we invite you to look at and listen to Amerindian music in a context that does not require complexity, at least not at an immediate level. Native musical performances are part of a set of worldviews founded on an intrinsic connection between human beings and nature. However, if this connection is optimistically perceived as “natural,” there is still a lot to be investigated and learned about a complex set of cultural relations created by a variety of different timbres, vocal emissions, and instrumental sounds that communicate subtle human interactions and social structures and that are very specific to each of these small native communities.

We should also keep in mind that several musical traits of the Brazilian natives have blended with European and African traditions and are manifested in the caboclo culture and music of the North and Northeastern regions. In addition, the idealized image of the Brazilian Indian as pure and authentic, explored in 19^th-century romantic classical music, has been retained to this day in popular culture through a kind of “native nostalgia.” The figure of an idealized native is recreated every year by singers and dancers who dress in native “costumes” and parade during carnival celebrations throughout Brazil.

Finally, as a result of recent efforts to mitigate global warming and pollutants, popular musicians from all over the world have visited and performed with Amazon groups, and brought them to larger cities to perform in concerts for the preservation of rain forests. The most well-known example is the singer/composer Sting, who visited the Xingu reservation in the late 1980s and performed with the Xavante group. More recently, Brazilian jazz performer Egberto Gismonte has also appeared in concert with the Kamayuras; Brazilian metal band Sepultura visited the Xavante in the 1990s and included some of their sounds in their famous recording Roots (1996) [Available on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/search/Sepulturaa%20Roots]. But rather than wait for outside celebrities to bring their culture and pleas into the spotlight, musicians from several indigenous groups have inserted themselves in the local musical scene, performing, recording, and sharing their work on social media, and making a rich contribution to Brazilian popular music of various styles, from rock, rap, and pop, to creative blending of these with their traditional musics. Their strong presence in the contemporary scene can be seen in sites like https://kalamidade.com.br/20-artistas-indigenas-que-fortalecem-a-musica-contemporanea-parte-1/   and  https://novabrasilfm.com.br/notas-musicais/vozes-indigenas-para-acompanhar-na-musica-brasileira-confira-10-musicas , and many others easily accessible on social media.

B. European Music

The Iberian Peninsula’s long-held traditions of outdoor festivities, parades, and dramatizations with music and dance are alive and well in contemporary Brazil. Sacred music dramas recounting passages of the Catholic Church calendar were vital during colonization as a tool for converting natives and Africans to Catholicism, and they survive in today’s Brazil in several regional variations. For example, the Folia de Reis, asacredfolk drama recreating the Christmas Cycle, can be found in small towns in rural areas as well as in working-class neighborhoods in large cities. The celebrations of the Folias start on December 24 with the announcement of the birth of Christ, and end on January 6 (Epiphany), the Dia de Reis (Day of the Three Kings). Usually on the last day of the cycle people join the members of the Folias in large outdoor festivities that include musical performances, dances, food, and drinks.

The Folias typically consist of groups of 6 to 8 people who sing and dance from house to house and in return receive food, drinks, and sometimes donations in the form of money. But Folias can also be organized into larger groups of 20 plus participants that put on elaborate parades and whole-act dramas. Each Folia has original songs and different performing styles to greet the residents. The groups sing toadas, strophic songs with lyrics inspired by biblical passages, accompanied by several instruments; in the Northeast the zabumba, a double-headed bass drum, is the most popular, but the ensembles typically also include a caixa (snare drum), guitar, sanfona (accordion), and pandeiro (tambourine); in the Central and Southern regions a guitar, a cavaquinho (four-string instrument, similar to a ukalelê), or a rabecca (violin) are sometimes also included.

Iberian traditions are also evident in Brazil in a number of secular dramatic dances, of which the bumba-meu-boi is one of the most popular. Found in different formats in small towns and rural areas throughout Brazil, the bumba-meu-boi is a tradition that goes back to colonial days when Brazilian cattle farms were staffed with slave labor. But although the dramatization derives from the Iberian dramatic dances, the bumba-meu-boi plot is a Brazilian creation that connects the European, African, and Native traditions. The drama metaphorically recreates the agrarian cycle by enacting the kidnapping, death, and resurrection of an Ox. The plot, which is told in a variety of ways throughout the country, involves a Portuguese master and his wife, a slave (Pai Francisco) and his pregnant wife, and other Afro-Brazilians and native slaves. As the story goes, one day Pai Francisco’s wife craved to eat an Ox’s tongue, in particular the tongue of her master’s favorite Ox. Pai Francisco kills the Ox to satisfy his wife, but as a result falls in disgrace with his master. The master orders Francisco to bring the Ox back to life, which he does with the help of native medicines and sacred rituals. The animal awakes and everyone dances through the night. Some scholars believe that the bumba-meu-boi folk drama depicts the interaction among social classes in colonial Brazil, in particular denouncing slave owners and ridiculing the ruling class.

The bumba-meu-boi tradition is part of the Ciclo Junino (June Cycle) and is most prominent in the North and Northeast, where the drama unfolds in elaborate outdoor parades that re-tell the plot in original ways. The Ox, the main character of the drama, usually makes a dramatic appearance as a dancer in the middle of the parade covered by a colorful and ornate Ox costume. The Ox dances, is killed, then is resurrected, and everyone sings and dances together. During the dramatizations participants sing strophic songs, toadas do boi (Ox songs), in responsorial style accompanied mostly by percussion, especially the bass drum zabumba and pandeiros, but the ensemble can also include a sanfona, pifano (flute), guitar, and maracas. In the Northeastern state of Maranhão, bumba-meu-boi performances are a major attraction during the month of June. Their bumba-meu-boi groups are famous for their large percussion ensembles, which include: the characteristic pandeirão, alarge frame drum that can range from 24 to 32 inches in diameter; matracas, two hardwood sticks, similar to a Cuban clave; and tabor-onça (friction drum). Each group has its own sotaque (style), characterized by unique rhythmic patterns, instrumentation, and song style. Usually, the matraca and maracas provide a time-line that consists of alternating duple and triple rhythmic patterns, resulting in constant hemiolas. The pandeirões provide a bass pattern as well as improvised rhythms that enrich the overall sound. Some of these bumba-meu-boi sotaques can be heard in the State of Maranhão web site. In the State of Amazonas the Ox celebrations have been adapted and transformed to include native symbols and myths, as well as imagery from the Amazon River and its natural environment. Recently, these traditions have been enhanced in a most exquisite June celebration of the Ox in the city of Parintins, where Ox songs highlight the caboclo culture, and modernize the traditional musics by adding updated electronic sound apparatus to the already mixed celebration.

The tradition of sung improvised poetry of the Iberian Peninsula is also alive in several Latin American countries. In Brazil it is known as cantoria, a tradition that identifies the rural, peasant roots of wandering singers, cantadores, whose lyrics are improvised over the strumming of a viola, a string instrument smaller than the guitar with five double metal courses. Violas are crafted by a handful of local manufactures out of local pinewood, although recently a different kind of viola with an internal metal resonator has been the preferred type of modern cantadores. Their tuning varies depending on the region, but cantadores usually prefer an open tuning of a D chord. As they improvise their verses in song cantadores strum only one or two chords on the viola: the D chord, which serves as a drone to their declamatory style of singing, or the D and A. The melodies, set syllabically to the improvised text, are built on a limited number of notes and are sung with a characteristic raspy and high-pitched vocal style. In the Northeast, cantadores are part of the daily scene in both rural and urban areas. Their verses cover a range of issues from their peasant world, like life on a farm, local gossip and politics, but cantadores also sing about contemporary social issues and even international relations, as their songs’ lyrics highlight their well-rounded knowledge. There are several ways that cantadores organize the meter and rhymes of their verses, the sextilha, six-line verses, being the easiest and most common. The example below is a poem with three verses of ten lines each called décimas; here a poet from the State of Ceará talks about contemporary issues such as world climate changes. Let’s look at how the rhyming scheme works in the Portuguese language:

A.- Reciclar é muito importante Recycling is very important

B.- E precisa-se educar o povo, It’s necessary to educate the people

B.- começando já desde do ovo, Starting with the early egg

A.- num processo muito urgente, In a very urgent cycle

A.- porque a terra tá muito doente; Because the land is very sick

C.- com terremoto e furação; With earthquakes and hurricanes

C.- os animais estão em extinção. And animals are in extinction

D.- Já está faltando oxigênio, There is not enough oxygen

D.- não alcançamos novo milênio. We’ll not reach another millennium

C.- A terra será um grande vulcão. Because Earth will turn into a volcano

A.- O ozônio também está sumindo, The ozone is disappearing

B.- está acabando com as geleiras, It’s melting the glaciers

B.- e ainda com as cordilheiras. And also the mountains

A.- O mar a terra está invadindo; The sea is invading the land

A.- os oceanos já estão subindo, The ocean levels are going up

C.- têm causado tanta destruição And have caused a lot of destruction

C.- do Canadá até o Japão. From Canada to Japan

D.- A culpa é dos seres humanos, The human beings are to be blamed

D.- que em breve, dentro de poucos anos, who, very soon, in a few years

C.- da terra desaparecerão. Will disappear from Earth

“Vamos reciclar o planeta” (Let’s recycle the planet) by Henrique César Pinheiro Outubro/2006. Translation by Cristina Magaldi (Usinas das Letras  http://www.usinadeletras.com.br/exibelotexto.phtml?cod=9474&cat=Cordel&vinda=S)

Cantadores often confront one another in desafios (duels) with fights of words, double entenderes, clever rhymes, and reciprocal put-downs, where they display their general knowledge, arguing capabilities, memorization, eloquence, diversity of themes, and talent in creating comic and satirical verses. Audiences in bars or informal gatherings in town squares participate by challenging the duelists, suggesting topics and rewarding them with change passed around in a small tray. As the tradition has spread from rural to urban areas, and even to large cities like São Paulo and its surroundings, national competitions have gathered the most skilled cantadores and showcased them on radio and popular TV shows. Since the 1960s, cantadores have been receiving growing interest from the pop music industry, where singers like Elomar and Zé Ramalho have used the cantadores’ style to appeal to a large audience. In addition, the similarity between the techniques of cantoria and U.S. rap, the improvised poetry over a repetitive base, has not escaped the attention of the younger generation, and has created much debate about the “true” Brazilian origin of rap. Regardless, young popular musicians from Recife, the capital of the Northeastern state of Pernambuco, have been very successful in wedding the two traditions. The rap group Faces do Subúrbio, for instance, has achieved great success with songs that explore improvised rhymes accompanied by drum machines and strong bass lines.

The tradition of the wandering singer accompanied by violas has also served as a symbol of identity in Central and Southern Brazil, where música caipira, or hillbilly music, has grown to become a best seller in the Brazilian pop music market. Música caipira can be understood as the music of the rural peasant, but it has also crossed the rural/urban boundaries because of a heavy migration of peasants to large cities. In música caipira, a duo sings in parallel thirds to the accompaniment of violas, guitar, and/or sanfona. Their verses are not improvised, but strophic songs about romance and life in the country. Singers of musica caipira do however sing with the same characteristic nasal, high-pitched vocal tones of the wandering cantadores and the sound of the viola is often present or implied. As música caipira reached the air waves, it spawned hits in large cities and became known as musica sertaneja, or country music. New duos have popped up in the growing market and have wedded the sound of the viola with electronic instrumentations and bass drums, string orchestras, and updated sounds produced in state-of-the-art studios. One of the most successful duossertanejos of the 1980s and 1990s is Chitãozinho & Xororó. They have dominated radio and TV and sold millions of records in Central and Southern regions. Their music has also reached the international market; they have recorded songs in Spanish and collaborated with famous U.S. stars like the Bee Gees and Reba McEntire. As with U.S. country music, most duos sertanejo’s songs focus on romance and nostalgia for life in the country. Chitãozinho & Xororó have influenced a host of new duos sertanejos who dominate the Brazilian airwaves today and that are widely available in social media, including the duo Zé Neto & Cristiano, who are one of Brazil’s most well-known contemporary sertanejo groups. Check their site for videos, shows, and recordings, which are also available on Spotify and YouTube.

C. Afro-Brazilian musical traditions

Let’s start learning about the rich African heritage in Brazil with a sacred musical tradition from a religion called Candomblé. African religions have strong influences in other Latin American countries, especially in Cuba, as we will learn in Chapter 6. But in the Brazilian Northeastern state of Bahia, the pervasiveness of African religions is such that the state’s capital, Salvador, is said to be for African religions the equivalent of the Vatican for Catholicism. Thus, Salvador is the center of all musics derived directly or indirectly from African religious practices, not only in Brazil, but in the Americas. And Candomblé is the most distinctive of all these African religions because it has preserved direct links with its original West African sources, in particular those of the Yoruba culture. 

Candomblé followers worship a supreme being Olorum, with orixás, or deities, as intermediaries between the worshipers and the God Olorum. Orixás are mythological figures that symbolize all parts of nature, as well as spiritual ancestors. The high point of the Candomblé ritual is when initiates pass into a trance and a state of spiritual possession where the orixá takes over their bodies to communicate with and bless the worshipers. Orixás’ animistic characteristics are represented in Candomblé by different colors, special clothes, types of food, and particular objects or symbols; for example, Yemanjá is the female orixá of the oceans and her preferred colors are blue and white. Each orixá is also associated with specific songs, rhythmic patterns, and dance movements. During the ceremony the initiates, practitioners specially trained in the symbology of the ritual, dress in the clothes and colors of each orixá and place his/her favorite food at the altar. Then they sing and dance to the sound of sacred drums, the atabaques, to evoke that orixá and to eventually get him/her to possess their bodies. Thus, song and dance are essential to the Candomblé religion as they have a vital role in the act of trance and possession, which is an indication of the presence of the orixá.

It is the job of the Candomblé religious leaders, the babalorixá (male) and ialorixá (female), to know and teach the associations between each orixá and their songs, as well as the placement of each song within the liturgical sequence of the ritual. Worshipers sing in the Yoruba language and in responsorial style, where the leader makes the call and the initiates and participants respond in unison with short phrases and/or interjections. Because drumming plays a crucial role in “calling” and communicating with the orixás, the main drums, the atabaques, are considered sacred instruments. They undergo a ritual baptism and are painted with special colors and decorated with colored scarves, beads, and other materials associated with specific orixás.

Atabaques are cone shaped, single-headed drums played with a wooden stick or, depending on the tradition, with a combination of hands and sticks. They come in three sizes: from the lowest to the highest pitched they are called Rum, Rumpi, and Lê. The master drummer, or alabê, is the second in importance in the Candomblé hierarchy. He plays the Rum, the largest and most important drum, and provides the basic rhythmic patterns, gives clues for changes in rhythm and drives the general tempo for singing and dance movements performed by the initiates. The alabê also assists in leading the singing and directs the improvisations played on the rumpi and lê. The Candomblé musical ensemble also includes an agogô, or double-bell, and sometimes a xekerê or afoxé, an idiophone made of a calabash gourd covered with beads. Each instrument has a small, improvised rhythmic pattern that is repeated several times in ostinato.

Ethnomusicologist Gerard Béhague studied the liturgical functions of songs within the Candomblé ritual and transcribed several rhythmic patterns associated with specific orixás. Musical Example 5:2 shows a section of the avaninha rhythm, which is performed by an ensemble of atabaques and agogô at the beginning of the xirê, the public ceremony of Candonblé.  This rhythm is performed by percussion as the initiates enter the main room, hence it has a march-like tempo. What is noticeable in this and other Candomblé rhythmic patterns is the predominance of compound duple meters, 6/8 or 12/8, which allow for easy changes between duple and triple accentuations (either two times three–with accents on one and four–or three times two, with accents on one, three, and five). These rhythmic patterns are repeated several times in ostinato, and feel like a round rhythmic line that never ends. You can play this easily by tapping on a table, one beat on each hand, counting until six, and accentuating the right hand on one and the left hand on the four and then repeating it incessantly; then do the same, but this time accentuating the right hand on one, three, and five. Then you can simply alternate these accentuations repeatedly. A continuous circular feel emerges, and it is the insistence on these particular rhythmic patterns that helps create the trance among the Candomblé initiates. Also quite common is the distribution of five beats within a measure, so that the first three follow a triple division, while the last two follow a duple division. This five-note sequence played by the Rum and the agogô in the notated example below is very similar to some African time-lines and to Afro-Cuban claves (see Chapter 10).

It is believed that about 1.5 million Brazilians are devoted to the Candomblé religion and its practice is well known and acknowledged today. But this was not always the case. In fact, until the beginning of the 20^th century Afro-Brazilians were prohibited from practicing their faith in the open. As a result, Candomblé worshipers often disguised the practice of their religion by blending it with Catholicism. In this way, many orixá names have come to be associated with catholic saints so that, for example, Yemanjá is also worshiped in Brazil as the Virgin Mary. Nonetheless, African songs and drumming remain the most important symbols of Candomblé and a strong mark of the African traditions preserved in Brazilian music. Even when it mixes with other traditions, crosses over to the secular realm, and is performed in commercial popular musics, African drumming has never lost its symbolic power of “communicating” with the supernatural and of linking Brazilians with their sacred African heritages.

Among the most popular Afro-Brazilian secular musical practices is the performance of capoeira, a fight/game/dance with movements similar to martial arts. During the times of slavery capoeira served to conceal fights among African groups and factions by disguising the fights as dances. Today it is used more as a dance and/or a game that also involves high degrees of physical strength and agility. Capoeira is performed by two players who dance in the middle of a circle made up of observers and other participants. What makes capoeira unique is the dependence of the movements on the music. Also noteworthy in the practice of capoeira is how it links Afro-Brazilians to other African derived traditions in the Americas. For example, the moves of capoeira closely resemble those of African American break dancing in the U.S.

Capoeira’s toques (rhythmic patterns and tempo), dance moves, and style of fight are accompanied by one or more atabaques, pandeiros, and three berimbaus; the latter instruments give the music its most distinctive timbre. The berimbau is a musical bow made out of wood in the shape of an arc and strung with a steel wire and is played by striking the wire with a small stick. A dried gourd is attached at the bottom of the bow and serves as a resonator. Berimbau performers hold a small rattle, the caxixi, with the right hand and coordinate it with a rock or coin held between the thumb and indicator. When the rock or coin touches the wire, it produces the berimbau’s characteristic metallic, buzzing sound.

The capoeira dance/game is performed in a roda de capoeira (ring of capoeira) with three berimbaus of different sizes: the gunga, the bass berimbau, plays the melody and sets the rhythmic pattern and tempo that guides the choreography and style of dance. The other two are called berimbau medio and berimbau viola; they complement the gunga and improvise. Each berimbau produces two pitches, one low and the other one step higher. The different combinations of these pairs of sounds, the buzzing tone created by touching the string with the rock or coin, and the varying tempos make each capoeira toque distinctive.

While the dancers perform in the ring of capoeira, the participants continuously clap and sing in responsorial style, where the player of the berimbau gunga makes the call and the rest of the participants respond with small phrases in unison. A varied repertory of capoeira songs are learned orally, and have lyrics that report, revive, and recount the experiences of Afro-Brazilians since the times of slavery. In the roda de capoeira, the leader (gunga player) sings the ladainha, a long, narrative song, and then follows with a chula, which is sung in responsorial style…

Capoeira as a fight once served well in the slave’s fight for freedom. And it evidently received much disapproval from the ruling classes, who historically responded to capoeira gatherings with force and imprisonment. Although this is no longer the case and capoeira groups abound in all sorts of informal gatherings throughout Brazil, to this day the idea of resistance and liberation is ingrained in the minds of capoeiristas, regardless of their ethnicity or origin. Today, people from all over the world engage in capoeira for both its physical and spiritual benefits. Expectedly, there are countless capoeira academies spread across continents, and several international competitions with participants from all over the world, which are also readily accessible for viewing and listening through social media.

D.  Carnival

Back in Brazil, let’s look at how these Afro-Brazilian traditions merged with European styles and other traditions of the African diaspora in the Americas. The celebration of carnival is perhaps one of the best examples of how the mingling of these traditions in Brazil produced a unique musical style that was also able to cross the boundaries between traditional and popular musics.

Carnival is not unique to Brazil, but an ongoing tradition in various countries of the Americas where the Catholic Church played a role in colonization. Latin Americans from Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Argentina, and several other countries organize elaborate carnivals every year. The best-known North American equivalent is New Orleans’ Mardi Gras celebration. Originally a Roman Catholic annual event, carnival marks the preparation for the season of Lent, a period of fasting and disregard for the pleasures of the flesh (“carnevale”), which starts on Ash Wednesday, forty days before Easter. During the week leading up to the beginning of Lent, usually at the end of February, communities revel in the last opportunity for the excesses of the flesh and commemorate with masquerade balls, games, outdoor parades, musical performances, singing, and dancing. Carnival became especially important in Latin America in colonial days because servants and slaves were allowed to celebrate at the same time as, and even together with, the European colonizers and white elite. It did not take long for the celebration of carnival to become a symbolic act of inclusion, a time of collective euphoria when racial and social divides were replaced by celebrations of ethnic amalgamation, solidarity, and union.

Carnival is one of Brazil’s most widely shared cultural traditions. No other cultural expression achieves, so well and so intensely, the status of a “national” event. However, not everyone celebrates the same way. Brazilian carnival occurs in various formats, from small, rural, informal gatherings, to larger, urban, organized events. During the 19^th century, carnival was celebrated in large cities with masquerade balls where dancers, in truly European fashion, danced waltzes and polkas until the crack of dawn. Old-time Portuguese traditions were also part of informal outdoor celebrations, such as the entrudo game, in which participants with painted faces danced and sung aimlessly in the streets while throwing powder and liquids at each other. Outdoor carnival celebrations became more elaborate in the first part of the 20^th century, especially in large cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Recife where, to this day, parades including music, singing, and dance mark the event in an exquisite manner.

Rio de Janeiro hosts Brazil’s most elaborate carnival parade, one that has been considered the world’s most luxurious outdoor celebration. Since early in the 20^th century, small neighborhood groups called blocos and cordões have paraded in Rio de Janeiro’s streets during carnival in costumes, singing and dancing popular tunes accompanied by brass instruments and zabumbas. But it was the participation of Afro-Brazilians in these outdoor celebrations that transformed an essentially European tradition into a Brazilian celebration. In less privileged Rio de Janeiro neighborhoods, where the population consisted of low-income European immigrants and a majority of mulattoes and Afro-Brazilians, carnival was celebrated with African derived dances, such as batuques, lundus, and later sambas, accompanied by percussion.

Samba music and dance have origins in the Angolan semba, and are found to this day in their original form in rural areas of Brazil. Samba involves a specific choreography, the umbigada, in which dancers move their navels and hips inviting others to dance. As Afro-Brazilians migrated from Bahia to Rio de Janeiro, they brought samba with them and in the new urban context it was mixed with European dances such as the polka and the march to become the urban version of samba performed during carnival. Since the 1930s, samba music and dance have become the hallmark of Rio de Janeiro’s carnival parade, with its marching and percussive music and a choreography that still recalls the traditional umbigada.

As outdoor carnival parades became more elaborate, people started to meet to rehearse their sambas. These meetings, called escolas de samba, samba-schools, were transformed into neighborhood associations, where participants could meet and learn to perform, sing, and dance that year’s samba and to learn their role in the parade. The first school of samba Deixa-Falar started the tradition in 1928, and by the 1930s, several samba-schools were parading in the streets of Rio de Janeiro in fierce competitions. With subsequent state supervision and financial support, Rio de Janeiro’s samba-school parade has grown to gigantic proportions; it has become a multi-million-dollar industry and a showcase for tourists. In 1984, Rio de Janeiro’s government built the sambódromo, a mile-long street with bleachers on either side with a capacity of some 65,000 spectators. Today, some 60 samba-schools with some 2,000 to 4,000 dancers each parade to samba music and dance during carnival with luxurious costumes and floats. But despite the current carnival’s grandeur, samba schools are still local entities headquartered in the neighborhoods where the schools’ participants live. The success of the parade depends on a large population of low-income and mostly mulatto and Afro-Brazilians who work throughout the year as a community for their samba school to have a one-day magnificent carnival show.

Every year, the organization of the parade involves:

1. The choice of a theme (enredo), a plot that unfolds during the parade
2. The design and manufacturing of luxurious floats and costumes, the most elaborate of which are sold for top dollar to celebrities and tourists
3. An internal competition to sponsor the composition of a new samba
4. The recording of the winning samba for advertisement and commercial sales
5. Weekly rehearsals of the percussion ensemble, called the bateria
6. Weekly general rehearsals to coordinate performers, singers, dancers, and plot
7. Final rehearsal in the sambódromo before the parade

Schools of samba parade with a style of samba called samba-enredo (samba-plot), strophic songs that narrate a story related to the experience of Brazilians, usually a historical event. This enredo (plot) is then dramatized in the parade with music and dance, in the traditional Iberian style of dramatic dances that can also be viewed as a popular, outdoor opera. Unlike traditional dramatic dances or opera, samba-enredos are seasonal compositions: a new one is needed every year for the parade. Like commercial popular musics, sambas-enredo have catchy, memorable refrains that can be easily learned by large numbers of people whose enthusiastic singing helps their neighborhood do well in the competition. To coordinate a large group to sing together over a one-mile stretch of street, a leader, or puxador, sings from a strategic position or with a microphone, and accompanies himself with a cavaquinho, the same ukulele-like four-string instrument we encountered in the dramatic dance Folia de Reis. As with other types of sambas, samba-enredos are duple meter march-like songs that help dancers make their way through the sambódromo in synchronization. The singers and dancers are accompanied by a huge percussion section of some 300-500 performers called the bateria. Samba baterias include a variety of instruments from both European and African heritages. The most important instruments in samba-schools’ baterias are:

1) Surdo: a bass drum played with one mallet while damping the head with the other hand. The surdo provides the basic duple-meter rhythm that drives the samba. There are three kinds of surdos: the one with the largest and deepest sound is the surdo marcação. It accents the “2” of the basic “1, 2” rhythm of samba, while the surdo resposta (response) answers accenting the “1”. The smallest surdo is the cortador fills in with syncopations.

2) Repique: a high-pitched double-headed drum played with one hand and a small mallet. The repenique plays the part of a conductor for the bateria; it supports the surdo beats and provides the calls that cue the entrances of the other percussionists.

3) Cuica: a friction drum. The cuica is a single-headed drum capable of producing both high and low pitched notes that are essentially improvised on top of the basic surdo marching beats. The cuica’s “squeaking” sound is produced by rubbing a damp cloth along the stick inside the drum with one hand (see picture below). The thumb of the other hand is used to press down on the skin of the drum to produce different pitches, usually a combination of high and low.

4) Caixa or tarol: a double-headed snare drum played with two sticks.

5) Pandeiro: a hand held, single-headed frame drum similar to a tambourine with metal jingles and a tunable head. The pandeiro produces different sounds when it is played with the thumb, fingertips, or palm of the hand. It is in a variety of types of sambas and related musical styles and genres. We already discussed its use in dramatic dances and will see it again in bossa nova (below). In samba-schools, pandeiro performers show off their dexterity by tossing the instrument around with acrobatic movements while they parade (see picture above).

6) Tamborim: the smallest and the highest pitched drum in the bateria; the tamborim is a single-headed small frame drum and it is played with a flexible metal drumstick and has no jingles. Tamborims provide countermelodies or polyphonic improvisations on top of the constant syncopated rhythms of the lower drums.

7) Agogô: a double (or sometimes triple) bell of African heritage. It provides a metallic sound and melodic quality to samba percussion, and alternates between high and low pitches. We already encountered agogôs in the percussion group that performs in Candomblé rituals.

8) Ganzá our chocalho a shaker. Ganzás come in a variety of shapes and styles, but modern ones are constructed from several metal canisters filled with beads and attached to one another to produce a loud sound.

Each of these instruments plays a short rhythmic ostinato, which can be repeated incessantly or varied according to the skills of the performer and the role of the instrument within the bateria. Below you can see a few of these rhythmic patterns, but keep in mind that an infinite number of variations are possible. The score shows two measures that can be repeated continuously. What is important to note are the polyrhythms and the dense texture produced by different timbres in the percussion and the variations in each instrument’s rhythmic patterns.

Keep in mind that it is a huge challenge to put together a winning parade with impeccable bateria, singers, dancers, costumes, etc. The largest samba-schools in Rio de Janeiro have web sites with video, pictures, and descriptions of the entire process. Check out the sites for Rio de Janeiro’s most traditional schools of samba: Mangueira and Portela. Although the sites are in Portuguese, on their pages you can hear all their sambas-enredos, including the latest one in preparation for the next carnival celebration. 

In the Northeast, very distinctive carnival celebrations showcase Brazilian cultural richness. In the 1970s and 1980s carnival in the city of Salvador (state of Bahia) became an important channel for the expression of Afro-Brazilian traditions and for the unification of African cultures in the diaspora. Less formal than the samba-school parades in Rio, in Salvador blocos (groups) gather thousands of participants to parade around town for a week (sometimes longer) before Ash Wednesday. The most traditional groups are the Afoxes, who celebrate their authentic African roots by bringing to the streets instruments and rhythms used in Candomblé. Another typical group is the bloco-Afro, who parade to the sounds of Afro-Brazilian songs and percussion, but also include Afro-Caribbean rhythms and instrumentation. The best-known bloco-Afro in the 1980s, Olodum, has performed with a variety of mixed Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Caribbean rhythms, like the samba-reggae, which weds Candomblé, samba, reggae, and merengue rhythms and instrumentation. Their ensemble includes surdos, repeniques, and caixas, as well as congas and timbales. Recently Olodum has added saxophone, electrical guitar, and keyboard to the band to attract a pop international audience. In 1995, they recorded in Salvador with Michael Jackson the song “They don’t care about us,” and performed several times outside Brazil with well-known artists. In 2014, they provided the instrumental accompaniment for Pitbull and Jennifer Lopez in the official song of the World Cup, “We are one, Ole, Ola.”

Yet another way carnival is celebrated in Salvador is with the Trio Elétricos. These are huge trucks onto which all manner of electronic instrumentation is mounted to offer loud music to throngs of up to 20,000 people who follow dancing through the city’s streets. Active since the 1970s, Trio Elétricos have become fantastic machines of sound and light. To give you an idea, each of these trucks is equipped with guitars, bass, several keyboards, electronic and traditional drums, and up to 68 amplifiers, each one producing 650 watts of sound that feed some 206 loudspeakers.

In the1990s, the new electrified carnival of Salvador gave rise to Axé music. Axé is a Yoruba word that can be roughly translated as “good vibrations” or “power.” In music, Axé is an umbrella term used to refer to dance-like music that mixes Afro-Brazilian (Candomblé and samba) and Afro-Caribbean musics (reggae, merengue, rumba), with the electric sounds of the Trio Eletricos and disco. Axé tunes have crossed boundaries to become major hits in Brazilian commercial popular music, as well as best sellers in the market for “World Music.” One of the pioneers of Axé music is Daniela Mercury , a versatile songwriter, arranger, and energetic performer, whose career as a singer has grown to impact the music scene in Brazil and abroad.

E.Urban Popular Musics

Before the emergence of the recording industry, radio, and the movies early in the 20^th century, theaters and dance halls were the main venues for the popularization of music in urban areas of Latin America. Quite popular in Brazil were arrangements for small ensembles of operatic arias, short songs in Portuguese called modinhas, and European dances, in particular polkas, marches, and waltzes. The polka was the most popular dance and, just like rock and roll in the middle of the 20^th century, it spawned a variety of local variants throughout the Americas; these include the Brazilian fado, the Brazilian tango, the habanera (from Havana, Cuba), the two-step and ragtime (from the U.S.), and several others. At times, these dances, regardless of their titles, were nothing but polkas written for the growing white middle class. But overall, the New World versions shared one common trait: the lively duple meter of the polka was wedded to rhythmic figures derived from theatrical renditions of African derived dances. Invariably they included syncopations and/or dotted rhythms in the bass, the melody, or both; they also tended to stress off-beats and favor anacrusis. Some of these rhythms are notated in the musical example below.

In Rio de Janeiro the most popular of these polka-derived pieces was the maxixe. Born in the poor neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro where Afro-Brazilians, Portuguese, and other immigrants lived in close proximity in small tenements, the maxixe was first popularized in comic theatrical acts.. The maxixe was a couple-dance in duple meter, with syncopation and dotted rhythms in the bass line, and short melodic lines that usually started on the upbeat. These generic characteristics were not unique to the maxixe, as mentioned above. What made the dance so popular at the time was not the music per se, but a daring choreography saturated with sexual overtones that involved female and male hip movements in close contact.

At the turn of the 20^th century, the most successful Brazilian composer of polkas, waltzes, tangos, and maxixes was Ernesto Nazareth (1863-1934), who became known as the “king of the Brazilian tango.” Nazareth was also a virtuoso pianist who made a living playing in cafés, theatrical intermissions, and in early movie theaters. He was one of those musicians who, like U.S. composer and pianist Scott Joplin, filled the needs of the early music industry at a time when the distinctions between popular music, mass culture, and concert music were not yet clearly defined. Thus, his pieces were performed in the streets and cafés, as well in concert halls; they were recorded on piano rolls and were among the earliest pieces recorded by Casa Edison (Odeon), the first Brazilian recording company.

Waltzes, polkas, Brazilian tangos, maxixes, and habaneras circulated in sheet music publications for the piano, but they were also performed in the streets of Rio de Janeiro by popular musicians in instrumental ensembles composed of flutes, trumpets, trombones, and other instruments common in military bands, dance and theatrical orchestras. Soon the ensembles incorporated guitars, mandolin, and cavaquinho. The performers in these ensembles became known as the chorões, probably because of their overuse of low guitar notes as countermelodies to their improvised elaborations on long melodies, a style that was described as chorar, to lament or cry, although the origin of the word is still a controversy among scholars. Chorões improvised on modinhas, arias, polkas, waltzes, habaneras, tangos, and maxixes, bringing several urban musical experiences together and integrating the European and African heritages in the Brazilian context. The music performed by the chorões eventually became known as choro (cry or lament), or chorinho, Rio de Janeiro’s first style of instrumental popular music.

In choro, long melodies reminiscent of operatic arias are extended in improvised instrumental passages. The mandolin, cavaquinho, and flute are the preferred soloists and have roles similar to that of an operatic “prima donna.” But the ensemble may also include a piano, a clarinet, and light percussion used to stress the syncopated rhythms popular in Brazilian tangos and maxixes. A famous musician who made significant contributions to the choro repertory was Alfredo da Rocha Viana Filho (1896-1973), an Afro-Brazilian performer (flute and saxophone), composer, and arranger known in Brazil as Pixinguinha. He left a long list of pieces that have become standards in the repertory of Brazilian popular music. In the 1920s, he traveled to Europe with his group, Os Oito Batutas (The eight masters), where they showcased their skills in instrumental improvisations. In several ways, Pixinguinha and his group’s role in the Brazilian popular musical scene of his time parallel that of African American composer and band leader James Reese Europe, who also visited Europe with his ensemble during WWI and introduced jazz abroad.

Maxixe, tango, and choro could not have developed as powerful creative musical styles, as a combination of European melodies and dances, and African-derived rhythms and choreographies, if it was not for the marked presence of Francisca Gonzaga (1947-1935). A woman working in a male-dominated world, she managed to contribute to the development of early popular music industry in Brazil in a number of ways, as a composer, performer, ensemble director and manager, as a collaborator with the most prestigious musicians of her time, and as a defender of the rights of the popular musician. She left a long list of works that are the definers of the early popular musical styles in Brazil. She wrote works for the dance hall, waltzes and polkas, as well as for the theater where she experimented with the myriads of rhythms being introduced to audiences on the city’s stages. Listen, for example, to her “Pudesse esta paixão”, and “Corta Jaca”, where she uses the dotted rhythms of tangos and maxixes to support long melodic lines that recalls Italian opera, a coexistence of styles so characteristic of the time and of which she helped shape and develop in creative ways.

Choro music was kept alive throughout the 20^th century thanks to the performances of virtuosos such as mandolin master Jacob do Bandolim (1918-1969) and cavaquinho virtuoso Waldir de Azevedo (1923-1980). As a result of their revival efforts, choro is taught today in music schools, where young performers learn the art of instrumental improvisation and virtuoso performance and preserve this Rio de Janeiro tradition.

In the 1930s and 1940s another popular musical style dominated the recording industry and radio: the samba-canção (samba-song). We already learned about samba-enredo performed during carnival in Rio de Janeiro. In samba-canção, however, samba’s danceable, syncopated rhythms are softened by slower tempos, long melodies, and romantic lyrics. Rather than full-scale percussion ensembles, samba-canção favors the guitar and light percussion, and occasional accompanying flutes, brass, or string orchestra. A prominent role is given to the solo singer; thus, samba-song crooners became national radio stars during the 1930s and 1940s. The earliest example of a recorded samba was the 1916 song “Pelo telefone”  by Donga and Mauro de Almeida, but it took until the 1930s for samba songs to impact the national scene. One of the most successful samba singers/composers was Noel Rosa (1910-1937). During his short lifetime, Rosa wrote memorable sambas with sophisticated lyrics and well-crafted melodies that appealed to a large middle-class. His sambas, now classics in the repertory of Brazilian popular music, created a tradition in Brazilian popular song that influenced later styles such as Bossa Nova and MPB.

Another important samba-canção composer was Ary Caarl(1903-1964), the author of the famous “Aquarela do Brasil” (1939) (known in the U.S. simply as “Brazil”). The song is in a style called samba-exaltação, a samba-song with nationalistic lyrics that praise the beauty of the country and its people. “Aquarela” and other similar sambas were important tools for political propaganda during the populist government of Getulio Vargas. “Aquarela” also boosted Barroso’s international career when it was included in Walt Disney’s movie Saludos Amigos (1942). Since then, the song has been recorded with English and Portuguese lyrics in a variety of arrangements by famous artists like Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Dezi Arnez, Dionne Warwick, Ray Conniff, and Chick Corea, among others. One of the most popular interpreters of Barroso’s sambas was Carmen Miranda, whose voice, dazzling performing style, and outfit recalling Afro-Brazilian Candomblé dancers showcased samba-songs as an international symbol of Brazilian music (see Chapter 10).

The popularity of samba in its various formats has never slackened. A more recent style called samba-pagode has taken the lead in popularity as a way of going back to samba’s roots and shying away from the largely commercialized carnival sambas.  Samba-pagode is most prevalent in large Brazilian cities and is usually performed in social gatherings and bars. It features a singer soloist and a small instrumental ensemble consisting of cavaquinho, pandeiro, shakers, tamborim, a repique de mão (a one-headed drum placed on the performer’s lap and played with hands), and a tan-tan (a portable bass drum played with hands).

In the 1960s and 1970s, Brazilian urban popular music was greatly diversified as a result of industrial development and the empowerment of the middle and upper classes. Bossa nova (new wave or new style) led the way. The “new” style was associated specifically with the city of Rio de Janeiro and the lifestyle of its classy neighborhoods, dreamlike beaches, blue summer skies, and easy upper-class life. Singing in an intimate low tone and using the picking of guitar chords to emulate samba percussion, singer/composer João Gilberto (1931-2019) started the trend. Gilberto was joined by highly educated and extremely creative musicians and poets, such as composer Antônio (Tom) Carlos Jobim (1927-1994) and poet Vinicius de Moraes (1913-1980). Together they wedded long melodic lines derived from 19^th century operatic bel canto with the popular guitar of the chorões, the percussion beats of samba, and their original, well-crafted lyrics, creating a “new way” of performing samba-canção. Gilberto and Jobim then updated the samba-canção with new arrangements and instrumentation; similar to samba songs, in bossa nova only light percussion is featured, usually the pandeiro and a shaker. But then, they brought the guitar to the forefront and used it to recreate the samba syncopations with a characteristic bossa nova beat (see the musical example below). Bossa Nova musicians also added jazz harmonies to their songs. Jobim’s songs are saturated with 9^th and 11^th notes piling on chords that move in parallel motion, a common characteristic of jazz. In addition, influenced by his classical music training, Jobim’s long melodic lines move easily and smoothly in the most awkward directions (as in the song “Wave”), or do not move at all (as in the song “One note samba”), but are supported by fast changing harmonies in the bass, recalling the guitar of the chorões. These elements made the music extremely attractive to cosmopolitan audiences in Brazil, the U.S., and Europe. Jobim’s tunes became classics in the pop music world and are alive today in the repertory of jazz musicians in Brazil and abroad. The intimate, laid back feel of bossa nova has also made it appealing as background music in cocktail parties, waiting rooms, and elevators.

Soon after Bossa Nova reached the international music scene, a political turmoil erupted in Brazil; the years between 1964 and 1985 mark the emergence and fall of a military regime. During this time, the country witnessed another wave of nationalism, a movement led by left wing intellectuals, artists, and musicians, who presented themselves as both critics of the regime and defenders of an authentic Brazilian music. This new, politically oriented musical movement promoted a variety of styles that were grouped under the umbrella term MPB, an acronym for Música Popular Brasileira (Brazilian Popular Music). As with Bossa Nova, MPB musicians were highly educated, middle-to-upper-class artists who catered to the tastes of left-wing intellectuals and college students. But instead of bossa nova’s jazz harmonies and laid-back soft lyrics dealing with beaches and easy life, in MPB the focus was on socio-political lyrics and stylized versions of Brazilian traditional musical styles.

The most well-known MPB musician is Francisco Buarque de Hollanda, known as Chico Buarque (b. 1944). Born into a family of intellectuals and writers, Chico Buarque’s music and lyrics reflect both his opposition to the military dictatorship and his criticism of the social and racial issues affecting the country. In 1971 he released the LP Construção (Construction). The title song of the album, “Construção,” shows how Chico Buarque puts his musical and poetic talent to work for socio-political criticism. The lyrics are a long narrative on the tragic death of a construction worker during a morning of heavy traffic on a busy street. Chico Buarque’s lyrics are filled with double-entendres and build the story slowly and in layers, to convey the emptiness and lack of prospects for uneducated workers in urban Brazil. As with his ingenious play of words, Chico Buarque’s music helps to “construct” the story with a clever use of instrumentation. The work starts only with voice and percussion and has the feel of an old-time samba. But as the story unfolds new instruments are added to intensify the dramatic plot. A full brass section enters as a surprise in the last sentence, to overstress the worker’s death.

MPB’s diverse musical scene also brought to prominence talented musicians, poets, and performers like Caetano Veloso (b. 1942) and Gilberto Gil (b. 1942). These musicians were part of a larger artistic movement that emerged in the late 1960s called Tropicália and that involved music, poetry, theater, arts, and cinema. Tropicalia can be understood as a Brazilian response to U.S. musical and artistic movements, such as rock, concrete poetry, and pop art. Tropicalists aimed at freeing Brazil from cultural isolation by creating hybrid sounds that mixed rock music and electronic instrumentation with traditional Brazilian styles and instruments. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when nationalistic feelings of the Brazilian middle-class were extremely acute, Veloso’s and Gil’s embrace of foreign sounds and ideas were not immediately accepted. Nonetheless, their well-crafted and provocative lyrics brought to the fore contemporary issues that spoke directly to cosmopolitan Brazilians, including such topics as the consumer mentality, the ubiquitous presence of mass media in Brazilian cities, and a general disillusion with the military regime.

By the early 1970s, the Tropicalia movement was exhausted, but Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil continued their careers as innovators in Brazilian popular music. Today, they continue as major forces on the Brazilian musical and artistic scene, representing a strong link between traditionalism and cosmopolitanism in popular music. They also continue to play a role in connecting their artistic endeavors and to their strong political voices within Brazil. Influenced by performing style of Bossa Nova, the lyrical melodies of U.S. songwriter Cole Porter, and the social commentaries of Bob Dylan, Veloso’s music continues to explore the lives of urban Brazilians linked to a global village. Since the 1980s his career has boomed internationally with shows and record releases in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, recordings in Spanish and English, and the 2000 Grammy in the World Music category. Gilberto Gil has also had had a successful career after Tropicalia, exploring the Afro-Brazilian musical traditions from his native State of Bahia in his music, as well as other styles from the African diaspora. He recorded with Jimmy Cliff and is responsible for introducing reggae to Brazil. Gil received a Grammy in 1999 and has become an active player in Brazilian cultural politics. In 2003, he was appointed Secretary for Culture of Brazil.

Bossa Nova and MPB were also shaped by the marked presence of a long list of female composers and performers, such as Elis Regina (1945-1982), Gal Costa (1944-2022), Maria Bethânia (b. 1946),, and Rita Lee (1947-2023). Their participation in the emergence and shaping of these styles show another facet of the often male-dominated reports on the music scene in Brazil at the second half of the 20^th century. Their voices, works, and innovative performances crossed musical styles and helped connect otherwise separate musical groups. Elis Regina (1945-1982) experimented with several musical styles; her wide vocal range expanded the possibilities of bossa nova, samba, MPB, and her creative use of her flexible voice to improvise in long scatting sections brought her close to jazz performers. In addition, her ability to dramatize the poetry of Bossa Nova and MPB, including politically inclined lyrics, made her one of the most important voices of popular music in Brazil.  Rita Lee, a composer, singer, performer, actor, writer, business woman, and activist, is considered one of the most important and multifaceted artists in Brazil in the second half of the 20^th century. She adopted and re-shaped various popular musical styles being imported into Brazil, like rock, jazz, disco, new wave, and psychedelic music, and added her own experimentations, adding new instrumental sounds and twits to local rhythms and traditions. Lee was part of the influential groups Os Mutantes and Tutti-Frutti, and with the latter she recorded in 1975 the album Fruto Proibido, one of the most iconic of the period. Her song “Ovelha Negra” from the album became an anthem for middle-class adolescents throughout Brazil. You can watch Rita Lee on YouTube, from her early days to a more recent show in 2012 where she performs “Ovelha Negra”. For the whole show see. For another classic of Brazilian popular music, watch Lee singing “Baila comigo” in 2009.

In the 1960s, Anglo-American rock ’n roll entered the Brazilian music market and immediately inspired local groups. The ‘Brazilianized’ renditions of buble-gum rock done by Jovem Guarda (New Guard) musicians like Roberto Carlos enjoyed mass appeal with young, white middle class and urban workers, although they could never compete with mainstream MPB. However, this began to change in 1985, the year of the first Brazilian rock mega-concert ”Rock in Rio”. The event brought together internationally acclaimed rock groups performing alongside Brazilian bands and helped bring rock music into the mainstream. Significantly, 1985 also marked the end of two decades of military regime in Brazil and the return to democracy. For young Brazilians who supported Rock in Rio and were raised under the dictatorship, the break with traditional MPB provided an alternate outlet for the problems posed by the new times. Instead of the traditional samba percussion and refined lyrics that had served MPB, the new generation moved to electric music exclusively and to a more direct language. Rockeiros continued to enjoy a large audience of young Brazilians with whom they share the problems of their age and time; their lyrics talk about urban lives in chaos and criticize the established values of contemporary urban society, but they also reflect on the social issues inherent to the times and the country in which they live. Brazilian rockeiros sing in Portuguese, but never shun the outside influences and foreign groups with whom they identify. Bands like Paralamas do Suscesso modeled their rock-reggae sound from The Police, while Legião Urbana preferred a watered-down U2-like style and contrasts with the heavy metal sound of São Paulo based band Titãs. These Brazilian bands (and several others) have also represented Brazilian popular music in concerts abroad and have their albums circulating internationally. And, of course, they have websites that you can visit to get a better feel for their sounds, ideas, and recent work.

While in the mid- and late 1980s rock became the preferred music of young, white middle class, in Brazilian large cities another international music took the country by storm: rap and funk. Through the exposure of video clips, pictures on record sleeves, and stylish images of U.S. black ghettos propagated by Spike Lee’s films in Brazil, rap quickly made its way from the black neighborhoods of New York and Los Angeles to the favelas (slums) of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Like their U.S. counterparts in the 1980s and 1990s, the majority of Brazilian rappers were Afro-Brazilians who live in neighborhoods stigmatized by racism, poverty, and violence. Despite almost century-old claims of racial equality and uncritical celebrations of cultural pluralism by various political factions, Afro-Brazilians continue to suffer enormous social and racial discrimination. Their social-economic position within society is hardly visible in the lyrics of romantic samba songs, or in the celebratory nature of samba-enredos during carnival. But through rap, young Afro-Brazilians aggressively combat the status quo, talking about misery, fights with police, and survival issues in the periphery. Afro-Brazilian rap music challenges the white elite’s nationalistic definitions of Afro-Brazilian cultural practices and gives the local youth a unique chance to deviate from the accepted channels of musical expression, such a samba. In most cases, the recordings are produced and distributed by the groups themselves and have sold millions of copies throughout Brazil in the last decade of the 20^th century. The revenues have empowered Afro-Brazilian musicians to compete in the music market with powerful multi-national labels. In addition, large profits have been returned to their neighborhoods in the form of basic infrastructure improvements such as schools and social organizations. Without a doubt, the spread of rap in Brazilian cities has been one of the most powerful musical phenomena in Brazil in recent years, exerting an unprecedented force in the internal process of social, ethnic, and cultural negotiations.

Our musical example is from the popular Brazilian rap group from São Paulo, Os Racionais MCs. The group’s lead singer—Afro-Brazilian Mano Brown–has as models specific U.S. rappers such as Ice-T and the band Public Enemy. Following in the track of gangsta rap, Os Racionais’s songs serve as tools to “fight the power” and discrimination. In the song “Capitulo 4, versiculo 3,” which was a big hit in the late 1980s, Mano Brown make references to the Bible (Chapter 4, verse 3 refers to a biblical passage), but makes the Savior’s message his own. The use of religion here is quite important, since Brazil has one of the largest Catholic populations in the world, and thus Mano Brown’s language reverberates right into the minds of Brazilians. At the same time, his lyrics offer realistic descriptions of the social and economic situations of his Afro-Brazilian “manos” (Brothers), with a gangsta language that has never made it into even the most popular sambas. Also, it is important to note in this example the lack of references to any Brazilian traditional music or instrumentation. Mano Brown has become a model for many young Brazilian musicians and he has stepped up his activism with his podcast “Mano a Mano,” where once a week he discusses a variety of topics, from politics, social relations, culture, and religion, and opens them for debate in interviews with many local figures.

A new generation of rap and funk musicians is now reshaping the initial raw sound to accommodate pop musics fashionable internationally. In the third decade of the 21^st century, funk music, once the domain of localized urban youth, has reached widespread success in various music distribution sites like Spotify and YouTube. Check, for example, MC Ryan SP’s song “Favela,”which has become a hit on Spotify with an updated electronic sound that is less dense than previous generation of rap performers, but no less intricate in its musical elaboration of rarefied bass lines, different timbers, and vocals, in addition to strong lyrics that continue to relate to hardships of life in the favela. Bailes funk have also produced a gamut of successful DJs who are creatively mixing a variety of traditional rhythms and music instruments from samba, forró, capoeira, to techno-pop and are selling their mix as a product coveted in nightclubs throughout Brazil, Latin America, and Europe. Some Brazilian DJs have started successful careers in the most high-profile clubs abroad, and they are now as coveted in Europe as much as soccer players from Brazil. The businesswoman, singer, composer, performer, and actor Anitta (b. 1993) shows another facet of the funk phenomenon in Brazil. Anitta has distinguished herself by keeping up with new sounds and musical trends inside and outside Brasil, as she has built a most successful national and international career by catering to a wider audience. Starting as a “funkeira,” and inspired by strong women artists with international careers–from Carmen Miranda to Madonna and Beyonce–Anitta is today an award-winning artist who has partnered with a wide range of artists inside and outside Brazil, has recorded in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, and has produced and performed a myriad of styles from funk, to techno, pop, R&B, and reggaeton. Check out her album Versions of me (2022) where she performs in a variety of styles, in three languages, and in partnership with various international performers.

Classical Music

Classical music flourished uninterruptedly after the Portuguese Royal family moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1808. Upon his arrival, Prince Regent D. João VI imported new singers and instrumentalists from Portugal to provide first-rate European performances in a new Rio de Janeiro Royal Chapel and Cathedral. Significantly, rather than bringing a European composer, the monarch appointed a Brazilian musician as chapel master, José Mauricio Nunes Garcia (1767-1830). A virtuoso on the keyboard and a talented composer, Nunes Garcia’s musical talents immediately caught the attention of the Portuguese aristocracy, and he was hired to teach music, direct the choir and orchestra, and write new music for religious services and special celebrations at the court. He later lost his position as a chapel master to the famous Portuguese opera composer Marco Portugal (1762-1830), who arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1811. Even so, Nunes Garcia continued to work for the court and to compose until his death in 1830.

Son of an Afro-Brazilian mother, Nunes Garcia’s African ancestry left no mark on his compositions. Instead, his early music reveals a keen familiarity with 18^th century European pre-Classical styles, and especially the music of Italian and Portuguese composers such as Niccolo Jomelli (1714-1774) and David Perez (1711-1778). After the arrival of the Royal Family in1808, his compositions show the influence of the new Italian operatic style in vogue, especially the music of composers such as G. Paisiello (1740-1816), D. Cimarosa (1749-1801), and G. Rossini (1792-1868). Nunes Garcia’s religious compositions of this period are saturated with virtuoso passages for singers and instrumentalists in the theatrical style. These works attest not only to his compositional skills, but also to the high-performance level of the musicians in the Brazilian capital during the first decades of the 19^th century. Nunes Garcia’s last work, the Missa de Santa Cecilia (1826), is considered one of the masterpieces of Latin American music in the genre. The mass, written for a large ensemble of four-part chorus, soloists, and orchestra, shows Nunes Garcia’s mastery in choral writing and contrapuntal textures, his handling of classical style orchestration, and his skills in writing highly embellished solo lines on par with contemporary European works.

During Pedro II’s reign (1840 to 1889) the operatic craze dominating European cities took the Brazilian monarchical capital by storm. Responding to the demands of the Brazilian aristocracy, the imperial government subsidized the construction of luxurious theaters like those in vogue in European capitals. And because Rio de Janeiro housed an imperial court and an aristocracy willing to pay for opera, the city became a major operatic center in Latin America and a Mecca for European singers and impresarios crossing the Atlantic in search of new audiences. Residents of Rio de Janeiro who could afford tickets filled large and luxurious theaters, such as the Theatro São Pedro de Alcantara and Lyrico Fluminense, where they were able to see and hear the latest operas by European composers such as Rossini, G. Donizetti (1797-1848), V. Bellini (1801-1835), and G. Verdi (1813-1901).

To support Brazilian opera composers, Pedro II subsidized an Imperial Conservatory and an Imperial Academy of National Opera (1857-1863). These institutions prepared singers and performers, promoted the translations of operas into Portuguese, and commissioned local composers to write operas with librettos on Brazilian subjects. Under the direction of the Brazilian composer Francisco Manuel da Silva (1795-1865), the National Operaproduced original operas by several Brazilian composers, including two works by a young musician who would become Latin America’s most prominent opera composer in the 19^th century: Antônio Carlos Gomes (1836-1896).

Born in the town of Campinas (state of São Paulo), Gomes moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1859 to study music at the Imperial Conservatory. He soon incorporated the operatic style in vogue into his compositions, which were very well received by local audiences. In 1863 Gomes received a grant from Pedro II and the directors of the National Opera to continue his studies in Milan, Italy, one of Europe’s major centers for opera. In Italy, Gomes wrote his most famous work, the opera Il Guarany (1870) with a libretto based on the Brazilian 19^th-century Indianist novel O Guarani (1857), written by José de Alencar (1829-1877). The plot tells the story of the love of Peri, a Guarani Indian, for Ceci, the daughter of a Portuguese nobleman, and glorifies the formation of the Brazilian race through the unification of the Amerindian and the European. Gomes’s opera Il Guarany premiered at the famous theater La Scala in Milan on March 19, 1870, and later in the same year in Rio de Janeiro with great success. Soon after, the opera was performed in several cities throughout Europe and Latin America.

Gomes wrote several other operas that were relatively successful both nationally and internationally, but it was Il Guarany that guaranteed his position as a Latin American opera master. Il Guarany plot’s suggestion of Brazil as a unified nation helped fill the gap between an early feeling of national pride and the emergence of a more consistent nationalistic musical movement, which was to take place at the beginning of the 20^th century. Written in the fashionable operatic style of Verdi, Il Guarany’s charm lay not only in the subject matter of the libretto but also in Gomes’s ability to write memorable melodies that became immediate successes inside and outside the opera house. One of the opera’s most popular tunes is the duet between the two major characters, Ceci and Peri; Ceci’s melody became so popular that it was performed in the streets by chorões, it was published and recorded in a variety of arrangements, and ultimately was used in carnival marches at the beginning of the 20^th century. But the opera’s overture is by far the opera’s best-known part. Since the 1930s, Il Guarany’s Protofonia (Overture, or Introduction) has served as the opening of a government-sponsored radio program A hora do Brasil (Brazil Hour). Since the program is broadcast every day at 7 pm on all Brazilian radio stations, Il Guarany’s overture is heard daily, form the coastal cities to the remote villages of the Amazon. Thus the opera’s opening, with its brassy fanfare-like calls, has been used to substitute for Brazil’s national anthem and to evoke sentiments of Brazilian civism.

With the advent of the Republic in 1889 and the decline of state patronage for the cultivation of classical music, the golden age of opera production in Brazil came to an end. Nonetheless, several Brazilian composers continued to pursue classical music and the creation of a musical language that could symbolize the new, independent, Republican nation. The composer Alberto Nepomuceno (1864-1920) was key to this transition. He directed the National Institute of Music in Rio de Janeiro and organized several concerts in which he presented hits of the classical music repertory alongside the music by young Brazilian composers such as Leopoldo Miguez (1850-1902), Barrozo Neto (1881-1941), and Henrique Oswald (1852-1931). Nepomuceno worked passionately for a nationalistic music school by defending the use of Portuguese in songs. He was a very accomplished composer and left a large body of work that show influences from Germanic and French music. In some of his compositions, Nepomuceno used themes from Brazilian traditional music, like is his famous Batuque, or Dança de negros (1887) for orchestra, a stylized version of the Afro-Brazilian dance.

Nationalism in Brazilian classical music became particularly evident in the works of composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959). Born in Rio de Janeiro, Villa-Lobos was first introduced to music by his father, an amateur musician who adored classical music and opera. Villa-Lobos also received a few private cello and composition lessons with local teachers. Although he had no systematic music schooling, he was a quick learner and absorbed a variety of classical musical styles that were fashionable at the beginning of the century in Rio de Janeiro. To make a living as a musician, Villa-Lobos played the cello in theaters and cinemas and participated in popular choro groups playing the guitar alongside influential popular musicians of his time. Villa-Lobos was also interested in folklore; he visited cities in the North and Northeast, and in the Southern state of Parana, where he heard and collected folk material he later used in his compositions.

Villa-Lobos’s early work (1915-1922) shows the influence of harmonic devices and the orchestration of French descriptive pieces of late 19^th century. Debussy’s music, which started to appear consistently in Rio de Janeiro concerts after 1908, was particularly influential on the young composer. Nonetheless, living in an era in which defining Brazilianess became central for intellectuals and politicians, Villa-Lobos made it a goal of his career to create a music that had international appeal but that also could represent Brazil musically. With that in mind, he skillfully wed French nationalism and impressionism with local elements, using musical descriptions of the Brazilian landscape as one of the main sources of his Brazilian musical language. In 1922, Villa-Lobos’s participation in the Week of Modern Art helped his work to be viewed as the utmost representative of musical modernism and to spread his music as a truly Brazilian musical language.

In 1923, with the financial help of friends and a governmental stipend, Villa-Lobos went to Paris, where he met important figures of the European musical world and conducted several presentations of his works. When he returned to Brazil in 1930 his music had been performed throughout Europe and the Americas, his publications were circulating worldwide, and he was consecrated as the best composer the country had ever produced. Villa-Lobos first visited the U.S. in 1944, in the midst of Roosevelt’s “good neighbor policy,” and returned several times throughout his life. His international reputation grew exponentially after World War II, especially in the U.S. and Europe, where he conducted important orchestras in various cities. In 1952 Villa-Lobos moved to Paris and continued to conduct and record his works in Europe and the U.S. Acclaimed as one of the most important composers of the Americas, he lost his fight with cancer in 1959, when he died at age 72.

Villa-Lobos was an extremely prolific composer and left over 1,000 works. The influences of French descriptive music are already in evidence in the early ballet/tone poems Amazonas (1917) and Uirapuru (1917), in which he shows his originality in a musical exaltation of his country’s flora and fauna. In Uirapuru the traditional orchestra is enhanced by a large percussion section with Brazilian instruments that serve as a background to Villa-Lobos’s story of an enchanted native bird transformed into a handsome youth. To the unusual instrumentation and extra-musical elements, Villa-Lobos adds original harmonic devices, such as clusters and polytonality, that show his musical ideas on pair with contemporary European music. Villa-Lobos left works for a variety of instruments. Some of his works for piano became standards in Brazilian piano literature. They show the composer’s experimentation with timbre on the keyboard, which parallel his orchestral sound explorations. The guitar was also one of Villa-Lobos’s preferred instruments and his guitar works are mainstays in the repertory of classical guitar.

During the 1920s Villa-Lobos wrote the monumental cycle of 14 Choros inspired by the urban popular musical style. And from 1930 until 1945, he wrote the cycle of 9 Bachianas Brasileiras , which was conceived as a series of Baroque suites for a variety of instrumental combinations and contains some of Villa-Lobos’s most popular music.

Two generations of composers followed Villa-Lobos’s nationalistic ideals, refining and diversifying the nationalistic musical language. The list is long but we can single out prominent names such as Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez (1897-1948), Francisco Mignone (1897-1986), and Camargo Guarnieri (1907-1993). The latter was one of most successful in merging traditional Brazilian music with the classical European repertory. By inserting musical elements common in local traditional musics, such as pentatonic structures and scales with lowered seventh degrees, his music evokes Brazil without sounding exotic. Guarnieri’s music exhibits a penchant for long, arched melodic lines characteristic of operatic arias and urban popular musics, which are often supported by ambiguous harmonies. He left memorable piano pieces and a long list of songs that are among the best in the Brazilian song repertory. But Guarnieri was most successful in writing full-scale orchestral works. Five symphonies and several concertos display his mastery of the classical forms. Guarnieri conducted his music throughout the world and at the age of 85 he received the Gabriela Mistral award by the Organization of the American States, recognizing him as one of the most accomplished Latin American composers of the 20^th century.

Guarnieri made it a goal of his career to defend musical nationalism against other musical languages that were attracting Brazilian composers in the middle of the 20^th century. Among his adversaries was the German-born composer Hans-Joachim Koellreutter (1915-2005), who was responsible for bringing serialism to the attention of young Brazilian composers. Koellreutter’s influence on the Brazilian musical scene of the 1950s and 1960s is felt to this day. He groomed new Brazilian talents like Claudio Santoro (1919-1990), Eunice Katunda (1915-1990), Guerra Peixe (1914-1993), and Edino Grieger (1928-2022). Once freed from strict nationalism, this new generation of composers was able to pursue new techniques and eventually revitalize the Brazilian musical language.

The composer from São Paulo, Gilberto Mendes (1922-2016) took a different direction. After a short stay in Darmstadt, Germany, where he studied with Pierre Boulez and Stockausen, Mendes departed from strict serialism to focus on microtonal and aleatory music, and to experiment with electro acoustics, mixed-media, and music theater. He promoted Brazilian premieres of music by U.S. composer John Cage and founded the music vanguard group Musica Nova (New Music). Following a similar track, Jocy de Oliveira (b. 1936) has been very successful in her explorations of multimedia, electronic effects, computer generated sounds, and music-theater. She is the author of a music-theater trilogy that explores women’s topics: “Inori to the Sacred Prostitute” (1993) with texts in various languages, including Japanese and native Bororo, which explores the myth of the sacred prostitute; “Illud Tempos” (1994), which deals with women’s dreams and fairy tales; and “As Malibrans” (1999-2000), which explores the dark side of the Diva image. Oliveira has received numerous national and international grants, and has presented her music regularly in Brazil and abroad.

European music of the classical tradition is alive and well in contemporary Brazil. After a strong influence from European centers of new music like Paris, and Darmstadt in Germany, Brazilian composers have started to look at composition schools in the U.S. Eclecticism and post-modern experimentations that blend a variety of languages characterize the contemporary musical scenario. Important composition schools in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Bahia have produced successful composers such as Marlos Nobre (b. 1939), Ricardo Taccuchian (b. 1939), Jamary de Oliveira (1944-2020), and Ilza Nogueira (b. 1948).