Music, the pulse of a people

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 1986 by Tarik De Souza

Music, the pulse of a people

BRAZIL was born singing. Flowingthrough the veins of this "subcontinent" is the lifeblood of a mingled ethnic heritage. From the Indians, the original inhabitants, came tribal choirs and vocal groups singing in counterpoint to the loud and clear rhythms of work, festivity and suffering. From the Portuguese invaders came plaintive and nostalgic stringed instruments, hymns lamenting their exile and songs in celebration of bloodthirsty conquest. From the Black slaves, bound by their chains, came chants of forced labour, conveying the hidden message of struggle and resistance, and the wild batuque dance of revolt and passion. Held in the grip of these discordant influences, it was impossible for Brazil to create a harmony. Were we to plot, however sketchily, a map of its songs and dances, its rhythms and melodies, we would find that there is almost as wide a variety of musical languages as there are cultural microcosms in this vast country.

Culturally rich yet socially downtrodden:a typical aspect of the northeastern region of Brazil with its baioes drawn from the violas played by blind singers at fairs; the xaxado danced at rustic celebrations by the crusading cangaceiros, Robin Hood-like bandits whose sandals kick up clouds of dust from the parched earth; and the coco of the seaboard, in which the words are broken down into syllables at lightning speed and are lost in a spate of verbal dexterity culminating in the tongue-twisting embolada. Equally typical is the bitter Northeast of the toada, the monotonous chanting of the inhabitants of the Sertao forced to emigrate from their arid lands, in contrast to the spell cast by the medieval puluxia from the interior; the last incantation of the incelencia (funeral song), the lowing of the cattle and the gentle rustle of the grasslands.

The main sources of this musical torrent,flowing counter to the course followed by the river Sao Francisco from the Sertao down to the sea, are the coastal areas, in the splendid works of Luiz Gonzaga, from Pernambuco, and Dorival Caymmi, from Bahia. Gonzaga gave an urban tone to the rhythms and beliefs of the interior and to the legend of the sad fate of the emigrants driven off their land by drought. Caymmi speaks of the sea and fishermen--the weather-beaten proletariat of the seaboard--but with the Afro-Brazilian eloquence characteristic of the passionate macumba of Salvador, the city of 365 churches in Bahia State. Gonzaga exalted the two-beat baiao which, in its export version, has swept throughout the world, while Caymmi adapted the folklore of the street-vendors' cries and of the sambas to the pulse of the industrial era. The delightful harmonies he produced from his violin provided the model for the vocal and instrumental bossa nova with which his fellow-Bahian Joao Gilberto introduced music that was Modernist in inspiration.

A second focal point of cultural influencefor the emergence of all these trends was to be the city of Rio de Janeiro. It was not by chance that it came to be the country's second capital, from 1763 to 1960, in succession to Salvador, which had performed that role from 1549 to 1763, and that it had the same mixed population. After all, it was in Rio--in the very centre of the city, in the house of a set of festive Bahians--that the samba, the basic feature of the country's music, was born. The samba rhythm, which was derived from the African lundo and had the same origins as the maxixe, was eventually expelled physically from its place of birth. However it continued to follow the route taken by the poverty-stricken and established itself in the foothills of the morros--the mountains surrounding Rio where the first samba schools were founded.

The samba schools are local socialorganizations which are instrumental in promoting the city's annual costume and mask parade, headed by an intricately interweaving pattern of samba dancers. With the creation of a music industry (factories manufacturing records, radios, and subsequently television sets), the so-called samba de morro can be said to have gone downtown. It is accordingly no longer a code of conduct or way of eking out a living for popular poets, but has entered the "literate" sphere of bourgeois writers like Ary Barroso, the author of the celebrated Brazilian Water-colour, or Joao de Barro, to whom we owe, among other works, Rio's signature tune Copacabana, Little Princess of the Sea.

It was the samba, coupled with post-warNorth American jazz, which gave rise to the bossa nova, the rhythm of which also owes something to the audacious skills of Ravel, Debussy and Chopin. The composer Antonio Carlos (Tom) Jobim, a pupil of the German theorist Hans Joachim Koellreutter, a refugee from Nazism who settled in Brazil in 1937, joined with the poet and diplomat Vinicius de Moraes in creating a set of harmonic progressions that were to change Brazilian music, instrumental and vocal alike. Through the bossa nova movement, composers and artists like Baden Powell or the dissident Jorge Ben--who also mixed the samba with the blues--as well as Edu Lobo and Sergio Ricardo, who composed the sound tracks for Glauber Rocha's films, were all involved in changing both the form and the socio-political content of Brazilian musical discourse.