Music, the pulse of a people

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 1986 by Tarik De Souza

Even the harsh northereastern songs ofGeraldo Vandre took the path of the orchestral avant-garde under the impetus of the resourceful Quarteto Novo, at least two of whose members succeeded in absorbing some of the most progressive currents of jazz. These were the percussionist Airto Moreira, with his discovery of the unusual sounds he could make with an ass's jawbone, and Hermeto Pascoal, described by Miles Davis as "the world's most impressive musician", who conducted a symphony of sounds on a series of receptacles filled with stones and turned a set of cheap carafes into "wind instruments".

Following in the footsteps of the musicianBaden Powell and the path opened up by the bossa nova from 1958 to 1965, Chico Buarque de Hollanda (born 1944) gave a fresh lease of life to the samba by devising an original combination of the musical language of the morro foothills with urban satire. For their part, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, both of whom were born in 1942 and were "launched" by the same television festivals as had contributed to the fame of Chico Buarque, picked up, each in his own way, the musical threads laid down by Caymmi and Joao Gilberto. They also created a cultural movement, known as Tropicalismo, that was closely related to the painting of Helio Oiticica, the Cinema Novo (see article page 33) of Glauber Rocha, and the "cannibal theatre" of Jose Celso Martinez Correa. Notwithstanding its brief existence, from 1967 to 1969, the movement reconciled the country's traditions of critical revisionism, steeped in the literary irony of the drama, poetry and prose of the Modernist writer Oswald de Andrade, with the "concrete" poetry of the Futurist Decio Pignatari and the brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos.

This approach also incorporated theaesthetics of the "popular bad taste" of the idols of Brazilian music-hall and the international style of the Beatles, and combined discontinuities and silences like those of Stockhausen, or sound effects as in the work of John Cage, with the langorous melodies of long-ago sambas. Rogerio Duprat, the main orchestrator of Tropicalismo, which featured singers of the importance of Gal Costa and Maria Bethania, was also a pupil of Koellreutter. Moreover, since there is always a master "arranger" in the many different schools of Brazilian music, it is useful to take a look at the instrumental heritage known as the choro.

The word choro was first used to denotea mixture of European genres, including the schottische, waltz, tango, polka and habanera, by Alfredo da Rocha Viana Filho, known as Pixinguinha (1898-1973). Through his work with a variety of orchestral ensembles and his patient transcription of the oral music of self-taught composers, Pixinguinha laid down the parameters of Brazilian musical tradition. His baton charted the path taken by the country's music from the brass-dominated marchinha of carnival time to the feverish sounds of the military bands of Pernambuco, and from the modinha, a legacy of the Portuguese court related to the fado, to moonlight serenades in the suburbs. This is the origin of Abre Alas, the first piece of carnival music involving a literal host of musical instruments. The leading composer of "serious" music in Brazil, Heitor VillaLobos (1887-1959), was a friend and contemporary of Pixinguinha, and indeed wrote a celebrated series of works known as Choros.