Music by José Miguel Wisnik

Music in Brazil clearly evolves in two distinct fronts: the written tradition (transposed from the European music), also called “erudite” or “concert”, and the non-written tradition (resulting from the mix between European, indigenous and African music), which corresponds to the multiple forms of the popular music. Both present their own developments and cross each other at certain moments – just like it happens in many other countries. In Brazil, however, these encounters between the popular and the erudite have specific importance, for they bear, without any doubts, one of the singular marks of the Brazilian musical production.

The letter written by Pero Vaz de Caminha to the king of Portugal, in 1500 – the first document to narrate the primary contact between the Portuguese and the native people on the American continent – registers at a certain point the musical mix between Europeans and natives to the sound of the harmonica. The catachesis by the Jesuits, since the first century of the colonization, appealed to music by promoting the combination between music elements and tribe dances with songs and instrumentation connected to a religious theater with medieval background – a combination that is present in the origin of many popular parties and dances that have remained over the time.

According to registers, in the seventeenth century, the most important Brazilian poet in the baroque period Gregorio de Matos was at a certain point of his life chanting sung verses in the region of Salvador, in Bahia.

Already present in the eighteenth century, the first manifestations of modinha and lundu show some syncopated peculiarity, certain melodic malevolence, and irrefutable sensuality, between the implicit and the explicit, which to European travelers appear to be unequivocal traces of typical sensibility. The characteristics of these two musical genders somehow anticipate the mournful song and the samba, which would be the par excellence gender of the modern Brazilian popular music. But the modinha and the lundu reverberate in Portugal, in the eighteenth century, through poet and mulato priest Domingos Caldas Barbosa (1740? – 1800), who is also present in literature stories, turning out to be representative of the interpenetration between the oral and the written, the erudite and the popular.

The three most representative composers of the written tradition in the Brazilian music in various phases of its development are priest José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767-1830), at the end of the colonial period, Carlos Gomes (1836-1896), in the romantic period, and Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), in the modern period. José Maurício, who produced essentially religious music during the period D. João – king of Portugal – stayed in Brazil, and that is immediately prior to the independence, was a mestizo priest (just like Caldas Barbosa) who also composed some modinhas. Carlos Gomes, who accomplished success in Europe with the opera “Il Guarany” (1870), written in a Verdian style but with indigenous theme, composed a not so well known group of popular songs before going to Europe. Finally, Villa-Lobos, a cellist with classic formation and set in the modernist innovations of the 1920s, befriended popular musicians, seresters, samba and choro composers, whose acquaintanceship is reflected in the ambitious projects of “Choros” and the “Bachianas Brasileiras”.

French composer Darius Milhaud, who lived in Brazil in the late 1910s, called the attention to the music of Ernesto Nazareth (1863 – 1934), who combined Chopin and the popular “piano players” in a group of finely written pieces of maxixed polkas and maxixes that are part of the popular memory and started to have a role – after some resistance – in the concert repertoire.

The permeability between diverse cultural levels may be mentioned to accompany the social life in which the family and systematic work spheres evolve – in the folds of the slavery structure – with the intermittent work, the transitority concubinage, and the popular party culture, often ambivalently sacred and mundane, catholic and pagan. The interpenetration between the spheres of “order” and “disorder”, which the literature critic and theoricist Antonio Cândido called “the dialetics of trickstry”, shapes the movable terrain of some sociability and culture in which the oral and the written, the “erudite” and the “popular” continuously move in an unsual manner.

Whereas movements of concert music creation many times betray a certain connection with the popular, the latest developments of the urban popular music point to a connection with written music and literature that confirm the interactive dynamics between these levels.

Antonio Carlos Jobim (1927 – 1994), the great bossa nova composer, chose Villa-Lobos as paradigm even though he moved away from his classic background to compose arrangements at Radio Nacional and eventually sambas and songs well-known all over the world. Tom Jobim’s production develops together with that of João Gilberto (1931 – 2019), the great interpreter and modern recreator of the samba, and that of Vinícius de Moraes (1913 – 1980), a renowned poet in literature since 1930s, who migrated to the popular song in the late1950s. Bossa nova has formed a generation of musicians and lyricists embedded in samba, in a literary and concert music tradition, and also open to other influences, in a range that spans from Jorge Benjor to Roberto Carlos, from Chico Buarque, Edu Lobo and Milton Nascimento to Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil.

This tradition defines the modern Brazilian popular music, in which the late-1960s tropicalist movement acts and intervenes mainly with the participation of Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. The tropicalist movement places face to face, through collage, displacements and parodied quotations, the universes of the Brazilian popular music, the mass romanticism alleged “tacky”, the pop music, and the avant-guard experiments, in a dialogue with literature, making this nonsensical confluence of times, in which the artisanal, the urban-industrial and the post-pop meet, an index of the singular complexity of the Brazilian experience in the context of transnationalization of the culture.

Open to the classic, indigenous, jazz, and eastern music, works with a more instrumental stamp such as those of Egberto Gismonti, the bricoleur experimentalism of Hermeto Paschoas, the dodecaphonic incursions of Arrigo Barnabé into the hard urban pop, are also signs of the permeability to the differences that the tropicalism raised to the condition of interpretative trace of Brazil.

In conclusion, the Brazilian music may be pointed out as not having a still place in the worldization framework as it may line in the field of either native and ethnic cultures or in the purely cosmopolitan culture – it is rather essentially shaped in the field of experience and creation on the intemperance of cultural frontiers in the contemporary world.