Made in Brazil

Studies in Popular Music

Martha Tupinamba de Ulhoa, Cláudia Azevedo, Felipe Trotta, Martha Tupinamba de Ulhoa, Cláudia Azevedo, Felipe Trotta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135954857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Made in Brazil: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of twentieth-century Brazilian popular music. The volume consists of essays by scholars of Brazilian music, and covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in Brazil. Each essay provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance to Brazilian popular music. The book first presents a general description of the history and background of popular music in Brazil, followed by essays that are organized into thematic sections: Samba and Choro; History, Memory, and Representations; Scenes and Artists; and Music, Market and New Media.

PART I

Samba and Choro

In August 1939, famous singer Francisco Alves (1898–1952) recorded a samba that became a kind of unofficial Brazilian anthem. Composed by Ary Barroso (1903–1964), with orchestral arrangements by Radamés Gnatalli (1906–1988), “Aquarela do Brasil” (Watercolor of Brazil), known internationally as “Brazil,” may be approached as the synthesis of a shared social imaginary of nation put together from specific features in the 1930s. The rhythmic cell in the main accompaniment reiterates the acclaimed pattern of the “radiophonic” samba of the time, already integrated to media systems and established as a sign of “Brazilianness.” According to Carlos Sandroni (2001), this rhythm incorporated a wide process of dispute and conciliation, which took samba from the marginal context of its origins to the hegemonic position as representative of the national identity. The lyrics, in exaltation fashion, enumerate images of grandeur and diversity regarding the country’s cultural manifestations. The discourses about miscegenation, expressed in the form of female characters, the praise of both natural beauty and cultural manifestations, as well as distinct bodily gestures related to the swing of samba dancing, give shape—through the watercolor metaphor—to an ethic and aesthetic grandeur on which the national imaginary rely until today. In the lyrics, the female characters appear as the “black mother,” the “white madam,” and the “morena” (a female whose brown skin results from the miscegenation of black and white); water springs, the moonlight, coconut trees are examples of natural beauty; congado and samba are praised as cultural manifestations; bamboleio and ginga are gestures related to the swing of samba dancing. According to the lyrics, all this grandeur is manifest in the samba because the genre is a product of the country, “samba que dá” (samba that grows spontaneously) and the synthesis of the explanation of Brazil, “terra de samba e pandeiro” (land of samba and tambourine). Inaugurating a style that came to be known as “samba exaltação” (exaltation samba), “Aquarela do Brasil” consolidates in samba form some features of national identity that Brazilian foreign policies have used as cultural marketing. Since then, samba has presented Brazil to the world, as well as created a narrative about what it means to be Brazilian, putting into action a discourse of joy, swing, and congeniality. It was from Barroso’s composition that Walt Disney created the character José Carioca, the green parrot in the short-length movie Watercolor of Brazil (1942), produced within the Good Neighbor Policy of the U.S. government. At the same time, singer Carmen Miranda (1909–1955) consolidated her career in the U.S. movie market with a repertory exclusively of samba songs.

In the narrative magic of the show in the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in London, it was the beat of the tamborim (a small tambourine hit with a stick) that convinced the rigid British security guard to allow the friendly entry of Sorriso onto the stage of the great Olympic party. And it was the swing of the gari-sambista that made the Englishman smile as he tried unsuccessfully to mimic the syncopated wiggles of the Brazilian’s waist. In the 2014 World Cup Final Draw, which took place in Bahia, again samba and choro were protagonists of a narrative of a multicultural, joyful, and receptive nation. Samba, like sound, like music and dance, was transformed in the scenic area of the shows into a metonymy of national identity globalized by the Olympics and the World Cup: a festive and cheerful national identity with swing, energy, smiles, and embraces.

Within the boundaries of the nation, the genre also functions as a symbol of “Brazilianness,” constantly reinforced by publicity, movies, telenovelas, and varied narratives. The “way of being” of the Brazilian is associated with massive recurrence with the symbolic universe of samba, its dance, its rhythm, and its protagonists. Possibly because of this ubiquity of samba in the national imagination, research on popular music in Brazil has dedicated a prominent space to the genre. There are dozens of essays, biographies, and journalistic narratives about composers, broadcasters, and interpreters of samba, as well as on the Samba Schools, neighborhoods, and rodas that form the imagery of the genre. In the context of more systematic academic research, samba has been the subject of dissertations and theses from various disciplines, which address different aspects of the practice of samba in Brazilian society. The period of structuring of the genre is what has attracted more attention from researchers. In regard to this central theme, the emphasis is on the works of Hermano Vianna (O mistério do samba [The Mystery of Samba], 1995) and Carlos Sandroni (Feitiço decente [Decent Spell], 2001), which cover the moment of transformation of samba into a genre that is a synthesis of national identity. In the course of a few decades between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1930s, samba withdrew from its origin in a marginal community to occupy the center of the mass media (records and radio). For that, it had the support of various cultural mediators (journalists, entrepreneurs, producers, singers, broadcasters) and the development of a set of technical and formal elaborations (rhythm, melodies, themes, commercial structure, abandonment of improvisation, assigning of authorship) that made samba into a commercial music, deeply connected simultaneously with amateur community activities from its origin and with commercial and professional modes of circulation.

This period will be the subject of the first chapter of Part I, entitled “The Invention of Brazil as the Land of Samba: Sambistas and Their Social Affirmation,” by Adalberto Paranhos, who discusses samba’s role in the 1930s in musically building a shared imagery about an essentially mestizo Brazilian national identity. By analyzing the repertoire of some major sambistas of the period, the author traverses the ethnic and social streams that surrounded the consolidation of samba as a symbol of “Brazilianness,” providing an extensive interpretation of the process of legitimization of the genre. Paranhos expands Vianna and Sandroni’s discussion, devoting special attention to the role of samba in the development of a political musical practice from the musical repertoire. According to the author, the ideas that circulated in samba lyrics were associated with thoughts about “Brazilianness” of the time, coloring a debate that strengthened the notion that samba is “coisa nossa” (our thing), as in a well known song by Noel Rosa, a key composer of the 1930s.

Closely accompanying this movement of reflection about Brazilian music, choro—the instrumental version of samba—has in recent years gone through an intense process of valorization, which has consecrated it as Brazilian instrumental music of high quality. Concurrently, investigative works on choro repertoire, composers, performers, and groups gained strength in Brazilian universities, expanding themes and knowledge about national instrumental popular music in the country. If samba is considered the genre that best consolidates the national imagination, the development of research on choro points to the recognition of the instrumental genre as a founding music of national music. Processed from varied repertoires of the mid-nineteenth century, choro began as a “way of playing” polkas, waltzes, tangos, and scottishes so that by the turn of the twentieth century, it had solidified into an autonomous musical genre. In this process, choro would format a sound for samba recorded in the first decades of the twentieth century, and it would be the subject of numerous recordings at the time. Choro instrumentalists and arrangers such as Pixinguinha and Anacleto de Medeiros were hired by the nascent recording industry to write arrangements for samba songs, and in the process shaped a set of styles and “genre rules” for the genre. In a sense, samba and choro are sister genres that formed a common universe of music that sonically identified the national identity.

Choro is examined by Pedro Aragão in “Choro’s Manuscript Collections of the 19th and early 20th Centuries: Written Transmission of an ‘Oral’ Tradition.” The author focuses on aspects of oral and written transmission in Brazilian popular music through the analysis of what may be one of the first ethnographic accounts from an insider of an urban popular music, the book O Choro—Reminiscências dos Chorões Antigos by Alexandre Gonçalves Pinto, published in 1936. A rereading of the book (well known in the choro literature) emphasizes previously unexplored aspects such as the teaching, learning, and transmission of choro, leading to discussion of the transmission network of choro manuscript albums that worked in parallel to the sheet music industry in the early decades of the twentieth century. During this period, a musical canon was structured, formed by recorded samba and choro, which accounts for the typically Brazilian sound.

After the establishment of the canon, various artists and musical genres attempted to position themselves within the value hierarchy. To some extent, bossa nova can be understood as one of those movements of obtaining legitimacy from samba and choro, featuring intellectualized middle-class youth who stood on the margin of the consolidated traditional samba narrative. At the end of the twentieth century, there were diverse changes in Brazil not only in the musical field, but also in the economy and politics. The country became more involved with the global cultural market, which increased accessibility to innumerable products. From the musical point of view, some genres attempted to incorporate elements of transnational pop, dealing with technology and electronic sounds. The initial kick-start was given by música sertaneja (Brazilian country music), which, since the 1980s, had sought to reprocess its rural origin in a young and cosmopolitan environment. The solution found by the “duplas” (duos) was to develop a more electrified sound through keyboards, electric bass, and electric guitar, abandoning the 10-string acoustic guitar and songs with themes related to nature and country life to emphasize narratives about love. The música sertaneja movement was closely accompanied by groups of young samba musicians, who invented a new marketing label and a new symbolic ethos for samba, founded on love and electrified sounds. This is the case of the samba known as “romantic pagode,” discussed by Felipe Trotta in “Samba and the Music Market in Brazil in the 1990s.” The appearance of romantic pagode triggered a series of conflicts over the legitimacy of samba, its imagery, and its sound practices. Such conflicts reveal tensions about the elements that comprise the discourse of national identity shared internally and presented externally. Tellingly, despite its selling out concerts weekly in all the capitals of Brazil, pagode was not included in the closing show of the London Olympics, although the presence of Alexandre Pires—one of the style’s main artists—in the World Cup Final Draw shows that the legitimacy match between pagode and samba seems nowadays less polarized and more complex.

The first three chapters of the book can be read as a summary of current debates about samba, choro, and pagode, revisiting foundational narratives and contemporary movements of Brazilian music with greater national and international projection.

Bibliography

Sandroni, Carlos. 2001. Feitiço decente: transformações do samba no Rio de Janeiro (1917–1933). Rio de Janeiro: Zahar/Ed.UFRJ.

Vianna, Hermano. 1995. O mistério do samba. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar/Ed.UFRJ.

1

The Invention of Brazil as the
Land of Samba: Sambistas and
Their Social Affirmation

Adalberto Paranhos

In the gallery of national icons, the social invention of Brazil as the land of samba is an image that endures to this day, crossing through time despite all its setbacks in the field of Brazilian popular music. The common denominator of the vaunted Brazilian cultural identity in the segment of music, urban samba had to face a long and bumpy ride to go from being a marginal cultural artifact stigmatized as “something of blacks and bums” to receiving the honors of its consecration as a national symbol. This history, whose starting point can be traced to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was permeated by comings and goings, marches and countermarches, dialectically describing a trajectory that did not follow a uniform or linear path.

The directions taken by samba—more specifically by samba carioca (samba from Rio de Janeiro)—are connected to the wider context of capitalist industrial development. As industrialized popular music, its expansion spun in the orbit of growth of the fledgling entertainment industry, or, if you will, the cultural industry. For that, the urbanization and social diversification experienced by Brazil in the early decades of the twentieth century played a decisive role.

Linked to these changes, popular music, turned into a commercial product for mass consumption, would reveal its commodity side. At least four basic factors, in my view, converged in order to promote this process, which directly affected samba: (1) originally, a socialized cultural good (i.e., of collective production and enjoyment, with recreational and/or religious purposes), samba also reached the stage of production and individual appropriation, for commercial purposes; (2) anchored in electrical recording devices, the recording industry, with its foundations based in Rio de Janeiro, advanced technologically on a large scale and steadily gained consumers in the middle- and high-income sectors; (3) self-proclaimed radio education gave way to commercial radio, which acquired, in a short span of time, the status of the main launching pad of popular music, leaving behind the circus tents and the stage revues; and (4) the production and dissemination of samba, at first almost restricted to the working classes and a population with a predominance of blacks and/or mulattos, came to be also taken up by white middle-class composers and performers, with easy access to the world of radio and records.

Tal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Analyzing Popular Sound: An Assessment of Popular Music Studies in Brazil
• Part I: Samba and Choro
• Part II: History, Memory, and Representations
• Part III: Scenes and Artists
• Part IV: Music, Market, and New Media
• Coda
• Afterword
• A Selected Bibliography on Brazilian Popular Music
• Notes on Contributors
• Glossary
• Index