Musical Spaces

Place, Performance, and Power

James Williams, Samuel Horlor

• Publisher: Jenny Stanford Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000400991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

There is growing recognition and understanding of music's fundamentally spatial natures, with significances of space found both in the immediacy of musical practices and in connection to broader identities and ideas around music. Whereas previous publications have looked at connections between music and space through singular lenses (such as how they are linked to ethnic identities or how musical images of a city are constructed), this book sets out to explore intersections between multiple scales and kinds of musical spaces. It complements the investigation of broader power structures and place-based identities by a detailed focus on the moments of music-making and musical environments, revealing the mutual shaping of these levels. The book overcomes a Eurocentric focus on a typically narrow range of musics (especially European and North American classical and popular forms) with case studies on a diverse set of genres and global contexts, inspiring a range of ethnographic, text-based, historical, and practice-based approaches.

PART I

(TRANS)LOCAL MUSICAL SPACES

Chapter 1

Musical Spaces and Deep Regionalism in Minas Gerais, Brazil

Jonathon Grasse

Music Department, California State University, Dominguez Hills, 1000 E. Victoria Street, Carson, CA 90747, USA

[email protected]

1.1 Introduction

In researching music and regional identity in Minas Gerais, Brazil, I engage three interrelated notions of musical space: the geography of cultural territory’s physical places; the spaces of social development within and between historical communities; and the spaces of consciousness hosting identities of place as emotional, cognitive experiences enabling what some have theorized as neuro-phenomenological ‘enactment’ (Schiavio, 2014). This chapter focuses on applying theories of musical spaces while briefly engaging other important aspects of three case studies illustrating the defining role these spaces play in considering what I term ‘deep regionalism’. These musical spaces, equated with the places of self and social identities, frame the music depicted here with notions of empowerment: individual, social, historical, and political. The three select case studies in Minas Gerais are: the Congado popular Catholic processional of contemporary African-descendant communities in the city of Ouro Preto; the ten-string Brazilian guitar (viola or viola caipira), an instrument/object of regional iconicity; and lyrics extolling pathos of regional place and history in songs from the region’s Corner Club popular music collective (Clube da Esquina). Each case study engages the array of musical spaces in unique ways.¹

1 Fieldwork on the Ouro Preto Congado festivals occurred in January of 2015, 2016, and 2018 and includes interviews with organizers and participants, and videographic documentation. Fieldwork examining the viola includes interviews with luthiers, viola players (violeiros), and scene events in Belo Horizonte, Nova Lima, and Sabará in 2012, 2015, and 2016. Research into the Corner Club includes interviews with collective members beginning in 2006.

Encountered at various places and times throughout the year, the often-termed Black Catholicism of the Reinado festival, or Congado, is also manifest in Ouro Preto during Epiphany week, when the ensemble Ouro Preto Moçambique Group of Our Lady of the Rosary and Saint Iphigenia parades with invited groups visiting from other towns and cities. They follow a route from the Saint Iphigenia Church in the Alto da Cruz neighbourhood in the direction of the Chico Rei mine. Groups typically include extended families with children and elder participants, reflecting their basis in community and neighbourhood. In 2016, the Epiphany week festival titled ‘The Faith that Sings and Dances’ attracted Congado groups invited from many regions of Minas Gerais (also simply Minas). A person or thing from Minas is still called ‘miner’ (mineiro/a), and the heritage of Baroque-era mining wealth was enabled through the enslavement of black Africans and their descendants. Though the procession’s destination is the site of Chico’s old gold mine, the gates to the Church of Our Lady of the Conception serve as both a practical and picturesque compromise on the part of organizers; the masses of musicians, dancers, and spectators would overwhelm the narrow street running past the mine’s entrance, a stone’s throw away.

A regional foundation myth posits Chico Rei (Francisco the King) as having been the very first King of Congo (Rei do Congo), a title still bestowed to others as part of an election rite during or in conjunction with many Reinado festivals. For this very festival, the Moçambique community’s king is joined by royal representatives of visiting groups as they bestow blessings on procession participants at the gate of the Church of Our Lady of the Conception. In a legend shared by countless Congado practitioners, Chico Rei purchased his freedom, and that of his son and other members of his African ethnic group, by saving what gold he could from his mining work. He later purchased the mine, earning the title in recognition of his leadership and having overcome slavery in such grand fashion. Before the dawn of the eighteenth century, the first of hundreds of thousands of slaves were brought to this highland interior of Brazil to work in the gold, diamond, and gem mines for their owners and the Crown of Portugal, and later as forced labour in the coffee fields of southern Minas. ‘The Faith that Sings and Dances’ is a popular Catholic festival of a compound nature, dedicated to the Virgin Mary and the group’s patron Saint Iphigenia of Ethiopia, two figures joined by Chico Rei in the nearly equally passionate devotion they inspire. Several festival events are held at the Chico Rei House of Culture, a community centre dedicated in part to the organization of social activism. Saint Iphigenia Church, the heart of the hosting group’s community, and dramatically perched atop one of Ouro Preto’s many hills, was constructed by slaves between 1733 and 1785, partially funded by Chico Rei.

The colourful procession, characterized by pounding percussion, graceful call-and-response praise songs, bright costumes and banners, and enthusiastic spectators, winds through steep streets and past landmarks. The pageantry links iconic physical locations symbolizing Minas’ primary historical modes of regional identity: gold mining and the spectacular colonial-era architecture now protected by UNESCO. The Alto da Cruz neighbourhood in Ouro Preto’s eastern edge, from which both the community and the parade emerge, dates to the village known as Antônio Dias founded at the dawn of the eighteenth century, and bordering Ouro Preto, when it was known as Vila Rica, Portugal’s wealthy colonial gem in the New World. It was near Antônio Dias that gold was discovered in 1697 and that slaves and the working poor were forced to live. Today, the parade route almost traverses what were these two worlds: one, of the poverty-stricken, marginalized black workers; the other, of a picture postcard of a cultivated colonial city reflecting the European elegance of political and social power. Brazilians typically embrace the symbolic picturesque beauty of Ouro Preto’s renowned landmarks as a national treasure, leaving behind as a seemingly forgotten legacy the marginalized districts still called home by descendants of forced labour. Here, the Chico Rei legend and the legacy of urban marginalization engage musical spaces of both physical territory and the development of historical communities; celebration of the historical figure’s meaningfulness, mingling with the religiosity of public devotion, re-inscribes cultural places still marked in 2018 by difference and confrontation.

The Moçambique ensemble’s call for unity among visiting groups, and the festival’s role in cultural resistance, positions the religious event, in part, as a confrontation to the general marginalization of Afro-Mineiro communities, while reawakening attention to historical legacies and to their spaces of racially segregated social development. The festival, a spectacular display of public devotion to Catholic icons, also contests Brazil’s prevailing racial injustices in a theatrical ‘desegregation’ of the old city’s streets and landmarks and thus a marking of cultural territory. This aspect of black pride inherent in Congado, a facet not lost on the general Brazilian public, was emphatically shared by that year’s Rei do Congo in an interview during the festival (Benifácio, 2015 interview in Ouro Preto). At play here too are the notional social spaces of freedom — Chico Rei’s freedom and the promise of freedom — forming the figurative grounds for contemporary commemoration. These ‘spaces of freedom’, augmenting Ouro Preto’s physical cultural territory, emanate from social arenas of confrontation etched into history and into notions of collective difference as a set of social places inhabited by communities. Music’s formative spatialities created by the Reinado tradition in Minas confront, on their own terms, specific histories and legacies of hope and suffering while expressing and celebrating both Catholic religiosity and Chico Rei’s heroic role in contemporary mineiro black consciousness. Geographic, historical, and cognitive layers of formative spatiality further link these Afro-Mineiro communities to their place in a particular frontier of the African diaspora.

1.2 Musical Space in Consciousness

Ouro Preto’s culturally symbolic physical locations, and the historical arenas of the Reinado’s figurative spatialities of confrontation, are near-empty ideas without the participatory consciousness in which individuals enact identity of place as a cognitive musical experience in real time, mapping in some way to these meanings. ‘Musical sense-making is not a passive representation of elements of the musical environment. Rather, it is a process of bringing forth, or enacting, a subject’s own domain of meaning’ (Schiavio, 2014: 142). Intentionality and purposefulness on the part of Congado participants (performers, audience, and community members), as a musical space, form a key element to deep regionalism, an identity of place made real by neuro-phenomenological enactment. Similar neuro-phenomenological processes hold true, as key to meaningfulness, in the following descriptions of the viola as an icon of Minas’ rural past and of regionalist themes in the music of the Clube da Esquina popular music collective. If we are to say that these examples offer potential for deep regionalism, then we are saying that participants cognitively enact such sentiments, positioning themselves towards identities of place through music. Aesthetic and formal realms attract and encourage such participation through style, sound, and structures.

Music is neither expressive nor symbolic without participants consciously enacting experiential meaningfulness of those expressions and symbols. Enactment leads to processual, musical spaces of consciousness hosting identities of place. Here, I theoretically concretize cognitive experience as being elemental to deep regionalism; through performer and audience enactment of meaningfulness, music enables mindful engagement of both the objective physicality of cultural territory and the discursive arenas of historical social implications. Sense-making brought about in musical encounters is, furthermore, socially conditioned and linked to expectations inherent in broader experiences with the world. Theories of ‘embodiment’ suggest how affective encounters made beautiful, powerful, and sensual by music augment and facilitate the formation of identities of place enhanced by physical places and historical space. Notions of embodiment locate regionalism within a participant’s sense-making of experiential meaningfulness with music. In the twenty-first-century ethnomusicological literature, embodiment acquires interrelated meanings (Ciucci, 2012; Gibson and Dunbar-Hall, 2000; Guy, 2009; Magowan and Wrazen, 2013; Schultz, 2002). I draw from across these sources to form a threefold neuro-phenomenological concept of embodiment, emplacement, and emplotment: in lifting ourselves up into music (enacting), we place ourselves into relationships with geographies of cultural territories and into narratives of music’s ‘formative spatialities’ (after Leyshon, Matless, and Revill, 1995: 424–425) of social developm...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• Preface Page
• Notes on Contributors Page
• Introduction: Musical Spaces Page
• Part I
• Part II
• Epilogue: Towards More Geographic Musicologies
• Index