Music of Brazil
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Strong influences on the music of Brazil come from many parts of the world, but there are very popular regional music styles influenced by African and European forms. After 500 years of history the brazilian music developed some unique and original styles like Choro, Forró, Frevo, Samba (in a lot of styles), Bossa Nova, MPB and others. Samba is no doubt the best known form of Brazilian music worldwide, though Bossa Nova and other genres have also received much attention abroad. All genres of Brazilian music formed a solid tradition.
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[edit] Brazilian music history
[edit] Colonial music
The earliest known descriptions of music in Brazil date from 1578, when Jean de Léry, a French Calvinist pastor, published Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil, autrement dite Amérique (Journey to the Land of Brazil, also called America). He described the dances and transcribed the music of the Tupi people. In 1587, Gabriel Soares de Sousa wrote Tratado Descritivo do Brasil about the music of several native Brazilian ethnic groups, including the Tamoios and Tupinambás.
King João VI of Portugal was a noted lover of music, and spent a period of time in Brazil. He sent for prominent European musicians to join him, including Austrian pianist Sigismund von Neukomm and composer Marcos Portugal. A local Brazilian musician, José Maurício Nunes Garcia, an organist and clavichordist, was appointed Inspector to the Royal Chapel.
In 1739, Domingos Caldas Barbosa wrote a series of modinhas that were extremely popular[1]. A modinha (pronounced mɔˈdʒĩɲɐ) is a kind of sentimental love song whose origin is uncertain, as it may have evolved either in Brazil or Portugal.
Lundu was the first kind of African-influenced music to flourish in Brazil. Lundu, a style of comedic song and dance, was extremely popular and even came to be performed in the Portuguese court.
[edit] Independent Brazil
Brazil became independent from Portugal in 1822, following the Brazilian War of Independence. Soon after, the African comic form 'lundu' spread from the poor black quarters to a broader, white middle-class audience.
Towards the end of the 18th century a form of comedic dance called bumba-meu-boi became very popular. It was a musical retelling of the story of a resurrected ox. These dances are led by a chamador, who introduces the various characters. Instruments used include the pandeiro, the tamborim, the accordion and the acoustic guitar.
[edit] Classical music
During the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century, the classical music in Brazil was strongly influenced by the music style practiced in Europe, particularly the Viennese classical style. The first major Brazilian composer was José Maurício Nunes Garcia, a priest who composed several sacred pieces and some secular music. He wrote the opera Le Due Gemelle ("The two twins"), the first opera written in Brazil, but the music is nowadays lost. About 250 works written by him are known in the present days. Elias Álvares Lobo composed the first Brazilian opera with a libretto in Portuguese: "A Noite de São João" (Saint John's Party Night).
Near the end of the 19th century, Carlos Gomes (from Campinas) produced a number of Italian-style operas, such as Il Guarany (based on a novel by José de Alencar). Brasílio Itiberê was another prominent classical composer, the first to use elements of Brazilian music in Western classical music, in his Sertaneja (1869).
In 1922, the Week of Modern Art revolutionized Brazilian literature, painting and music. Heitor Villa-Lobos led a new vanguard of composers who used Brazilian folk music in their compositions.
By the end of the 1930s, there were two schools of Brazilian composition. Camargo Guarnieri was the head of the Nationalist school, inspired by the writer Mário de Andrade. Other composers including Guerra Peixe, Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez, Francisco Mignone, Luciano Gallet and Radamés Gnattali. Beginning in 1939, Hans Joachim Koellreutter, creator of the Live Music Group, founded another school, characterized by the use of dodecaphonism and atonalism. Other composers in this school included Edino Krieger, Cláudio Santoro and Eunice Catunda.
[edit] Folk music
The earliest music in what is now Brazil must have been that of the native peoples of the area. Little is known about their music, since no written records exist of this era. With the arrival of Europeans, Brazilian culture began to take shape as a synthesis of native musical styles with Portuguese music and African music.
[edit] Indigenous music
Main article: Indigenous Brazilian music The native peoples of the Brazilian rainforest play instruments including whistles, flutes, horns, drums and rattles. Much of the area's folk music imitates the sound of the Amazon Rainforest. When the Portuguese arrived in Brazil, the first natives they met played an array of reed flutes and other wind and percussion instruments. The Jesuit missionaries introduced songs which used the Tupi language with Christian lyrics, in an attempt to convert the people to Christianity [1], and also introduced Gregorian chant and the flute, bow, and the clavichord.
[edit] Eastern Amazônia
Main articles: carimbó and lambada
Eastern Amazônia has long been dominated by carimbó music, which is centered around Belém. In the 1960s, carimbo was electrified and, in the next decade, DJs added elements from reggae, salsa and merengue. This new form became known as lambada and soon moved to Bahia, Salvador by the mid-1980s. Bahian lambada was synthesizer-based and light pop music. French record producers discovered the music there, and brought it back with them to France passing by Portugal, where a Bolivian group called Los K'jarkas saw their own composition launch an international dance craze. Soon, lambada had spread throughout the world and the term soon became meaninglessly attached to multiple varieties of unrelated Brazilian music, leading to purist scorn from Belém and also Bahia.
Another form of regional folk music, bumba-meu-boi, was popularized by the Carnival celebrations of Parintins and is now a major part of the Brazilian national scene.
[edit] Popular music
The field of Brazilian popular music can be traced back to the 1930s, when radio spread songs across the country. Popular music included instruments like cuicas, tambourines, frying pans, flutes, guitars and the piano. The most famous singer, Carmen Miranda, eventually became an internationally-renowned Hollywood film star. Her songwriter was Ary Barroso, one of the most successful songwriters in early Brazil, along with Lamartine Babo and Noel Rosa.
[edit] Música popular Brasileira
Main article: Música Popular Brasileira
Tropicalia eventually morphed into a more popular form, MPB (música popular Brasileira), which now refers to any Brazilian pop music. Well-known MPB artists include chanteuses Gal Costa, Maria Bethânia and Elis Regina and singer/songwriters Chico Buarque, Milton Nascimento, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Ivan Lins, Djavan, João Bosco, and others.
[edit] Bossa nova
Main article: Bossa nova
Antonio Carlos Jobim and other 1950s composers helped develop a fusion of jazz harmonies and a smoother, often slower, samba beat called bossa nova, which developed at the beach neighborhoods of Ipanema and, later, the Copacabana nightclubs. The first bossa nova records by João Gilberto quickly became huge hits in Brazil. Bossa nova was introduced to the rest of the world by American jazz musicians in the early 1960s, and songs like "The Girl from Ipanema", which remains the biggest Brazilian international hit, eventually became jazz standards.
[edit] Tropicalia
Main article: Tropicalia
By the end of the decade, artists like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil combined American and European styles with electric guitars and different kinds of genuine Brazilian music, beginning a genre called Tropicalia. These songs, not unlike the music coming out of Britain and America at the same time, were often very politicized and were perceived as threatening by the establishment. The military government of the time went as far as to exile Veloso and Gil to England.
[edit] Música nordestina
Main article: Música nordestina
Música nordestina is a generic term for any popular music from the large region of Northeastern Brazil, including both coastal and inland areas. Rhythms are slow and plodding, and are derived from accordions and guitars instead of percussion instruments like in the rest of Brazil - In this region, African rhythms and Portuguese melodies combined to form maracatu and dance music called baião has become popular. Most influentially, however, the area around Recife, the home of forró.
[edit] Repentismo
Northeastern Brazil is known for a distinctive form of literature called literatura de cordel, which are a type of ballads that include elements incorporated into music as repentismo, an improvised lyrical contest on themes suggested by the audience.
[edit] Frevo
Main article: Frevo
Frevo is a style of music from Olinda. In the 1950s, it spread south, to cities like Salvador. In Salvador, frevo bands began playing during Carnaval, originally in trios called trios elétricos. Overtime, the bands moved from playing on pickup trucks to fully amplified bands and stages. Trios eléctricos remain a primary feature of the Salvadoran Carnaval today.
[edit] Forró
Main article: Forró
Forró is played by a trio consisting of a drum and a triangle and led by an accordion. Forró is rapid and eminently danceable, and became one of the foundations for lambada in the 1980s. Luiz Gonzaga was the preeminent early forró musician who popularized the genre in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the 1940s with songs like "Asa Branca".
[edit] Funk Carioca
Main article: Funk Carioca
Funk Carioca is a type of dance music from Rio de Janeiro, derived from and superficially similar to Miami Bass. In Rio it is most often simply known as Funk, although it is very different musically from what Funk means in most other places and contexts. It's usually seen as party music and high and medium class people are usually relunctant to admit they listen to it, since music from this genre usually contains sexually explicit lyrics and is attributed to people derived from the Favela.
[edit] Rock
The Brazilian rock n' roll exists since the "first rock song", "Rock Around the Clock", was covered (and also recorded in Portuguese), in 1954. The 1960's, young singers like Roberto Carlos and his Jovem Guarda were very popular and influenced other artists like River Raid. In the 1970's, there were many Progressive Rock bands in Brazil, such as O Terço and Bacamarte, which were very well-known in Europe and the US by progressive fans. The real "boom" of Brazilian rock was in the 1980's, with many bands and artists like Barão Vermelho, Legião Urbana, Engenheiros do Hawaii, Titãs, Raul Seixas, Lulu Santos, Paralamas do Sucesso and festivals like Rock in Rio and Hollywood Rock.
[edit] Brazilian Heavy Metal
The most famous Brazilian heavy metal bands are Sepultura, Angra and Krisiun. Nowadays Sepultura is considered one of the best metal bands all over the world and a big influence for many other bands from different countries. Another bands are famous also, for an exemple: Torture Squad, Shaaman, Eyes of Shiva, Tuatha de Danann etc.
[edit] Ragamuffin Dancehall
Music originally from Jamaica, but with representants in Brazil, mainly coming from the north / northeast region of the country. yep
[edit] Sertanejo
Main article: Sertanejo
Música sertaneja or Sertenejo is a term for Brazilian country music. It originally referred to music from originating among Sertão and musica caipira, but has since gained more influences from outside Brazil. In particular American country music, Mexican mariachi, and the Music of Paraguay. For several years it was a category at the Latin Grammy Awards.
[edit] Afro Brazilian music
[edit] Samba
Main article: Samba
By the beginning of the 20th century, samba had begun to evolve out of choro in Rio de Janeiro's neighborhood, inhabited mostly by poor blacks descended from slaves. Samba's popularity has grown through the 20th century, especially internationally, as awareness of samba de enredo (a type of samba played during Carnival) has grown. Other types of samba include:
- Samba de breque - reggaeish and choppy
- Samba-canção - typical variety of nightclubs.
- Samba pagode - modern popular variety.
[edit] Capoeira music
Main article: Capoeira music
The Afro-Brazilian sport of capoeira is never played without its own music, which is usually considered to be a call-and-response type of folk music. The main instruments of capoeira music include the berimbau and the pandeiro. Capoeira songs may be improvised on the spot, or they may be popular songs written by older mestres (teachers), and often include accounts of the history of capoeira, or the doings of great mestres.
[edit] Maracatu
Main article: Maracatu
This type of music is played primarily in the Recife and Olinda regions during Carnaval. It is an Afro-Brazilian tradition. The music serves as the backdrop for parade groups that evolved out of ceremonies conducted during colonial times in honour of the Kings of Congo, who were African slaves occupying symbolic leadership positions among the slave population. The music is played on large alfaia drums, large metal gonguê bells, snare drums and shakers.
[edit] Afoxé
Main article: Afoxé
Afoxê is a kind of religious music, part of the Candomblé tradition. In 1949, a group called Filhos de Gandhi began playing afoxé during Carnaval parades in Salvador; their name translates as Sons of Gandhi, associating black Brazilian activism with Mahatma Gandhi's Indian independence movement. The Filhos de Gandhi's 1949 appearance was also revolutionary because, up until then, the Carnaval parades in Salvador were meant only for light-skinned people.
[edit] Samba-reggae
Main article: Samba-reggae
The band Olodum, from Pelourinho, are generally credited with the mid-1980s invention of samba-reggae, a fusion of Jamaican reggae with samba. Olodum retained the politically-charged lyrics of bands like Ilê Aiyê.
[edit] Music of Salvador: Late 60s to mid-70s
In the latter part of the 1960s, a group of black Bahians began dressing as Native Americans during the Salvadoran Carnaval, identifying with their shared struggles through history. These groups included Comanches do Pelô and Apaches de Tororó and were known for a forceful and powerful style of percussion, and frequent violent encounters with the police. Starting in 1974, a group of black Bahians called Ilê Aiyê became prominent, identifying with the Yoruba people of West Africa. Along with a policy of loosening restrictions by the Brazilian government, Ilê Aiyê's sound and message spread to groups like Grupo Cultural do Olodum, who established community centers and other philanthropic efforts.
[edit] Other Afro-Brazilian music genres
Afro-Brazilian music also include:
| Latin American music |
|---|
|
Argentina - Bolivia - Brazil - Chile - Colombia - Costa Rica - Cuba - Dominican Republic - Ecuador - El Salvador |
| Lusophone music |
|---|
| Angola | Brazil | Cape Verde | East Timor | Guinea-Bissau | Macau | Mozambique | Portugal | Sri Lanka |
[edit] Further reading
- Castro, Ruy. "Bossa Nova: The Story Of The Brazilian Music That Seduced The World." 2000. Chicago Review Press. ISBN 1-55652-409-9
- McGowan, Chris and Pessanha, Ricardo. "The Brazilian Sound: Samba, Bossa Nova and the Popular Music of Brazil." 1998. 2nd edition. Temple University Press. ISBN 1-56639-545-3
- Veloso, Caetano "Tropical Truth: A Story Of Music & Revolution In Brazil." 1997, 2002. Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-40788-X
