Africa! Africa! Africa!" Black Identity in Marlos Nobre's Rhythmetron

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"AFRICA! AFRICA! AFRICA!" BLACK IDENTITY IN MARLOS NOBRE'S RHYTHMETRON

Henrique Medeiros Batista

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF MUSICAL ARTS

May 2020

Committee:

Daniel Piccolo, Advisor

Irina Stakhanova Graduate Faculty Representative

Sidra Lawrence

Henrique Medeiros Batista

Daniel Piccolo, Advisor

In this document I examine Brazilian composer Marlos Nobre’s ballet Rhythmetron, adding to the scholarly literature available on the contributions of Latin American composers to the percussion ensemble repertoire. Using archival, ethnographic, and text-based analyses, I inquire into the genres, instruments, and performance practices of the piece, as well as its critical reception. This history reveals that the colonial relationship with black sound has continuously been re-inscribed in Brazilian cultural artifacts, and that institutional biases are upheld when determining what constitutes Art music. Through its inclusion of the Afro-Brazilian genres of samba and maracatú, Rhythmetron invites us to consider the hierarchies of valuation that govern

what constitutes Brazilian popular music, art music, and ballet, revealing racialized power

dynamics. I utilize postcolonial theories of hybridity to demonstrate that Rhythmetron dialogues

with the Dance Theatre of Harlem’s intent to reimagine and break racial expectations in the

realm of classical ballet. This research reveals that what is guarded in our cultural memories is

power-laden, and shows that more inclusive canonization practices can challenge existing

narratives and create new ones. iv

To Rosely and Janio v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to thank my dedicated committee members. Dr. Daniel

Piccolo, thank you for your guidance and patience throughout the past couple of years. Without

your persistent encouragement, this project would not have been realized. Dr. Marilyn Shrude,

thank you for your continuous support from day one. It has been a journey and without you this

would not have been possible. Dr. Sidra Lawrence, there are no words to express the gratitude I

feel, thank you for your support. Dr. Irina Stakanova, thank you for your generosity throughout

the years this project unfolded.

Many other friends and colleagues have been invaluable throughout the years by helping

me formulate the ideas presented in this document, or by showing me support in many forms.

Paraguassú Abrahão and Karla Bach, and Suzanne Pergal for your friendship and support I thank

you. Richard Hopkins and Bobby Rue-Wilder, without your friendship throughout the years, I

would have not made it, thank you for believing in me. Thank you to Dr. Andy Connell for your

guidance in the early stages of this document. To my fellow BGSU DMA colleagues, thank you for your intellectual and artistic stimulation throughout the years. Being around the DMA cohort for four years was a life experience I will take with me wherever I go. I would also like to extend my thanks to the SGI-USA members Ashley, Candy, and April.

To Marlos Nobre: Thank you for your support and generosity. I am forever indebted to your kindness, support and unprecedented artistry.

And lastly, my deepest appreciation to my family, without whom none of this would have been possible. Thank you Maiara, Priscilla, Monique, Mariana, Tia Celia, Mom and Dad. vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Engagements with the Other – A History of Borrowing ...... 5

Janissary Bands ...... 5

Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodaly ...... 8

Lou Harrison ...... 10

Stravinsky ...... 12

Darius Milhaud ...... 14

Other Considerations ...... 15

Applications in Marlos Nobre’s Music ...... 16

Chapter Outline ...... 16

CHAPTER ONE. COLONIAL LEGACY ...... 20

Brazil’s Colonial Legacy ...... 20

Postcolonial Theory ...... 24

Edward Said ...... 25

Frantz Fanon ...... 27

Homi K. Bhabha ...... 31

Paul Gilroy ...... 32

CHAPTER TWO. MODERNISM, ANTHROPOPHAGY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY 35

Anthropophagy as Myth ...... 37

Anthropophagy in Popular Music ...... 40

Anthropophagy as Brasilidade ...... 43 vii

CHAPTER THREE. ARTHUR MITCHELL AND MARLOS NOBRE ...... 51

Marlos Nobre ...... 52

Arthur Mitchell ...... 55

A Fortuitous Collaboration ...... 58

CHAPTER FOUR. GENRE ...... 61

A Reflection on Musical Genres ...... 61

Rhythmic Fragments in the Music ...... 64

Marlos Nobre and a Palimpsestic Memory ...... 72

Maracatú…………...... 74

Precursors to Samba ...... 76

Batuque…...... 78

Lundu...... 80

Maxixe ...... 81

Samba...... 84

CHAPTER FIVE. RHYTHMETRON PERFORMANCE AND LINEAGE ...... 88

CHAPTER SIX. CONCLUSION ...... 100

REFERENCES………...... 110

APPENDIX A. MARLOS NOBRE INTERVIEW ...... 123

APPENDIX B. PERFORMANCE DATES ...... 132

APPENDIX C. RHYTHMETRON SCORE USE AUTHORIZATION ...... 135 viii

LIST OF EXAMPLES

Example Page

4.1 Gonguê, maracatú rhythm ...... 65

4.2 Rhythmetron, mm. 39-41 ...... 66

4.3 Rhythmetron, mm. 136-142. Canon-like Presentation ...... 66

4.4 Rhythmetron, mm. 171-177. Canon 2...... 67

4.5 Rhythmetron, mm. 208-215. Canon 3...... 68

4.6 Rhythmetron, Movement Three, mm. 41-45. Bass Drum Part...... 69

4.7 Rhythmetron, Movement Three, mm. 56-60. Pandeiro Part...... 70

5.1 Correio da Manhã, Newspaper Clipping...... 80 1

INTRODUCTION

When Patricia Ricketts, Lydia Abarca, Walter Raines and the rest of the company perform ‘Rhythmetron’ to the music of Brazilian composer Marlos Nobre… Mitchell’s choreography, plus percussion – gongs, drums and bells, and the free exotic motions of the dancer-priestess all shout of Africa! Africa! Africa! And the Blacks in the audience are exalted and warm all over.1 -Carol Morton, Essence Magazine

This 1972 review of Dance Theatre of Harlem’s (henceforth DTH) performance of

Marlos Nobre’s ballet Rhythmetron, presents the idea that peoples of African-descent share a collective history, racial and political interests and identity, and even share collective trauma.

Morton’s review links the racially coded sounds and instruments of Marlos Nobre’s music to the bodies of the dancers using Africa as a unifying topos. Such sounds – the “percussion - gongs, drums, and bells” – connect the listener to the Afro-Brazilian genres of maracatú and samba. In this document, I will show that these racialized genres are linked to Brazil’s colonial past.

Morton’s effusive exclamation-- “Africa! Africa! Africa! and the Blacks in the audience are exalted and warm all over” –delineates a Pan-African ideology by evoking Africa as a shared identity marker, as it expresses the author’s utmost excitement in witnessing familiar sounds imagined in a new context that upends our musical and racial expectations.

Morton’s review also attests to the ways in which genres have the potential to demarcate specific racial histories. Rhythmetron is a fascinating postcolonial artifact, existing at the intersection of, on the one hand, genres which are themselves by-products of a colonial history in

Brazil, with, on the other, genres that are steeped in European-derived cultural practices

(classical ballet and contemporary art music). A central aim in interrogating this intersection is

1 Carol A. Morton, "The Dance Theatre of Harlem: An Experience in Blackness," Essence, May 1972, 58. 2

the exploration of how a piece of music can complicate the notion of art. As we will see,

Rhythmetron displaces Eurocentric cultural discourses around what are (or are not) considered

elite cultural products.

Rhythmetron was conceived as a ballet, and from its inception it was a collaboration

between Nobre, the composer, and the choreographer Arthur Mitchell, one of the founders of

DTH. In an article written for the National Endowment for the Arts, Victoria Hutter asserts that

classical ballet is “a product of the imperial courts…its history was a patrician vision of purity,

uniformity, and whiteness.”2 In this article, Hutter celebrates Mitchell’s trailblazing efforts in classical ballet, bringing to the forefront one of DTH’s central aims as an institution: to reimagine and dismantle the racial boundaries found within classical ballet. Rhythmetron was performed in the DTH’s repertoire throughout the first decade of the professional company’s life, and it became a vehicle for reimagining racial boundaries in classical ballet. This redefinition became a negotiation of power, as well-established boundaries clashed with sounds, genres, and even physical characteristics that challenged the expectations associated with classical ballet.

The DTH sought to reimagine classical ballet by asking: “What bodies and what sonic elements are accepted into the canon?”

Similar negotiations occur within the Western Art Music canon. Latin American composers are expected to incorporate elements, traditions, folklore, and sounds from their own cultures. Ethnomusicologist Ana Alonso-Minutti discusses how the expectations placed on the

Latin-American composer are pervasive:

2 Victoria Hutter “Arthur Mitchell, Giving Back to the Community.” NEA. National Endownment for the Arts, Accessed January 28, 2020. https://www.arts.gov/NEARTS/2016v1-telling-all-our-stories-arts-and-diversity/arthur- mitchell. 3

It is not uncommon that composers, especially those beyond the Euro-American periphery, are asked to locate themselves in the parameters of “national” versus “international.” They usually face the expectation of situating their work in a discourse of differentiation—to describe the aspects that make their music representative of their place of origin.3

Although Alonzo Minutti’s article focuses on the music of Mexican composer Mario

Lavista, one can extend such logics (as she does) beyond his work and geography. Latin

American composers are expected to engage in the cultures in which they have been deemed authorities through geographic, and often racial, associations. However, in a critical catch-22, if they comply with these expectations and engage with popular and folk musics, their body of work is critiqued for its limited scope. Ethnomusicologist Gerard Béhague explains how these systems of value have affected artistic output from Latin American composers throughout the twentieth century:

We inherited the European vision of the concept that cultured music, art music, or serious music has its own inherent logic. The idea of art for art’s sake created the illusion that the composer was his own being, totally divorced from any non-musical reference. This belief not only distanced many composers from their cultural realities, but it also represents many of the tragic failures of their entire artistic lives. This conditioning was, in general, of such magnitude, that we can generalize in the manner that there have been only a few composers that questioned the basic references of their activities as creators, at the very least until the 1960s. In reality, there are many cases in the annals of Latin American history throughout the twentieth century in which composers’ names are mentioned, but whose body of work reflect, almost entirely, a slave-like submission to the aesthetics and ideologies imposed from abroad in a condescending manner. Ironically, we continue to mention these names as positive, and as examples of the perfect imitation of academicism, molded from European techniques of composition. 4

3Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, "Forging a Cosmopolitan Ideal: Mario Lavista's Early Music." Latin American Music Review / Revista De Música Latinoamericana 35, no. 2 (2014): 169-96. Accessed April 9, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/43282583. 4 Gerard Béhague, "La Problemática De La Posición Socio-Política Del Compositor En La Música Nueva En Latinoamérica," Latin American Music Review 27, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2006): 47. My translation; original: Heredamos de la visión europea el concepto de que la música culta/ artística/seria tiene su propio sentido lógico, inherente. La idea del arte por el arte creó la ilusión de que el compositor era un ser aparte, totalmente desvinculado de cualquier referencia no musical. Esta creencia no solamente distanció muchos compositores de su realidad cultural 4

Colonialism influenced and continues to influence the artistic output of Latin American composers. Béhague continues his address: “The colonized mentality of music historians and composers was such that they highly praised those who showed dominance in European composition techniques.”5 The artistic output from Latin American composers has been influenced by colonialism to such an extent that, if composers engage with European modernism and European high art, they are criticized for mimicking a culture that is ‘foreign’ to them. In the

Brazilian context, the music of Rhythmetron is considered to be nestled into the genre música erudita, or erudite music (a different name for Western Art Music), but it also incorporates elements of the Brazilian popular music genres of samba and maracatú. Paradoxically, then,

Rhythmetron exists in an in-between space, neither belonging exclusively to música erudita, nor to Brazilian popular music, and yet it belongs to both. This “in-betweenness” that Rhythmetron occupies invites us to re-consider historically constructed systems of values assigned to Western

Art Music genres and the popular genres that permeate Rhythmetron.

The expectations placed on Latin-American composers’ output stems from the colonial encounter, which produced a binary logic that created distinctions between the colonizer and

pero también representó la base de muchas fallas trágicas de vidas artísticas enteras. El condicionamiento fue, por lo general, de tal magnitud que se puede generalizar en el sentido de que pocos fueron los compositores que cuestionaron las referencias básicas de sus actividades como creadores, por lo menos hasta los años 60. En realidad, hay muchos casos en los anales de la historia de la música en Latinoamérica del siglo XX de compositores cuyos nombres son todavía mencionados pero cuya obra refleja casi totalmente la sumisión esclava a la estética e ideología impuestas de afuera y de arriba. Irónicamente, se sigue mencionando estos nombres como casos positivos y ejemplares de perfecta imitación del academicismo de los moldes europeos de técnica de composición. 5 Ibid., 48. My translation; original: La mentalidad del colonizado fue tal que compositores e historiadores de la música alabaron los que tenían la habilidad de dominar las técnicas de composición europea.

5 colonized (Self and Other).6 Othering generates cultural hegemony, and in this binary logic,

Euro-American value systems assert social and cultural dominance. This assumed hierarchy of cultures is evidenced throughout the history of Western Art Music. The next section will provide a glimpse into the ways the West has used colonial logic in the construction and valuation of its own cultural artifacts. Celebrated composers of the Western Art Music tradition will serve as case studies for my argument: Belá Bartók, Darius Milhaud, Igor Stravinsky, and Lou Harrison.

The selection of composers and their works was based on three criteria. First, their status in the canon; second, their relation to Brazilian music; and third, their celebrated or novel use of percussion. I demonstrate how these practices of borrowing from other cultures have always been present. In each of these cases we see a different engagement with appropriation. These examples serve to elucidate some ways in which the West’s relationship with the rest of the world has always reflected ideas and attitudes about cultural difference.

Engagements with the Other – A History of Borrowing

Janissary Bands

The history of percussion instruments in Western Art Music has been riddled with notions of exoticism, primitivism, and the “recasting of the relationship between self and other.”7

Percussion instruments were initially incorporated by European composers for both their sonic and cultural contrast. In particular, the music of the Turkish military bands, Janissary bands, had

6 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question: ‘The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse’,” in Twentieth Century Literary Theory, in Newton K.M. ed. (London: Palgrave, 1997). 7 Eric Rice, “Representations of Janissary Music (Mehter) as Musical Exoticism in Western Compositions, 1670-1824,” Journal of Musicological Research 19, no. 1 (December 1999): 41.

6 a significant role in introducing percussion instruments to European concert halls to convey notions of the exotic. Our ‘modern’ ears may well understand Beethoven’s use of percussion in his ninth symphony (1822) as the epitome of the Western sound, but in fact the cacophony of instrumentation that has its roots in the Janissary bands – the cymbals, drums, and triangle in the fourth movement’s heroic march – was likely quite jarring to his contemporaries.

Janissary music was employed by Lully, Rameau, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and other renowned composers, oftentimes to emphasize the exotic.8 Musicologist Eric Rice points, grounded in theoretical interventions of Edward Said, demonstrates that the West drew upon this repertoire as a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience, —in essence, a way for the West to define itself in terms of what it is not.9 The very introduction of the “Turkish” percussion instruments into the modern orchestra, including the triangle, cymbals, timpani, and bass drum, is indebted to this Orientalist gaze.

A scene in Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, written for King Louis

XIV’s court in 1670, is a notable example of the depiction of the Turks within the Western Art

Music tradition. After an unsatisfactory conclusion to a delicate diplomatic situation, Louis XIV asked specifically for this early portrayal of the Turks as a parody, with the intent to ridicule the credibility of the Turks and thus establish the supremacy of the French court.10 In the performance of this opera, Lully is said to have used “many Turkish instruments belonging to the

8 Ibid., 42. 9 Ibid. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 1.The following chapter will have a more in-depth discussion of Said’s work. 10 Eric Rice, “Representations of Janissary Music,” 58–60.

7 royal collection.”11 Although percussion instruments are not specifically asked for in the score, we can reasonably assume that some percussion instruments were used to change the timbre of the orchestra during this part of the opera.

Turkish Janissary music also had a huge influence on the Viennese classicism of Gluck,

Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Musicologist Eric Rice suggests that by the siege of Vienna of

1683, the Ottoman Empire’s first attempt to capture the city of Vienna, the Viennese certainly had contact with Janissary bands. Rice further suggests that by 1741, military bands in the

Austro-Hungarian region and in France resembled Turkish Janissary bands, employing cymbals, bass drums, and triangles, instruments previously associated exclusively with the Turkish bands.

Approaching the eighteenth century, the use of Turkish Janissary music became less entangled with notions of “accuracy,” or that of faithful representations of different elements of Janissary music, but instead the mere employment of the cymbals, triangle, and bass drum were enough for composers to consider their music “alla turca,” or “in the Turkish style.”12 By the second half of the nineteenth century, these instruments that were originally used to demarcate the exotic were so integrated to the orchestral sound that they became understood as Western. This demonstrates that the introduction of percussion into the Western repertoire was conceived from an Orientalist gaze. With this historical context in mind, I will transition to a discussion of the twentieth century, as this is another key historical moment for the development of the use of percussion in the Western Art Music canon.

11 Jean, Baptiste Couver, Lully: Musique et Dramaturgie au Servisse du Prince (Paris: Marc Vokar Editeur, 1992,) 204. 12 Eric Rice “Representations of Janissary Music,” 45.

Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodaly

Zoltan Kodály’s (1882-1967) work and contributions run parallel to those of Béla Bartók

(1881-1945). A contemporary of Bartók and a close friend, Kodály engaged with similar methods of cataloguing folk melodies and using the material in his own compositions. Both

Kodály and Bartók were influential in these methods of collecting, transcribing, categorizing, and systematizing musical systems foreign to them. Their efforts represented an increasing curiosity in music from other cultures, and their work also pointed them to the ways in which national essentialist notions of musical identity were constricting and shallow.

Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s output was heavily influenced by his engagements with folk music. His idealization of folk music was fostered by the “dismal aspects of nineteenth- century industrialism,” suggests Virgnia Danielson, as an attempt to “preserve” disappearing cultural artifacts.13 Bartók’s methods of collecting folk songs show a great affinity for the methods of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, considered a cradle of comparative musicology.14

While their methods did not initiate Bartók’s engagement with early methods of comparative musicology, he was certainly influenced by the Archiv’s procedures. His engagement with early methods of capturing folk music in Hungary shaped much of his musical output, and he was part of a school of early practitioners who were interested in collecting folk songs. On his engagement with folk music and his research methods, Kompridis writes: “What Bartók seems to have discovered was musical and cultural hybridity… long before Bhabha, Gilroy, Rushdie, and

13 Virginia Danielson, "The Canon of Ethnomusicology: Is There One?," Notes 64, no. 2 (2007): 226. 14 Vera Lampert, "Bartók and the Berlin School of Ethnomusicology," Studia Musicologica 49, no. 3/4 (2008): 383.

9 others.”15 In Bartók’s efforts to uncover disappearing musical traditions, his notions of hybrid musical traditions expanded.

Philosopher and political theorist Nikolas Kompridis makes us aware of the ways in which Bartók’s curiosity about the other led him to partly dismantle his own essentialist notions of culture, ultimately arriving at the idea that culture is not necessarily bound within national boundaries. He found that the crossing and the re-crossing of cultural styles, genres, and materials “dismantled his own essentialist assumptions about the ethnic and national purity of

Eastern and Balkan folk music.”16 One example is a particular rhythm he refers to as the “odd metered Bulgarian long song.” Bartók found that this rhythm was present in both Turkish and

Romanian cultures. What he learned from this discovery was that music is not contained within nationalist ideals or political borders, but rather it is hybrid and “uncovers the socio-historical heterogeneity of one’s own country.”17 Even with this realization, Katie Trumpener points out that although Bartók’s contributions to the field of comparative musicology are undeniable, “his conceptual framework remains oddly static, caught in the historical paradoxes of Hungarian nationalism and circumscribed by the racialized world-view of 1900.”18 She argues that his interests in Hungarian cosmopolitanism and nationalism are partly influenced by racist fear of

Gypsy and Jewish influences on Hungarian cultural life.19 Nonetheless, Bartók influenced the

15 Nikolas Kompridis, “Normativizing Hybridity: Neutralizing Culture,” Political Theory 33, no. 3 (June 2005): 338. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 339. 18 Katie Trumpener, “Bela Bartok and the Rise of Comparative Ethnomusicology: Nationalism, Race Purity, and the Legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire” in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronaldo Michael Radano and Phillip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 405. 19Ibid.

10 way we engage with ethnography, and his imprint undeniably elucidates a change in how the ways scholars and musicians started engaging with cultural difference in the twentieth century.

Lou Harrison

The ‘American maverick,’ Lou Harrison’s work often looked towards the East for musical material and inspiration.20 Lou Harrison’s music reflects his own personal interests with the East, but also the openness to innovation and exploration that many American composers had during the first half of the twentieth century. During interview in 1999, Harrison said that

Beethoven and Bach were just more iterations of “world” music.21 Harrison was grounded in the

Western classics, but did not feel constrained by the legacies of Beethoven or Bach. He acknowledged that even these canonic composers dealt with materials with which they had contact, and that their musics were hybrid constructions of their experiences. A notable work is

Harrison’s Fourth Symphony, which employs Javanese musical procedures when writing for the

Western orchestra. In some ways, his work is another example of the body of work in the twentieth century that broke away from the celebrated telos of late romanticism, while in other ways the use of word “Symphony,” with all its historical baggage, solidly grounds it within the

Western tradition.

Harrison’s intent was never about authenticity. Rather, he was inspired by the Javanese musical processes.22 Harrison had no intent to follow any set of rules surrounding the

20 Tom Huizenga, “Lou Harrison, The ‘Maverick’ Composer With Asia in His Ears.” Deceptive Cadence, NPR Classical. Accessed January 20, 2020. 21 Tom Huizenga, “Lou Harrison, The ‘Maverick’ Composer With Asia in His Ears.” Deceptive Cadence, NPR Classical. Accessed January 20, 2020. https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2017/05/13/525919082/lou-harrison-the- maverick-composer-with-asia-in-his-ears 22 Henry Spiller, "Lou Harrison's Music for Western Instruments and Gamelan: Even More Western than it Sounds." Asian Music 40, no. 1 (2009), 31.

11 performance practice of gamelan music, but even still, his music resulted in a “musical surface with an exotic patina that many listeners perceived to represent authentic Javanese music.”23

Ethnomusicologist Henry Spiller points out that this hybrid construction may “make the exotic seem familiar by masking non-Western approaches to music-making with existing Western discourses – a practice that has a potential to mislead its listeners into believing they are engaging in non-Western musical aesthetic when, in fact they are not.”24 Spiller points to the fact that Harrison’s use of hybridity relies heavily on Western modes of organizing. He further suggests that when Harrison writes for gamelan orchestras, “although he presents gamelan- derived materials in a way that seems to grant them equity with his own Western compositional processes, it strikes me as naïve to suppose that they represent ‘transcultural warmth and understanding’ with which Harrison and his fans imbue them.”25

Spiller is careful to note that there is no ill-intent in Harrison’s engagement with the East.

Nonetheless, the fact that he can view musical material from other cultures as “toys” from which he can pick and choose, as if he were picking different paints to paint a picture, masks his

“detachment from awareness of the power structures that enable his liberties.”26 Harrison’s oft- cited remark “Enjoy hybrid music, because that’s all there is,”27 reminds us of his engagement with the world around him and the liberty in which he created his artwork. Spiller encourages an interrogation on the values we hold true about music, and suggests that the “taking-for-granted

[of] musical processes… is directly analogous to accepting the easy way in which those with power blindly allow their own values to trump the values of other, all the while patting

23 Ibid., 31. 24 Ibid., 32. 25 Ibid., 48. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid.

12 themselves on the back about how well they have achieved some sort of equity.”28 Harrison’s case is an interesting one, because it shows us that even if there is no “ill-intent,” or arguably even a negative impact, one cannot divorce oneself from the structures that support or exclude us.

Stravinsky

Stravinskyian ideas have been so influential that one could almost say that twentieth- century European and Euro-American musical culture has been created in the image of Stravinsky. 29 -Richard Taruskin

Musicologist Richard Taruskin reminds us of Stravinsky’s stature as a monumental figure of the twentieth century, and of the practices of myth-making that constitute our memory of the composer.30 Stravinsky’s relationship with the other in his music is quite complex, as we see in the first work to achieve such mythological status, the Rite of Spring (1913). Stravinsky initially denied that he used Russian folk music when he composed the Rite of Spring, and by 1920 he told a reporter that the ballet was “originally conceived as a piece of pure, plotless instrumental music (une ouvre architectonique et non anecdotique).”31 But, in an interview in 1931 he admitted that the opening bassoon solo was in fact inspired by a Russian folk tune. Later in his life, in the 1960s, he told his autobiographer the piece was conceived wholly without tradition. In a 1994 New York Times article, American music critic Alex Ross —drawing from musicological and ethnographic evidence—shows that Stravinsky employed more extensive use of traditional

28 Ibid. 49. 29 Richard Taruskin, The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 420. 30 Ibid., 421. 31 Ibid., 421.

13 elements in his “Russian period” works than he later admitted.32 Similarly, musicologist Marc

Blitzstein points to Stravinsky’s early Primitivist output as: “violent, rhythmic, blunt, where

Impressionism was heady and glamourous; early Primitivism is intent upon short successive electric moments.”33 In some ways, Stravinsky looks to primitivism as a departure from the established canon. On primitivism’s function as a movement, scholar Jean-François Staszak states:

A diverse and changing movement, primitivism was characterized by a rejection of canonic Western Art, perceived as inauthentic, and by its quest for regenerative inspiration in alternative expressions, perceived as being truer because simpler is freer. Artists adopting these new references sought to free themselves from the conventions and ambitions of Western Art… The alternative models these artists borrowed from are those instituted by the West archetypes of Otherness: the child, the insane, the dreamer, the woman, and the animal. But it’s the savage, the primitive who constitutes the main alternative source of inspiration.34

This departure to otherness represents a trend within modernist thought of the twentieth century. There are troublesome implications here that are central to the contemporary critique of

Primitivist essentialisms. The move towards primitivism in the early twentieth century is problematic because it invokes essentializing and diminishing rhetoric to justify Europe’s imperialist mission through European cultural superiority. My next example, of Darius Milhaud’s music, further exemplifies how primitivist rhetoric is power laden and problematic.

32 Alex Ross, “Critic’s Notebook; The Influence of Stravinsky’s Russian Roots.” New York Times, May 10, 1994. Accessed June 20, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/10/arts/critic-s-notebook-the-influence-of-stravinsky- s-russian-groots.html 33 Marc Blitzstein, "The Phenomenon of Stravinsky." The Musical Quarterly 75, no. 4 (1991): 55. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.bgsu.edu/stable/741833. 34 Jean-François Staszak, "Primitivism and the Other. History of Art and Cultural Geography." GeoJournal 60, no. 4 (2004): 353-64. Accessed March 2, 2020. 353. www.jstor.org/stable/41147901.

Darius Milhaud

The French composer Darius Milhaud’s (1892-1974) body of work demonstrates how some Western Art Music composers dealt with cultural difference in the first half of the twentieth century. Milhaud spent two years of his life (1917-1918) as Embassy Secretary to Paul Claudel in Rio de Janeiro, and his time in Brazil generated an artistic output that included Brazilian themes, including Le Boeuf sur le toit (1920) and Saudades do Brasil (1920), both of which use

Brazilian folkloric material. Milhaud also looked to jazz as inspiration for his work, as in the ballet La Création du Monde, Op. 81, composed in 1922-23. The ballet uses a libretto based on

Blaise Cendrars’ book Petit Contes Nègres pour les Enfants des Blancs, or: Little Negro Tales for

White Children. Cendrars—a Swiss white man who became a French naturalized citizen in

1916—was heavily criticized in 2018 by Décolonial News for being negrophobic.35 Cendrars’ book, the libretto, and Milhaud’s ballet, were both products of European primitivism.

In his book The Mystery of Samba, anthropologist Hermana Vianna points out the ways in which Blaise Cendrars and Darius Milhaud participated as international mediators in the transformation of samba as a national symbol while they simultaneously disseminated this primitivist gaze. Their “engagement with Brazilian music reflected the transcultural flow that generated redefinitions of identity on both sides of the Atlantic.”36 At the same time, Vianna cites

Brazilian musicologist Mario de Andrade’s reflection on Cendrars’s cultural influence in Rio de

35 “Blaise Cendrars Accusé De Négrophobie Pour Ses Petits Contes Nègres.” Actualitté Societé. Accessed February 29,2020. https://www.actualitte.com/article/monde-edition/blaise-cendrars-accuse-de-negrophobie- pour-ses-petits-contes-negres/88653. 36 Hermano Vianna and John Charles Chasteen, The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music & National Identity in Brazil. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 73.

Janeiro. The expectation that European modernism placed on Brazilian music was restricting, as

Vianna points out in Andrade’s critique of Cendrars’s engagement in Brazil:

In music, the Europeans who visit us insist on searching for what is spicy and unusual… if they hear the heavy drumming of the batuque, great, they love it. But, if it’s a modinha without syncopation, or certain lyrical effusions in the tanguinhos of Marcelo Tupinambá, they make a face saying ‘that’s Italian music’.37

This engagement was not atypical, but it delineates a common narrative within postcolonial societies that establishes hierarchies and solidifies hegemony.

Other Considerations

French anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle discusses the congruencies between Western and “primitive” art: “[To establish these binaries] serves to de-historicize the Third World and to occlude its own contemporary art forms… to call African, Oceanian, or Asian art ‘primitive’ simply serves to justify colonial expansion and exemplifies the Western will to keep Third World peoples from participating fully in the contemporary art scene.”38 Here we start to see that the constructions of this binary logic are indeed power laden. There is an undertone of superiority in assessing cultural artifacts as “primitive.” This framework asserts that the West is ever expanding and “contemporary,” while the Third World is caught in their ancestral customs, playing the batuque endlessly.39 Europeans had limited experiences of what constituted Brazilian music.

This primitivist gaze on Brazil harkens back to Orientalist practices upheld in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. The gaze of othering not only influenced art production in

Europe (Picasso, Léger, Apollinaire, Cocteau), but it influenced the way Brazilians related to

37 Vianna, The Mystery of Samba, 75. 38 Jean-Loup Amselle. "Primitivism and Postcolonialism in the Arts." trans. Noal Mellot and Julie Van Dam, Modern Language Notes 118, no. 4 (2003): 975. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.bgsu.edu/stable/3251996 39 As we will see in chapter 4, the word batuque becomes a way to demarcate any black performance practice in Brazil.

European modernism. Chapter two will focus on the ways Brazilian modernists adopted such primitivist essentialisms and reconfigured them into the Movimento Antropófago.

Applications in Marlos Nobre’s Music

These examples represent some ways in which the West continuously uses an othering gaze in the construction of cultural artifacts. Additionally, we see that no one case is universal, and each operates within different socio-cultural contexts. In Marlos Nobre’s music, I found something different than what I found in these examples. As a composer, Marlos Nobre finds himself at the center of Western Art Music traditions, deeply immersed in these musics from his early youth, as he would listen to Stravinsky and the modernists from an early age at the local library.40 At the same time, the music of maracatú and samba were essential in his rhythmic formulation. Rhythmetron, then, does not invoke otherness or rely upon appropriation like the aforementioned examples.

Chapter Outline

I will begin unraveling these issues by first expanding our understanding of colonialism in Brazil. It is important to understand the context in which this music emerges, in a country with a colonial past. The legacy of colonialism is so enrooted in Brazil that the language, customs, religions, and institutions all reflect back on a history of domination and subjugation. Therefore,

Chapter One will include an explanation of Brazil’s colonial past, followed by a literature review of several scholars who have engaged with colonial discourse. The discussion of these scholars’ works expounds the ways in which binary logics are created as part of the colonial mission of subjugation and cultural dominance.

40 Marlos Nobre, e-mail correspondence with the composer, June 6, 2019.

I then examine a few postcolonial theories of hybridity to support my analysis of

Rhythmetron. The notion of hybridity in postcolonial studies is, as comparative literature scholar

Anjali Prabhu asserts, “an enticing idea… in its dominant form, it is claimed that it can provide a way out of binary thinking, allow the inscription of the agency of the subaltern and even permit restructuring and destabilizing of power.”41 Thus, I turn to these theories due to their potentialities as sites of agency. Here we can assert that Rhythmetron—a work that draws from an array of cultural signifiers—is a postcolonial cultural product which reflects the composer’s unique positioning. As dance scholar Carrie Gaiser has asserted in her analysis of the DTH’s engagement with hybridity: hybridity offers a “re-membering of history’s fragmented and phantasmic bodies of loss.”42 In other words, hybridity will allow us to grapple with the censorship that historically has riddled black performance practice in Brazil. Hybridity also allows us to critically reflect on modern iterations of the same practices. Rhythmetron’s hybrid nature allows us to look at the insider/outsider relationship between Rhythmetron and the popular music practices it stems from, as well as its relation to the canon of Western Art Music.

Chapter two introduces anthropophagy—a theory of hybridity that emerges in modern

Brazil—in order to interrogate these established binary relationships of insider/outsider, colonizer/colonized, and contemporary/traditional. Anthropophagy is introduced as an episteme in Brazil, at first through the Brazilian modernist movement. Its applications are re-imagined in various contexts throughout the twentieth century in Brazil by leading thinkers, philosophers, and artists. I introduce this hybrid lens to interrogate Rhythmetron’s place within Brazilian art

41 Anjali Prabhu, Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects (Albany: State University of New York Press), 2007. 1. 42 Carrie Gaiser, "Caught Dancing: Hybridity, Stability, and Subversion in Dance Theatre of Harlem's Creole ‘Giselle’." Theatre Journal 58, no. 2 (2006): 289.

18 production of the twentieth century. Anthropophagy becomes a main theoretical call to arms within the arts in Brazil throughout the twentieth century. Here I introduce the term brasilidade, as anthropophagy seeks to assert brasilidade without invoking notions of nationhood.43

Hybridity invites us to reconsider the colonial relationship, asserting agency in active engagement with cultural production.

In Chapter three I discuss the biographies of Marlos Nobre and Arthur Mitchell. The two main figures that created the ballet Rhythmetron. Nobre’s and Mitchell’s lives articulate the different ways in which postcoloniality asserts itself in individual experience. Mitchell’s life shows a continued resistance against the ripple effects of colonialism in America, through his engagement with the arts throughout his life. Nobre’s experience in the postcolonial space

Recife— the city in which he grew up, a city with a colonial past—can be heard in his music, through the ways his sonic world makes its way into his music.

Chapter four discusses the traces of Nobre’s sonic world through the genres that make up his rhythmic vocabulary. I introduce the concept of the palimpsest, of which I use American film theorist Robert Stam’s interpretation, to discuss the ways these genres are embedded in the sonic memories of Rhythmetron. Thus, I reveal how their histories of censorship and resistance make their way into contemporary performances of Rhythmetron, and how historical context and lineage become integral in understanding Rhythmetron’s significance in the percussion ensemble repertoire.

In the last two chapters I give Rhythmetron increased attention. Chapter five discusses

Rhythmetron’s performance history with the Dance Theatre of Harlem, so that we may understand the global scale of the piece’s history. In this chapter, I also discuss how Rhythmetron

43 Brasilidade: Brazilianness; of a Brazilian essence.

19 foreshadows a continued engagement with hybrid subjects by the Dance Theatre of Harlem in subsequent decades, and how hybridity becomes a way for DTH to carve out a space for the black body in classical ballet. In Chapter six, I conclude with a reflection on the censorship practices that make their way into contemporary situations. Rhythmetron brings out a discussion on the practices of canon-forming in Western Art Music. By acknowledging the ripple effects of colonialism in our modern cultural practices, we also acknowledge an inherent solution.

CHAPTER ONE. COLONIAL LEGACY

Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state…44 -Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Brazil’s Colonial Legacy

The Portuguese first arrived on the shores of Brazil in 1500, marking the start of the colonial period. As with other territories under colonial rule, Brazil’s colonial history shares a common history of exploitation. During the 322 years that Brazil was a Portuguese colony

(1500-1822), European powers extracted various types of commodities; including “gold, sugarcane, rubber, tobacco, cocoa, and cotton among others.”45 The extraction of such a monumental amount of raw material relied on a slave populace such that by the “eighteenth century, slaves represented more than half the population in the Northeastern captaincies, and between 65 percent and 70 percent in the plantation areas.”46 Slavery, then, was undeniably a force that shaped Brazilian history, and its consequences continue to shape Brazilian culture to this day. The ripple effects of this period can be evidenced, for instance, in the sheer number of people of African-descent living in Brazil in the present day, the largest of any country in the

Americas.47 Colonizers used domination and material extraction to obtain and maintain exploitation and control over the slave population. These processes of domination and extraction were to be replicated and repeated in the name of efficacy, but humane treatment of workers was

44 Fanon The Wretched of the Earth, 1. 45 Joana Naritomi and Rodrigo R. Soares, and Juliano J. Assunção. "Institutional Development and Colonial Heritage within Brazil." The Journal of Economic History 72, no. 2 (2012): 396. Accessed April 3, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/23256943. 46 Joana Naritomi and Rodrigo R. Soares, and Juliano J. Assunção. "Institutional Development and Colonial Heritage within Brazil," 399. 47João José Reis, and Hebert S. Klein edited by "Slavery in Brazil," In The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History: ed. Jose C. Moya (Oxford University Press 2010). DOI:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195166217.013.0007

21 not a top priority. In psychiatrist and political writer Frantz Fanon’ words: “The oppressor, ensconced in his sector, creates the spiral, the spiral of domination, exploitation and looting. In the other sector, the colonized subject lies coiled and robbed, and fuels as best he can, the spiral which moves seamlessly from the shores of the colonies to the palaces and docks of the metropolis.”48 This structural feature of colonization, its blatant exploitive mechanism, is a violent phenomenon, dehumanizing labor conditions to the fullest extent of the term. The legacy of colonial contact in Brazil has its roots in this violent context of exploitive mercantilism.

These violent systems, which were imposed throughout the colonial endeavor, shaped

Brazilian society as a whole. Historian Luciane Cristina Scarato’s PhD dissertation Language,

Identity, and Power in Colonial Brazil, 1695-1822, traces the power relationships and censorship practices that shaped the Portuguese language in Brazil.49 The imposition and censorship of language was one of the ways colonial violence asserted and replicated itself. Scarato notes:

“The persistence of censors in language matter…[it] reveals the importance of language control as a mechanism of power.”50 Those who could reproduce the language of the colonizer gained a tool that facilitated the ascension of socio-political strata. In this context, the colonized assumed colonial-imposed systems of value (such as language); this mechanism of power “opened up possibilities in a society where ethnic, religious, and economic criteria usually marginalized the vast majority of the population from the colonial system.”51 The institutions ingrained in the colonies through colonialism exclude those who do not conform to its value systems. In that sense, the advent of the Portuguese language is a silencing of other histories, for instance the

48 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 14. 49 Luciane Cristina Scarato "Language, Identity, and Power in Colonial Brazil, 1695- 1822." (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2017), 1. doi:10.17863/CAM.16757. 50 Ibid. 194. 51 Luciane Cristina Scarato "Language, Identity, and Power in Colonial Brazil, 1.

22 languages lost through colonial imposition. Colonial systems of value are imprinted in the colony to its very core.

Recife, the capital of the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco, was an important colonial port in the Portuguese empire, along with Salvador, São Luiz and Rio de Janeiro. It is estimated that from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century, 3.6 million slaves were brought to Brazil, and by the mid-nineteenth century the slave population was more numerous than the free population.52 Undeniably, Recife’s history was transformed by the colonial encounter. In this space— a space with a history of colonization—Marlos Nobre came of age and absorbed the cultural narrative. Recife’s streets offered Marlos Nobre sonic memories of the city’s past. In an interview, the composer reminisces:

During carnaval all the agremiações would parade through my street, the caboclinhos, maracatús, frevos, I used to run through them, dancing… I would throw myself into the crowds, in the mass of people, above all, the negros, mulatos, and mulatas that danced in a frenzy. That atmosphere was not something I observed but experienced with a fierce intensity. My mother, many times would go after me like a mad woman in the streets asking for my whereabouts. I would sometimes be taken home by the hands of helpful negro women saying “I found this boy. He is crazy about maracatú!” So that’s what it was. I was ‘crazy’ about maracatú, and that’s the basic essence of my rhythmic formation, in its most intense, most elementary form.53

The musical genres that he came in contact in his youth were shaped by the colonial encounter, and they are contemporary hybrid artifacts revealing a violent past. What Nobre encountered in the streets of Recife was not merely a colorful array of sounds and timbres, but a sonic patina of the city’s past. The genres Nobre mentions in this interview, the maracatús, caboclinhos, and frevos, are cultural manifestations that have been continuously repeated and

52The Library of Congress. “Slavery in Brazil.” Global Gateway. http://international.loc.gov/intldl/brhtml/br-1/br-1-3-1.html 53 Marlos Nobre, e-mail correspondence with the composer, June 6, 2019.

23 transformed in the streets of Recife. The city, a postcolonial space in which Nobre circulated throughout his early life, shaped his musical style and his consciousness. Marlos Nobre evidences Recife’s colonial legacy through the sonic elements he witnessed in the streets of

Recife.

Similarly, the bodies of the people performing in Recife’s streets, the negroes, mulatos, and mulatas, provide further evidence of Brazil’s colonial past. These different racial identities carry coded meanings and histories. Historically, in the Lusophone colonies, the term negro was usually used as a word to depict darker skinned black men (negra would be its feminine), while the mulata represented the miscegenation between whites and blacks.54 Each of these racial classifications carry different social meanings in Brazil, and bring with them their own histories of power negotiation. Corey A.C. David de Souza’s PhD dissertation, Samba, Mulatas, and the

Social Meaning of Carnaval, addresses fixed notions of these social identities, and focuses in particular on the mulata identity. Once a reminder of the colonial rape of a slave by a slave master, de Souza gives the mulata a new social context. “One cannot, however, reduce performances of mulatice to fortification of race and gender disparities… [the mulata shows] independence and subversion of hegemonic normalized standards of feminine propriety.”55 My intent with the inclusion of this information is not to unravel these different racial categories with the due diligence they deserve, as that would be an entire study in itself. Rather, I mention this to illustrate that racial power dynamics are performed, observed in, and intrinsic to Brazil, and they

54 It is important not to assign Euro-American value systems to Brazilian racial identities as they work within different linguistics. 55 Corey A.C. David De Souza, "Samba, Mulatas and the Social Meaning of Carnival." (PhD diss., University of Florida, 2015), 117. Mulatice – term coined by Natasha Pravaz to indicate the performance of mulata-ness.

24 draw connections to Brazil’s colonial past. Ultimately, what Marlos Nobre observed in the streets of Recife were traces of colonialism in Brazil.

In The Dialectic of Colonization, Brazilian literary critic Alfredo Bosi discusses the legacy of colonial contact in Brazil. He notes that one of the basic features distinguishing habitation and cultivation from colonization is that colonization reproduced the “mechanisms of production and relations to power … as if they were true universals in human societies.”56

Through colonial violence, European systems of values were imposed on the colonies. Brazilian language and musical genres, for example, were forged out of such violence that reproduced restricting binary logics.57 To better understand these mechanisms of domination, subjugation and violence, I turn to postcolonial discourse to better excavate the construction of the other as an imperialist political tool.

Postcolonial Theory

The field of postcolonial theory “represents a theoretical approach on the part of the formerly colonized, the subaltern and the historically oppressed, in literary cultural studies informed by a particular political stance, using the prism of race and the historical context of colonialism, to analyze texts, even as it seeks to produce critical commentary that serves as an act of cultural resistance to the domination of Euro-American epistemic and interpretive schemes.”58 This theoretical approach offers a re-reading of history and cultural products such as art and music through the displacement of Eurocentric cultural discourses. For the purposes of

56 Alfredo Bosi, Brazil and the Dialectic of Colonization (University of Illinois Press, 2015), 2. doi:10.5406/j.ctt16txwpg. 57 Luciane Cristina Scarato "Language, Identity, and Power in Colonial Brazil,” 19. 58 Pramod K. Nayar and Ohio Library and Information Network, The Postcolonial Studies Dictionary. (Hoboken: Wiley, 2015), 122.

25 this study, I will focus my attention on the theories, ideas, and concepts which I find contextually potent and relevant to my analysis of Rhythmetron. Therefore, in this section I focus on the works of authors whose body of literature I engage with in this document; Edward Said’s

Orientalism, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of

Culture, and Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic.

Edward Said

A professor of literature at Columbia University and one of the world’s foremost intellectuals, Edward Said’s (1935-2003) Orientalism (1978) is considered one of the foundational texts in postcolonial studies. I draw from this work to clarify the manner in which a binary relationship is constructed between East and West, or colonized and colonizer.59 Said demonstrates how the phenomenon of Orientalism expounds the relationship between the West and the East through configurations of power. “The relationship between Occident and Orient was created—or, as I call it, ‘Orientalized’… [the relationship] is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony.”60 This othering constructs a

‘repertoire’ about the East that reflects certain interests of the West. Orientalism is a lens through which the West distorts the reality of life in the East into an unfamiliar, strange, and threatening world. It is, essentially, the creation of the ideal other for Europe; it is a creation that is neither innocent nor objective. Orientalism is not only a gaze or attitude, but also a group of literary and cultural works produced in the West that systematically reproduce the same stereotypes of the

East as an exotic and unknown place, typified by tropes such as the licentious harem or the chaotic medina. This repertoire is not based on reality, but based on itself—it leans back on itself

59 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 60 Said, Orientalism, 5.

26 as an authority on Eastern subjects, essentially erasing the agency of Eastern subjects. Said’s theories lead to the crucial point that the creation of this repertoire reduces and dehumanizes the

East. Said takes us further than mere dehumanization and a repertoire of stereotypes.

[Orientalism] views the Orient as something whose existence is not only displayed but has remained fixed in time and place for the West. So impressive have the descriptions and textual success of Orientalism been that entire periods of the Orient’s cultural, political, and social history are considered mere responses to the West. The West is the actor and the Orient is the passive reactor. The West is the spectator, the judge and jury of every facet of Oriental behavior.61

This constructed, othering gaze is about power reinforcing itself, reinforcing the superiority of the West’s cultural, political, and economic status. Orientalism raises a set of questions that is set into motion through this othering gaze:

[questions that] are relevant in discussing the problems of human experience: How does one represent other cultures? Is the notion of a distinct culture (or race, or religion, or civilization) a useful one? or does it always get involved in either self-congratulation (when one discusses one’s own) or hostility and aggression (when one discusses the “other”)? Do cultural, religious and racial differences matter more than socio-economic categories, or politicohistorical ones? How do ideas acquire authority, “normality” and even the status of “natural” truth? What is the role of the intellectual? Is he there to validate the culture and state of which he is a part? What importance must he give to an independent critical consciousness, an oppositional critical consciousness?62

Orientalism—a discourse of the powerful about the powerless—erases subjecthood. This gaze from the West to the East asserts the superiority of Europe in comparison to non-European peoples and cultures. Orientalism is about this construction of values and their inherent negotiations of power. Orientalist thought is not, however, bound to a geographic model. For instance, recurring images of the Roma people radicated in the Czech Republic construct an image of an entire group of people as “socially weak” and “maladjusted” citizens who are thus

61 Said, Orientalism, 108-109. 62 Said Orientalism, 325-326.

27 never perceived as full participants in European citizenship.63 This is due to the fact that

Orientalism promotes a binary view of the world that asserts and constructs hegemony.

I will analyze the production of cultural artifacts in Brazil (Rhythmetron in particular) with this lens. When considering the global North/South relation, there are specific hegemonic discourses about the place of South American music (that is, the material over which the Latin-

American composer has supposed authority), as we have discussed briefly in the introduction.

Said’s work displaces these views and exposes the underlying power relations that construct binaries such as backwards vs. advancing, or contemporary vs. folk, and reveals that these dichotomies are about the negotiation of power. Said leaves us with an important caution in

Orientalism’s closing pages. “…[A] warning: that systems of thought like Orientalism, discourses of power, ideological fictions—mind forg’d manacles—are all too easily made, applied and guarded.”64 We cannot simply disregard systems of thought, binary constructions, and power relations, but instead we must be vigilant about the ways in which we reproduce such narratives in our daily discourses.

Frantz Fanon

Born in Fort-du-France, Martinique, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was psychiatrist, political-theorist, journalist, doctor, and anti-colonial revolutionary. Fanon’s first publication,

Black Skin White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs, [1952]), first submitted and denied as thesis of his doctoral studies in psychiatry in Lyon, is regarded as the “preeminent study of the

63 David Doubek, Marketa Levínská, and Dana Bittnerová. "Roma as the Others." Intercultural Education 26, no. 2 (2015): 131. European citizen 64 Said, Orientalism, 328.

28 lived experience of racism.”65 The Wretched of the Earth, comparable in its influence and published only a few weeks before the end of his battle with Leukemia, is a seminal discussion of decolonization in Africa. His work is considered among the twentieth century’s most important theories of revolutionary colonialism and race relations.

“National liberation, national awakening, restoration of the nation to the people or

Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event.”66 The Wretched of the Earth’s opening words express the inherent violence in the colonial world. Fanon’s thesis articulates the idea that violence permeates colonial systems right down to the psyches of the oppressed and the oppressor. In 1953, Fanon became the head of the psychiatric unit at a hospital in the French occupied town of Blida in

Algeria. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon paints a visceral image of the violent effects that colonialism imprinted on the psyche of colonial subjects, an image brought to life through the case studies of his European and Algerian patients from his time in the hospital. Fanon connects the violence of colonialism with the pathologies he sees in his patients. In the first pages of the book, Fanon delineates a binary division of the colonial world, a division which asserts the superiority of the colonizer. Fanon writes, “This compartmentalized world, this world divided in two, is inhabited by different species.”67 The imposition of a divided world creates a binary construct of them/us, savage/modern that maintains a hierarchy. Violence is justified when the

65 "Frantz Fanon," in OBO, Literary and Critical Theory, (Accessed 2 Apr. 2020). https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780190221911/obo- 9780190221911-0001.xml 66 "Frantz Fanon," in OBO, Literary and Critical Theory. 67 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 5.

29 colonist speaks of the native in zoological terms.68 Such mockeries served to vilify and demoralize the native into the other.

The Wretched of the Earth’s chapter “On National Culture” depicts the trajectory of the native intellectual towards liberation from cultural alienation. Fanon traces this trajectory from the mimesis of European culture to the native intellectual’s claiming of African culture’s superiority, which consequently leads to an epiphany, and ultimately to the national fight for liberation. On the beginnings of this schema Fanon writes, “There is no real creativity, no ebullience. Poverty, national oppression, and cultural repression are one and the same. After a century of colonial domination, culture becomes rigid in the extreme, congealed, and petrified.

The atrophy of national reality and the death throes of national culture feed on one another.”69

First, it is important to differentiate that when Fanon speaks of the national, he is not articulating nationalism, but the process of decolonization. Second, this quote brings to mind that colonization did not only take place within geographic territories and political sovereignties, but in the production of cultural artifacts. That is, colonization also happened in the minds of the colonized, as the colonizer declared himself the guardian of indigenous styles. What could, at first glance, be interpreted as a celebratory harnessing and preservation of the native’s culture, is actually another tool of the oppressor. This petrified, unchanging image of the Third World is encouraged by the colonizer because it is divorced from the colonial reality. This project requires a critical engagement: “colonialism was not seeking to be perceived by the indigenous population as a sweet, kind-hearted mother who protects her child from a hostile environment, but rather a mother who prevents her basically perverse child from committing suicide or giving

68 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 7. 69 Ibid., 172.

30 free reign to its malevolent instincts.”70 The mission and the effect are cultural alienation, a disconnection from the immediacy of the colonial situation.

For the purposes of my study, it is important to keep in mind that the psychological effects of colonization extend through national liberation movements (or decolonization as articulated by Fanon), and into the postcolonial context. Béhague writes, “the colonized mentality of music historians and composers was such that they highly praised those who showed dominance in European composition techniques.”71 This is a symptom of the same malaise that Fanon identifies within the colonial project. If Rhythmetron draws from the rhythms and genres that were created in the Brazilian colonial context, how then does it not reinforce colonial violence and mimesis? Would it not be simply recycling the petrified materials of the past? The theories of hybridity will be essential to our interrogation of these sounds in

Rhythmetron and their relationship to their colonial history. Within postcolonial studies, the term

“hybridity” is seen as an “empowering condition where both cultural purity and cultural diversity are rejected.”72 Cultural purity conveys an exotic appeal, and in itself implies problematic connotations of othering and domination through the frozen artifact of an imagined past, while cultural diversity “registers as contamination.”73 In sum, I now turn my attention to theories of hybridity because of their agentive properties, so that we may see these binary logics being dispersed and problematized.

70 Ibid., 149. 71 Gerard Béhague, "La Problemática De La Posición Socio-Política Del Compositor En La Música Nueva En Latinoamérica," Latin American Music Review 27, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2006): 47. 72 Nayar., 92. 73 Ibid.

Homi K. Bhabha

To exemplify how hybridity becomes a way to articulate agency for postcolonial subjects,

I draw from the work of Homi K. Bhabha (1949-). Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994) analyzes forms of resistance against colonial culture, and “claims that imperialistic control over culture can be transformed by hybridity.”74 Bhabha’s concept of the third space helps us understand his perspective on cultural hybridity, which he identifies as a site where the ambivalence to colonial rule enables a capacity of resistance.75 Bhabha calls into question

Eurocentric elitism in order to articulate new sites of agency for the other. The third space, or the interstitial space, is where culture can be articulated, hybridity can break down binary notions, and the colonial mission of exploitation by subjugation is brought to light. “The changed political and historical site of enunciation transforms the meanings of colonial inheritance into the liberator’s signs of a free people of the future.”76 Bhabha’s work breathes a new hope in which the colonized have an increased agency in the articulation of a cultural identity shaped by colonial violence.

Bhabha speaks about the transnational aspects that form culture. This view problematizes discourses of ‘nation,’ ‘peoples,’ and ‘folk,’ by positing that “the transnational dimension of cultural transformation – migration, diaspora, displacement, relocation – make the process of

74 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (New York: Routledge,1994). Jenni Ramone, Postcolonial Theories (New York; Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan 2011), 113 75 Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse,” in The Location of Culture, (New York: Routledge,1994), 85-92. Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs taken for wonder wonders: Questions of ambivalence and authority under a tree outside Delhi, May 1817,” in The Location of Culture, (New York: Routledge,1994), 102-138. 76 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 38.

32 cultural translation a complex form of signification.”77 Through this, he makes us aware that culture is constructed, and tradition is invented. Bhabha sheds light on the liminal negotiations that happen in the sphere of race, identity, and traditions. In Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, culture is not a static entity or an essence that can be fixed in time and space; rather, it is a fluid expression that is perpetually in motion and constantly in processes of transformation.

Paul Gilroy

Critical race theorist Paul Gilroy’s work argues against ethnic absolutism, and his use of hybridity works toward revealing that identity is not bound within nation-states. Central to

Gilroy’s work is the image of the slave ship crossing the Atlantic. The middle passage (the ship’s route as a site to articulate the liminality of culture) is an important cultural political system in motion, crucial to his formulation of a theory of modernity. Gilroy understands modernity as tightly bound with the black experience. In his view, there would be no modernity without slavery. Indentured labor, forced migration, and slavery are the shared experiences that connect these dispersed populations in what Gilroy calls the “black Atlantic world.”78 Paul Gilroy’s The

Black Atlantic (1993) addresses the stereophonic, bilingual, bi-focal cultural forms that are created in middle passage:

… the reflexive cultures and consciousness of the European settlers and those of the Africans they enslaved … were not … sealed off from each other. [These] groups have fallen back upon the idea of cultural nationalism, on the over-integrated conceptions of culture which present immutable, ethnic differences as an absolute break in the histories and experiences of “black” and “white” people. Against this choice stands another, more difficult option. The theorization of creolization, méstisage, and hybridity … [included in] this historical conjunction [are] the stereophonic bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms, originated by, but no longer the exclusive property of blacks dispersed within the structures … [of] what I have heuristically called the black Atlantic world.79

77 Ibid. 78 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993), 2-3. 79 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 2-3.

Gilroy elucidates the point that black culture and identity in the Americas and the

Caribbean are always transcultural, and are therefore a hybrid construction. A similar concept can be applied to early ethnographic inquiry in the discipline of anthropology, for instance. Since the informant is always connected to the metropolis, there is no such thing as a “far away, pure culture.” The moment one interrogates the manner in which the informant traveled to the field, such logics are broken. A key element in Gilroy’s ideas is the rejection of essentialist notions of identity and nationalism, instead favoring a shared heterogeneity. This metaculture acknowledges local differences, while at the same time sharing what he calls a “double consciousness,” inspired by the work of W.E.B. Dubois. The double consciousness of belonging to two cultures, of being both inside and outside. Thus, the shared experience that is grounded in the Black Atlantic constitutes an inseparable part of modernity, asserting the inseparable nature of the black experience to modernity itself. This double consciousness is understood through a series of exchanges through the Atlantic that map a crossing and re-crossing. The constant transformation of culture and the blurring of cultural boundaries serve to question fixed notions of rootedness, and deconstruct territorial space as the defining factor of identity.

In this theory, a person can simultaneously belong to and be in dialogue with both

European modernity and Afrocentric traditions. In chapter four, we will see how this is materialized in Rhythmetron through a historical understanding of its genres and their historical formations. This crossing and re-crossing of the Black Atlantic world was paramount in providing the cultural exchange that created the genres that Rhythmetron draws from, and also to creating the circumstances under which Rhythmetron itself was created. The encounter between

Nobre and the American Arthur Mitchell was facilitated by this trans-cultural network that was facilitated by the Atlantic cultural exchange. The actual sonic make-ups of these genres are not

34 rooted in Brazil or Africa, but in the cultural dialogue that is set in motion through trans-Atlantic cultures. If we root Rhythmetron in this concept, not only is the material that Marlos Nobre draws from an expression of the black Atlantic (the genres constituted in Rhythmetron are a result of the transatlantic network), but the very way Rhythmetron comes into existence is a further extension of this metaphor, as Arthur Mitchell’s crossing of the Atlantic creates a dialogue between Brazil and the U.S. that looks to Africa for a shared past.

CHAPTER TWO. MODERNISM, ANTHROPOPHAGY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

Tupy, or not Tupy that is the question -Oswald de Andrade, Manifesto Antropófago80

Oswald de Andrade’s statement “Tupy, or not Tupy, that is the question,” from his 1928

Manifesto Antropofago (Anthropophagic Manifesto), employs a Shakespearean reference to draw parallels between Western existentialism and a crisis in the articulation of identity in postcolonial

Brazil. Oswald uses the sonic similarities between Hamlet’s infamous soliloquy “to be, or not to be” and the name of one of the largest indigenous groups in Brazil, the Tupi people. Used as a metaphor, anthropophagy, or the cannibalistic consumption of culture, reflects the moment of encounter between cultural forces through a voracious appetite. As an epistemology, anthropophagy sought to frame a collective consciousness in Brazil. Throughout the twentieth century this has been the main theoretical call to arms within the arts in Brazil. Its influences can be, and have been, traced within popular and concert musics.

Spearheaded by Mario de Andrade, the modernist movement left a large imprint on the historicization of Brazilian identity throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.81 The modernist movement of the 1920s established a discourse of hybridity that sought to reframe the relationship between colonizer and colonized through the use of metaphor, giving the colonized population agentive freedom to digest and metabolize both the foreign and the local. In this chapter I trace the use of anthropophagy as an epistemology of miscegenation within postcolonial Brazil. I then trace how anthropophagy evolved from the Brazilian modernist project and was re-enforced and given new meaning during the Tropicalia movement of the

80 Oswald de Andrade "Manifesto Antropófago." Nuevo Texto Crítico 12, no. 1 (1999): 25. 81 No relation to Oswald de Andrade.

1960s. I do so in order to acknowledge the concrete influences of anthropophagy, while noting its less than idyllic history. I then look at the poetics of the metaphor as well as how its philosophical mythology is an invitation for a constant reflection on notions of brasilidade.82 I suggest that by using anthropophagy as a local epistemology we can better understand the body as a locus of culture, because anthropophagy invites us to consider the embodied nature of knowledge. I go on to argue that Marlos Nobre’s ballet Rhythmetron, written after the choreography and informed by physical movement, outlines a brasilidade of his embodied experience. These notions of brasilidade are built around Afro-diasporic elements, and through these articulations Rhythmetron becomes not only a site to enunciate Brazilian identity, but a

Pan-African experience.

The notion of a Pan-African identity is concerned with “the ways in which Africa has become and continues to constitute an important topos of Diasporic memory.”83 Pan-Africanism is concerned with African heritage – a heritage which points to common homeland as a point of origin which connects diverse groups of peoples.

I would like to delineate a distinction in my usage of the word Pan-African. I use the term here to refer to Pan-African thinking, rather than alluding to the Pan-African social movement which was an “intellectual tradition of Pan-African thought being distinct from Pan-Africanism – the institutionalized international social movement whose beginnings can be traced to the 1900

Pan-African Conference in London.”84 Instead, Pan-African thinking will speak to the

82 Brasilidade is a word that literally means “Brazilianness,” in other words, the characteristics of a Brazilian essence. 83 Katharina Schramm, "Pan-Africanism as a Resource: The W. E. B. DuBois Memorial Centre for Pan-African Culture in Ghana1," African Identities 2, no. 2 (2004): 151-171. 84 Harry Nii Koney Odamtten, "A History of Ideas: West Africa, “the Black Atlantic”, and Pan-Africanism." (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 2010) 128.

37 essentialisms Arthur Mitchell uses to talk about Rhythmetron’s inherent Africaneity as a strategy to “espouse unity among Africans living on the continent and those of African descent in the diaspora.”85

Anthropophagy as Myth

The 1920s brought an increasing desire to articulate modern Brazilian identity in the arts.

This came partly in reaction to the Belle Époque Tropical, an earlier period that brought an influx of European influence to the arts. This is evidenced across various art forms. The magnitude of the Brazilian elite’s fascination with Europe is seen, for instance, in the construction of Rio de Janeiro’s Theatro Municipal, Brazil’s main opera house. The website for this landmark states:

One of the most beautiful and imposing structures of Rio de Janeiro, the Theatro Municipal, which opened on July 14th of 1909, is considered the main performing arts center in Brazil, and one of the most important of South America. Its history is also the history of Brazilian culture.86”

The opera house’s construction was modeled after the Palais Garnier opera house in

Paris, and in its early days the theatre was used as a stage to host foreign performers. The obsession with European life is not only evidenced in architecture and the arts, it was pervasive in all of Brazilian culture. In cultural theorist Frantz Fanon’s words, “The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.”87 Fanon’s work reminds us of the inferiority complex that is instilled in the native’s

85 Ibid., 124. 86 Teatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro, “O Teatro Municipal – Historia” Accessed on January 20, 2020. http://www.theatromunicipal.rj.gov.br/sobre/historia/ My translation; original: Um dos mais imponentes e belos prédios do Rio de Janeiro, o Theatro Municipal, inaugurado em 14 de julho de 1909, é considerado a principal casa de espetáculos do Brasil e uma das mais importantes da América do Sul. Sua história mistura-se com a trajetória da cultura do País. 87 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 18.

38 mind. Brazilian artists at the turn of the century were grappling with this obsession with

European Art forms, where the colonized ‘mimics’ the colonizer to ‘elevate’ his cultural status.

Thus, with the onset of World War I, Brazilian artists were searching to articulate Brazilian identity in a manner that would acknowledge its mestiçagem as a movement against such colonized thinking.88 This socio-cultural background set the stage for the Semana de Arte

Moderna of 1922, a week of concerts, poetry readings, and art exhibitions in São Paulo that had a lasting imprint upon Brazilian culture for the way it intended to “appropriate and invert relations to European culture.”89 This week was led by a group of artists and intellectuals that would later be called the modernistas. Among them were Tarsilla do Amarall, Heitor Villa-

Lobos, Mario de Andrade, and other highly influential Brazilian artists of the time.

The modernistas appropriated the idea of cannibalistic rituals of the indigenous populations found in what is now known as Brazil. These man-eating rituals were present, to some extent, in some of the indigenous tribes native to Brazil during colonial contact.90 The indigenous groups used the Europeans’ fear of these rituals as a way to protect themselves.

Through the colonial exoticization of the native, the native finds an inherent power that lends him protection from decimation. It is in this reversal of relations, using the colonists’ own essentialism to mediate the violence inflicted on the native population, where the key point lies.

This reversal of roles is what inspired the modernistas to use anthropophagy as a metaphor to mediate the paradox of identity politics in the early twentieth century.

88 mestiçagem: of mixed race, having ancestors from two or more different races. In Brazil, it refers to any combination between native, European, and people of the African diaspora. 89 Gazi Islam, "Can the Subaltern Eat? Anthropophagic Culture as a Brazilian Lens on Post-Colonial Theory." Organization 19, no. 2 (2012): 162. 90 Ibid., 164.

The lasting cultural imprint of the Semana da Arte Moderna, and the influence of the modernistas, have been widely celebrated and historicized in a positive manner within Brazilian scholarship. Saulo Gouveia critiques this scholarship and brings an insightful analysis of larger socio-political forces behind these celebrated contestations of identity. He emphasizes the aristocracy’s support of the artists of the Semana de Arte Moderna, and critiques the work of

Mario de Andrade, who is seen as the central figure within the modernistas. The following excerpt elucidates Andrade’s poem “Noturno de Belo Horizonte,” in which he reveals the problematic idealization of the bandeirante, the colonial frontiersmen that plundered Brazilian soil, decimating indigenous populations.

In “Noturno de Belo Horizonte,” the myth of bandeirismo receives an avant-gardish patina while the monumental character of its discourse evinces a hegemonic view of history. This merger of past and present forms a symbolic representation of an idealized present. It is worth mentioning also that this poem was published in the early days of the Brazilian modernist movement, which is conventionally referred to as the “heroic years,” the phase in which Andrade and other modernists supposedly promoted a radical rupture with the aesthetics and the values of the past. I demonstrated, instead, that Andrade’s orthodox representation of nationhood displayed reactionary overtones, celebrated internal colonization, and posed no threat to the status quo.91

Although the modernist movement’s intent was to subvert the status quo, this shows the dissonance between their discourse and reality. Modernismo’s influence, which has been historicized by Brazilian musicologists and scholars as a “grass-roots” movement that turned the

Brazilian cultural landscape on its head, has been overly celebrated, and Gouveia makes us aware of the implications of such myopic historicizations. “In Brazilian culture,” he writes,

“whenever [a] demand for symbolic representation of Brazilianness arises, the modernist ashes will be summoned and an enchanted entity will rise from death, reinventing itself to provide

91 Saulo Rezende Gouveia, “Brazilian Modernism: A Discourse of Unity and Suppression” (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2006), 108.

40 another soothing tale of national integration.”92 He links the canonization of the modernistas’

“soothing tale of national integration” to the state-sponsored cultural policies that sought to maintain the interest of the wealthy elites in Brazil.93 Paulo Prado, one of the most influential and supportive patrons of the modernistas, was a coffee oligarch for whom, according to Gouveia,

“support of the modernist movement was a self-promoting enterprise that sought to extend [his] supremacy in the symbolic realm of high culture.”94

Although we can acknowledge problems in using the metaphor of anthropophagy as a redemptive tool, thus fortifying arguments against it as a theoretical framework to scrutinize the colonial relationship, its emergence in Brazilian popular culture throughout the twentiety

Century has shown that it has had a lasting imprint in Brazilian consciousness. Gazi Islam’s theorizations on anthropophagy lead us in a different direction:

It should not be assumed that the meanings of anthropophagy are either homogenous, nor conversely, entirely independent of each other. There are, however, some peculiarities which distinguish the forms these meanings take place in the Brazilian context, peculiarities which become more marked as the concept develops into a full blown ideological movement in the twentieth century.95

Popular music – and the Tropicalia movement, in particular – shows the clearest results of this

“full blown ideological movement.” Further examination of it helps relocate anthropophagy from its problematic birthing, and shows concrete manifestations of identity contestations.

Anthropophagy in Popular Music

The cultural imprint that anthropophagy had on Brazilian culture is undeniable, evidenced by its influence on Brazilian Modernism in the 1920s, and later in the 1960s with the

92 Ibid., 9. 93 Ibid., 48. 94 Saulo Rezende Gouveia, "Private Patronage in Early Brazilian Modernism” Luso-Brazilian Review 46, no. 2 (2009): 94. 95 Islam, “Can the Subaltern Eat?,” 162.

41 re-appropriation of the term by the Tropicalia movement as an identity-crafting mechanism to contest Brazil’s military dictatorship.96 The Tropicalia movement was a counter-culture movement in Brazilian popular music that was inspired by Oswald de Andrade’s manifesto on anthropophagy. In Caetano Veloso’s Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil,

Caetano reflects on the author’s engagement with anthropophagy and the influence of Oswald de

Andrade’s essays and poetry:

Oswald de Andrade’s imagery stimulated the imagination to be skeptical of nationality, history, language . . . Above all I surrendered to the shock of the “manifestos”: Manifesto da poesia pau-brasil (Brazilwood Manifesto) of 1924, and particularly the Manifesto antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto of 1928). These two manifestos . . . were a rediscovery of and a new foundation for Brazil...We were “eating” the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. Our arguments against the nationalists’ defensive attitude found in this stance its most succinct and exhaustive enunciation.97

However problematic Manifesto Antropófago may have been, due either to the financial support of wealthy coffee patrons with their own agendas or to the dissonance between the praxis and theory of the modernistas, the anthropophagic metaphor became instilled in the consciousness of

Brazilians and recontextualized in the 1960s with the Tropicalia movement.

Tom Zé, one of the founding members of the Tropicalia movement, wrote this manifesto of his own in the liner notes of his album Com defeito de Fabrição Fabrication Defect:

Someone from the Third World, an android, is producing works which would fit in the traditions of the First World. This android is adding defects which come from illiterate people to that so-called superior culture. In other words, this person is adding new significations . . . without the android, without “fabrication defects,” culture as a whole would be less rich with significations.98

96 Islam, “Can the Subaltern Eat?,” 169. 97 Caetano Veloso and Barbara Einzig, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil (New York: Random House, 2002), 155-156. 98 John Harvey "Cannibals, Mutants, and Hipsters," in Brazilian Popular Music & Globalization, ed. Charles A. Perrone and Christopher Dunn (New York: Routledge Press, 2002), 115.

Zé suggests that it is precisely the “excess of ‘defects’” that occur in the translation of artistic influences which make a work interesting.99 To him, the appropriation of Anglo-American rock to the Brazilian vernacular is a way to articulate contemporary Brazilian anxieties around globalization.

Similarly, the group Os Mutantes played with the “Third World time-lag stereotype”100 by parodying 1960s psychedelic Anglo-American pop through a focus on its tackiest elements.

In the song “Meu refrigerador não funciona,” Rita Lee, the lead singer for Os Mutantes, sings a rock ballad that imitates the style of Janis Joplin, offering a parodic tribute. Rita Lee sings the

English lyrics that seem like they could belong to any rock ballad of the time:

Now, you know that I'm no good alone No good alone I miss you Baby, tell me baby Say you do baby I know one thing you don't Try my honey Try to get someone lovin' baby Try me late tonight Don't say may be tonight, yeah101

And yet, during a “choked breakdown reminiscent of the hashpipe [sic] poetics of Jim

Morrison,” we hear the only Portuguese lyrics in the song (translated into English here): 102

My refrigerator doesn’t work, I’ve tried everything it doesn’t work.103

99 Ibid., 115. 100 Ibid., 117. 101 Rita Lee “O meu Refrigerador Não Funciona” Letras.com, Accessed: March 6, 2020. https://www.letras.com/mutantes/272035/ 102 Harvey, "Cannibals, Mutants, and Hipsters," 119. 103 Rita Lee, “O meu Refrigerador Não Funciona” Letras.com, Accessed: March 6, 2020. https://www.letras.com/mutantes/272035/ My translation; original: Meu refrigerador não funciona, eu tentei de tudo, não funciona.

Here, Os Mutantes is critiquing contemporary Brazilian listeners who listen to and idolize music from abroad, music that is disconnected from their contemporary realities. In the 1960s the majority of Brazilian listeners of foreign music did not speak English. By inserting the absurd lyrics sung in an exaggerated American accent, Os Mutantes comments on the contemporary

Brazilian relationship to Anglo-America. As John Harvey has asserted:

Oswald de Andrade urged Brazilian artists who found themselves on the global periphery to consume, digest, and regurgitate anew everything they could to make the entire universe their aesthetic patrimony.104

Tropicalists [sic] incorporated Oswald de Andrade’s idea of cultural cannibalism in order to create hybrid arts that challenge restrictive political aesthetic dualisms of the time.105

This example of the Tropicalia movement demonstrates how Andrade’s ideas of cultural cannibalism created waves of critical thinking in the peripheral artist and his relation to the world. I would agree with Luso-Brazilian scholar Christopher Dunn in his statement that: “the continuous recycling of the cannibalistic metaphor suggests that it remains a viable, though hardly uncontroversial, model for negotiating local and cosmopolitan imperatives in Brazilian cultural production.”106

Anthropophagy as Brasilidade

So what insight does the invocation of the metaphor of anthropophagy expose where others fall short? I would like to argue that the embodied nature of this metaphor helps us to articulate a certain brasilidade. First and foremost, I would like to clarify how brasilidade differs from nationalism. Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropofagico harkens not to a national notion of Brazil, but to a pre-colonial identity that is linked to the land of Pindorama, the land of

104 Harvey, "Cannibals, Mutants, and Hipsters," 106. 105 Ibid, 109. 106 Christopher Dunn, Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 20.

44 many trees, the indigenous name for the land now called Brazil.107 Thus, the paradigm of this notion of brasilidade is that it enunciates local identity, while excluding a nationalist rhetoric.

Anthropophagy, in fact, problematizes nationalist rhetoric.

As a theory of hybridity, anthropophagy shares this common goal of problematizing nationalism with, for instance, the work of the sociologist Paul Gilroy in his emblematic work

The Black Atlantic.108 Anthropophagy, like Gilroy’s theorization of the black Atlantic, problematizes ideas of rootedness. In fact, Gilroy’s work prioritizes contacts and connections rather than an infatuation with rootedness. In a similar fashion, anthropophagy stresses agency through praxis, through cultural deglutinação, through a cultural “swallowing.”109

Gilroy’s theory of the black Atlantic focuses on the slave ship as an agent in the webbed network between the local and the global. The transcultural flow of information, symbolized by the emblematic slave ship crossing the Atlantic, shaped Atlantic cultures. In Gilroy’s work, he primarily focuses on the inter-cultural exchange between Britain, North America, and Africa. I suggest an application of his theories to cultural contact in Brazil, so that we may understand that

Afro-Brazilian culture has always been transcultural, influenced by the continuous cultural flow facilitated by these webbed networks of the black Atlantic. Thus, this fixed notion of a stagnant culture, “steeped in its ancestral customs,” is problematized.110 What is different in

107 “Manifesto Antropófago” Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural, Accessed: March 6, 2020. http://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/termo339/manifesto-antropofago 108 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 1993. 109 Oswald de Andrade "Manifesto Antropófago." Nuevo Texto Crítico 12, no. 1 (1999): 25. In Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago, he signs it: Oswald de Andrade, Em Piratininga, Ano 374 da deglutição do Bispo Sardinha. My translation: Oswald de Andrade, In Piratininga, Year 374, of the swallowing of Bishop Sardinha. In this, he solidifies agency and praxis in the swallowing of culture. His theory of anthropophagy is directly related to contact, exemplified here by the literal swallowing of the European bishop. 110 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 14.

45 anthropophagy as a theory is that it focuses on these same deconstructions of rootedness and nationalism through individual agency and praxis, whereas Gilroy’s theory is agentive through deconstructing the idea of a rooted shared experience. Anthropophagy locates hybridity in a more microscopic lens, it locates it in the individual and their relation to art production.

Anthropophagy focuses on the quotidian ways in which we consume and regurgitate culture anew.

This theory has deep roots in Brazilian culture. It was used by the modernists in the

1920s to reflect on Brazil’s relation to Europe, and later in the twentieth century by the

Tropicalia movement, ensuring its place in the cultural memory of Brazil. For the music of

Marlos Nobre, using the concept of anthropophagy as brasilidade has astute applications. Marlos

Nobre did not seek a nationalist agenda, rather his experience of brasilidade, his experience of

“brazilianness,” comes from his experience in the land. It comes from his lived experience, and from his assimilation of that experience. Anthropophagy brings the composer to the forefront in defying his engagement with the world through his own lived experience.

It is important to consider the consequences of using a metaphor as a unifying methodology with such methodologies. Gazi Islam considers the following:

More than simply a methodological detail, using a metaphorical approach is particularly appropriate to discussing cultural contact in Brazil, whose histories and culture (like many post-colonial societies) are marked by the slippage of literal representation and the positioning of the subject in an ambiguous liminal space.111

The use of a metaphor has a far-reaching potential, but its boundaries are difficult to delineate because it functions in tandem with the agent’s own subjective positioning in the world. This slippage of literal representation that Islam points to, which is a point of departure for many in

111 Islam, "Can the Subaltern Eat?,” 161.

46 postcolonial studies, is what anthropophagy sought to do as an ideological movement within the modernistas movement.112 The metaphor of anthropophagy brings us to question its indigenous roots and its relation to European primitivism, which originally inspired the modernistas. Such connections implore us to consider whether the metaphor is convoluted with the essentialisms inherent in primitivism. We have gained a glimpse into the problematic othering that happens through primitivist discourse in the introduction to this document; however, I will turn to psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon to excavate this contested relationship.

The colonist makes history. His life is an epic, an odyssey. He is invested with the very beginning: “We made this land.” He is the guarantor for its existence: “If we leave all will be lost, and this land will return to the Dark Ages.” Opposite him, listless beings wasted away by fevers and consumed by “ancestral customs” compose a virtually petrified background to the innovative dynamism of colonial mercantilism.113

The depiction of the native as a listless being wasted away and consumed by his

“ancestral customs” was employed as a political tool to subjugate and enslave. Perhaps the metaphorical man-eater could be interpreted as the modernistas’ playing into a familiar characterization of colonial subjugation, a mimicking of the same tools that were used to dominate. After all, how can the summoning of primitivist discourses undo colonial violence?

What sets anthropophagy apart from this familiar emblem is that it grapples with undoing notions of self in relation to the other. In Bhabha’s theorization of the ‘third space,’ the paradox inherent in his theory is that “the third space notion allows expression of the contradictions inherent in a post-colonial situation that colonizer and colonized somehow only exist in relation to each other, and yet are defined by their separateness. This seeming paradox makes it

112 Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, and Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic grapple with these issues. The Brazilian modernists were influenced by European primitivism. The modernist movement took flight with the Semana da Arte Moderna of 1922. 113 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 14.

47 impossible to assert identity without also asserting otherness.”114 It is in these hybrid deconstructions of rootedness where we find that the Third world composer is not a helpless being tugged to one side by Western expectations and to the other by an imagined commitment to some idea of purity. Rather, he is in many ways the very definition of modernity, because his existence is living proof of a complex continuum of history.

Anthropophagy seeks to theorize hybridity in a way that differentiates itself from

Gilroy’s notions of the Black Atlantic and Bhabha’s concept of a third space. By displacing the notion of the other, anthropophagy breaks down this paradoxically dependent relationship.

Another reason for using anthropophagy is its continuous presence within the Brazilian subconscious. It is important to use local epistemologies to untangle and interrogate local subjects. What do we have to say about ourselves? What a culture says about itself can be far more potent than any imposed episteme. Thus, it is poignant to use a methodology in which

Brazilians have thought about themselves/ourselves to speak of Brazilian culture (however loosely we correlate “Brazilian” with nationhood). Brazilian philosopher Marcia Sá Cavalcante

Schuback expounds on the manner in which the metaphor of anthropophagy becomes a way to interrogate the relationship with the “other.” Her emphasis is on the ways in which anthropophagy emerges as a means to speak to an inherent brasilidade, which she refers to as a language of the heart.

The anthropophagic thought of non-other is exposed in making, birthing as a movement of leaving, of dis-appropriation. Anthropophagic “education” is an education of dissolution and not an education of attachment to a borrowed idea of identity and difference, of I and other. Anthropophagic education does not seek to teach anything to anyone, not the colonizer, nor the colonized, neither the imperial forces nor their targets. Anthropophagic education exposes that difference is not opposition between here and there, between I and other, but a verb of dis-appropriation. Anthropophagic thought of non-other exposes that human existence is an unrepresentable movement of coming

114 Islam. Pg. 164.

closer to, and of distancing to the other, made possible only by distancing from oneself. To leave oneself, to be the non-other is to take on a sense of the human, not of birth, but of continuous birthing. In an extended sense, anthropophagy may be a knowledge that one may only know with the heart, the dynamics of this unspeakable language, a language of feeling/thinking, the language of a certain “brasilidade.”115

When Schuback articulates the dynamics of the unspeakable knowledge that is known in the heart, she is articulating brasilidade. Brasilidade, or literally “brazilianness,” is—like the metaphor—a concept whose boundaries and extremities are impossible to articulate. For this reason, anthropophagy has been used to articulate Brazilian identity, without evoking ideas of nation-state or colonial legacy. In his book Brutality Garden, Brazilian studies scholar

Christopher Dunn places the Brazilian Tropicalia movement in relation to the avant-garde tradition, and in this work he reminds us, “as implied in the first lines of the manifesto

(manifesto antropofago) ‘Only cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.’

In other words, Brazilians are not defined by who they are but rather by what they do, which in

Oswaldo’s formulation, is to ‘digest’ myriad cultural influences.”116 By identifying brasilidade as an act, anthropophagy is a doing, an articulation of identity as praxis.

115 Schuback, Olho a Olho, 45-46. My translation; original: O pensamento antropofágico do não-outro expõe o em se fazendo, as nascentes como um movimento de deixar, de desapropriar-se. A “educação antropofágica é uma educação do desapego e não uma lição de apego a uma ideia emprestada de identidade e de diferença, e eu e outro. A educação antropofágica não busca ensinar nada a ninguém, nem ao colonizador, nem ao colonizado, nem ao imperializado. A educação antropofágica é uma exposição à flor da pele de que a diferença não é a oposição entre um aqui e um lá, entre um eu e um outro (eu), e assim um verbo de des-apropriação. O pensamento antropofágico do não- outro expõe à flor da pele que a existência humana é um irrepresentável movimento de aproximar-se, pois aproximar-se do outro só se dá distanciando-se de si. Deixar a si, deixar a si mesmo, ser o não outro, é assumir o sentido humano não como o que nasceu e assim é vivo, mas como o nascente e assim vivente. Assim entendida, a antropofágia talvez seja um saber que só sabe com o coração, a dinâmica dessa língua do indizível, a língua de um sentir-pensar, a língua de uma certa ‘brasilidade.’” All translations of this text are mine, not published in English. 116 Dunn, Brutality Garden, 20.

Brazilian philosopher Marcia Schuback’s book Olho a Olho discusses Brazilian anthropophagy as a site where the act of devouring another is in fact the act of devouring oneself.

She asserts: “The horror of anthropophagy is not to eat the other, but to eat oneself.”117

Anthropophagy does not disassociate itself from autophagy. She theorizes the idea of anthropophagy as deconstructing Western notions of self. Modern humanism is founded on the affirmation of man as an individual. I once again turn to Fanon:

The native intellectual had learnt from his master that the individual ought to express himself fully. The colonialist bourgeoisie had hammered into the native’s mind… the essential qualities of the West: the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity; a society whose only asset is individual thought.118

Thus, anthropophagy is an attempt to undo this colonial violence that regards the individual subjectivity as supreme. Anthropophagy seeks to deconstruct Western notions of the individual, a cornerstone of the Enlightenment, to bring forward a collective ethos that “continuously births” knowledge. 119 Notions about the embodied nature of brasilidade, the manner in which it is conceived as collective ethos, differ from the Western notion of self that is grounded in the ideals of the Enlightenment. These ideas about the deconstruction of selfhood in order to prioritize a collective knowledge remind me of the manner in which Rhythmetron was conceived – through observational practices. I bring attention to the method of conception of Marlos Nobre’s

Rhythmetron:

The most curious part about the whole process is that Mitchell had already conceived the entire ballet without music! So, I participated in various sessions where the dancers danced the choreography created by Mitchell and from these annotations and observations I created the music… In reality all the rhythms, the free rhythms created by the bodies in motion, and the samba and maracatú, were integrated in my memory in such

117 Schuback, Olho a Olho, 31-32. All translations of this text are mine, not published in English. 118 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 11. 119 Schuback, Olho a Olho. 46.

way that they worked as a single unit. In other words, it was the sublime expression, through percussion, of the musical ideas that marked my creative mind since my infancy in Recife.120

Marlos Nobre is identifying an embodied brasilidade that is both present in him through his memories and life experiences, as well as in the dancers’ bodies in motion. The notion of a collective ethos, as touched upon earlier in Schuback’s insights into anthropophagy, is important in this reading of Marlos Nobre’s experience. It is also important to observe the method in which

Marlos Nobre brings fourth the musical material from his memory. Through this embodied ethos

– through community – knowledge is brought forward through praxis. I bring attention to

Schuback’s ideas of the non-other. In the shared space between the dancers’ movements and

Nobre’s ethos, brasilidade is articulated through Marlos Nobre’s own “devouring of the material.” Nobre is able to bring the dancers’ corporeality into his own embodied knowledge of the sonic memory of rhythm. These musical formulations triggered out from Marlos Nobre’s relation to the world (in this case the dancers) are eventually constructed as sonic praxis (aha! a ballet is written). This, in my reading, is anthropophagy as it intrinsically articulates brasilidade

– brasilidade as an act – an articulation of the local identity without nationalist convolutions. It is a lived experience, a living, “feeling thinking… that one may only know with the heart.”121

120 Marlos Nobre, email correspondence with the author, June 2019. 121 Schuback, Olho a Olho, 45-46. All translations of this text are mine, not published in English.

CHAPTER THREE. ARTHUR MITCHELL AND MARLOS NOBRE

“Boy, what planet have you come from?” And I said, “from Recife” 122 – Marlos Nobre

The ballet Rhythmetron was conceived under unusual circumstances. An unlikely encounter between the celebrated ballet dancer Arthur Mitchell and Brazilian composer Marlos

Nobre was made possible by the patronage of a wealthy businessman in the city of Rio de

Janeiro. This patron had just created a new ballet company, and was looking to create a new ballet for their repertoire. In an e-mail interview with Marlos Nobre, he says:

[The] group was formed with the name Companhia Brasileira de Ballet of Teatro Novo with Italian scenographer and theater director Gianni Ratto as its director, who had settled in Brazil, at the time, for over 20 years. To direct the ballet dancers of this theater, they invited the North-American dancer and choreographer Arthur Mitchell... my name came up as a suggestion from Gianni Ratto himself, who wanted something new, with a new composer, a ballet company with new dancers, and a new and recognized choreographer. Everything was an intersection of a series of coincidences, between people who did not know each other (which was the case with Mitchell), and also many of the dancers, with people who did know each other like Gianni Ratto and some of the dancers of the Municipal Theatre.123

In this chapter I will look into the personal histories of these two men, Marlos Nobre and

Arthur Mitchell, and reflect on this moment of encounter. In Rhythmetron we see a concrete example of the continuous dialogue made possible by the flow of cultural information through trans-Atlantic networks—in this case between Brazil and The United States—which is exemplified by this collaboration between Arthur Mitchell and Marlos Nobre. On one end of this exchange we find Arthur Mitchell, the first African-American lead dancer of the New York City

Ballet, who shocked the New York City elites when he performed the first inter-racial pas-de-

122 Marlos Nobre, e-mail correspondence with the composer, June 6, 2019. 123 Marlos Nobre, e-mail correspondence with the composer, June 6, 2019.

52 deux under the tutelage of George Balanchine.124 On the other side is Marlos Nobre, a Brazilian composer whose own complex history dialogues with the history of Brazilian concert and popular musics. The intersection of these two lives, both of which were very much touched and shaped by the colonial encounter (as are all in the Americas) is our point of departure for this discussion. Arthur Mitchell’s life goal of uplifting the black body, and the establishment of a grassroots institution such as the Dance Theatre of Harlem, is an attempt to deal with the legacy of colonialism in America – a legacy which is embodied in the racial segregation of classical ballet. In Marlos Nobre’s case, the rhythms which populate his early memories and his sense of self are indebted to his upbringing in the city of Recife, a city whose history was molded by its colonial past. His own sonic memory (of maracatú and samba, specially) is that of the resistance of a people, and the rhythms that populate such memories are artifacts of the colonial encounter.

Marlos Nobre

Marlos Nobre, born in Recife, Pernambuco on February 18th 1939, is one of Brazil’s leading living composers. He studied piano, harmony and counterpoint at the Conservatório

Pernambucano de Música in Recife between 1948 and 1949, and had advanced studies at the

Latin American Center in Buenos Aires in the Torcuato Di Tella Institute with Ginastera,

Messiaen, Malipeiro, Copland and Dallapiccola (1963-64).125 Eduardo Herrera discusses the importance of these studios for Latin America in the 1960s:

Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (henceforth CLAEM), part of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires, Argentina. During the 1960s, the Di Tella Institute accommodated three art centers that pushed the boundaries of visual arts, theater, dance, and music, promoted the creation of multimedia works, and encouraged

124 Amy Brandy, “Arthur Mitchell on ‘Agon’: ‘My Skin Color Against Hers, It Became Part of the Choreography” Pointe Magazine, October 5, 2017, Accessed: March 6, 2020. 125 Ingrid Barancoski, "The Interaction of Brazilian National Identity and Contemporary Musical Language: The Stylistic Development in Selected Piano Works by Marlos Nobre." (DMA diss., The University of Arizona, 1997), 17.

innovative audiovisual experimentation.2 CLAEM was the center dedicated to music. Directed by composer Alberto Ginastera (Argentina, 1916–1983), it was funded largely by the Rockefeller Foundation. CLAEM had an impressive roster of composers-in- residence, such as Olivier Messiaen, Aaron Copland, Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Dallapiccola, Mario Davidovsky, Eric Salzman, Bruno Maderna, Riccardo Malipiero, Luis de Pablo, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and Luigi Nono.126

Marlos Nobre’s music is influenced by his upbringing in downtown Recife. He grew up in Rua São João, where the carnaval parades and agremiações would march down his very street every year. Equally as important to understanding his musical world is the influence of the

European avant-garde and modernist aesthetics. Marlos Nobre occupies an interesting “in- between” place within the history of erudite composers in Brazil. In the mid twentieth century,

Brazilian erudite composers were divided into two main schools of thought: the nationalist composers, influenced by Camargo Guarnieri (1907-1994), and the Eurocentric avant-garde aesthetics brought by the German ex-patriot Hans-Joachim Koellreutter (1915- 2005). Marlos

Nobre studied with both schools, drew from both traditions, but did not explicitly subscribe to either.127

126 Eduardo Herrera, “Electroacoustic Music at CLAEM: A Pioneer Studio in Latin America.” Journal of the Society for American Music 12, no.2 (2018): 180. 127 Documenta Video Brasil, “Koellreutter e a Música Transparente.” May 25, 2014. Youtube video, 1:00:18. https://youtu.be/5lh_qDqIP3I. Hans-Joachim Koellreutter’s expatriation to Brazil in 1937, was an important moment for Brazilian music in the twentieth century. Koellreutter was only 22 years old at the time, but he already had a considerable musical background, including having studied with Hermann Scherchen and Paul Hindemith. Koellreutter’s parents informed the Gestapo that he openly defended communist ideals and was engaged to a Jewish woman in order to prevent the marriage, resulting in him fleeing to Rio de Janeiro. During his first years in Brazil he played flute at Lapa and had some private students so he could make ends meet. In 1940 he was introduced to Villa-Lobos and became one of the founding members of OSB (Orquestra Sinfonica Brasileira), and along with this greater immersion into the Brazilian cultural landscape he started having informal reunions with many classically trained musicians of Rio de Janeiro at the Rua do Ouvidor, a street in downtown Rio de Janeiro. These meetings would be the grounds in which he founded the group Música Viva a group that helped disseminate ideas of European modernist aesthetics.

Marlos Nobre had contact with these two philosophical positionings of a what was expected from a composers’ output early on in his career, but he never adhered to any specific trends. Instead, his music follows his own experience of the world. In an e-mail interview with the composer he says:

When I was 14 in Recife, I used to go to the Discoteca Municipal, and there they had many recordings that one could listen to as a free public service, in booths that were isolated acoustically. I used to go there almost daily from when I was 15 until I was about 19 years old. There I was able to listen to all of Stravinsky’s ballets as well as Ravel, Debussy, Hindemith, and even Webern, Schoenberg, and Alban Berg, and arriving at Stockhausen. Due to this, when I arrived in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in 1960, after I won the first-place prize in the Concurso Música e Musicos do Brasil with my trio for piano, violin and cello, I already knew more about the modernists than anyone in Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo at the time. At the time, when I met with Koellreutter in the Summer Festival courses in Teresópolis, and showed him all that I knew about modern and contemporary music, he asked me: “Boy, what planet have you come from?” And I said, “from Recife.” Marlos Nobre set himself apart from his peers early in his career. At the time of Nobre’s encounter with Arthur Mitchell in 1968, he was 29 years old. By this time in his career he had won the Concurso Ernesto Nazareth of the Brazilian Academy of Music in Rio de Janeiro with his Divertimento for piano and orchestra, and had represented Brazil at the Tribuna Internacional de Compositores (TIC) of UNESCO in Paris with his composition Ukrinmakrinkrin, supported by a scholarship from the Rockefeller foundation.128 So, although he was a rising star, Marlos

Nobre was still a young composer.

In her DMA document, “The Interaction of Brazilian National Identity and Contemporary

Musical Language: The Stylistic Development in Selected Piano Works by Marlos Nobre,”

128 “Marlos Nobre” Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural de Arte e Cultura Brasileiras, Accessed on Feburary 29, 2020. http://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa560744/marlos-nobre.

55 pianist Ingrid Barancoski has catalogued Marlos Nobre’s music into five distinct periods.129 In her classification, Barancoski places his opus 27, Rhythmetron, within his second stylistic period.130 His first period of composition is characterized by his tonal works, and “towards the end of this early period, Nobre already incorporates elements of atonality, polytonality, and twelve-tone techniques.”131 His second period, influenced by his studies in Argentina with

Messiaen, Dallapiccola, and others, is characterized by a further exploration of twelve-tone technique in addition to aleatoric procedures.132 By 1968, when he meets Arthur Mitchell and

Gianni Ratto, Marlos Nobre was very much a cosmopolitan composer, well aware of European compositional methods and enriched by the rhythms he had heard on the streets of Recife and

Rio de Janeiro.

Arthur Mitchell

Arthur Mitchell’s legacy is monumental. Appearing as the first African-American solo dancer with the New York City Ballet in 1955, his life was a continuous legacy of breaking new barriers and opening doors for future generations. A black man born in Harlem in 1934, Mitchell had to work odd jobs by the age of twelve to support his family due to his father’s incarceration.133 In High School, through the support of a guidance counselor, he decided to audition for acceptance to the New York City High School for the Performing Arts, where he received a full scholarship.

I went to the High School of Performing Arts and when I auditioned, I prepared a tap dance routine to Fred Astaire’s “Steppin’ Out with My Baby.” But when I got to the

129 Barancoski, "The Interaction of Brazilian National Identity and Contemporary Musical Language.” 130 Ibid., 18. 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid. 133 “Arthur Mitchell, National Visionary” National Visionary Leadership Project. Accessed May 1, 2020. http://www.visionaryproject.org/mitchellarthur

audition, I saw all these trained dancers in modern dance and ballet. I thought, “I’ll never get in.” But they needed male dancers, as usual, and I got in. In addition to studying at the school, I danced with Donald McKayle’s company. I worked at the Choreographers Workshop, and with the New Dance Group. In your senior year at Performing Arts, you did auditions, and that’s when I ran into racism, because I would see that I was the best dancer but I didn’t get the job. I kept saying, “Well, what can I do? What can I acquire that would make me so good people would use me regardless of my skin color?” So that made me decide to take the scholarship that was offered to me to the School of American Ballet. I hadn’t had ballet training before then.134 Upon completion of his training there he was offered two scholarships, one to

Bennington College and the other to the School of American Ballet – an affiliate of the New

York City Ballet. He took the offer to the School of American Ballet.135 Upon completion

Mitchell took a job with Roland Petit’s company in Europe, a position he held up until the time

Lincoln Kirsten offered him to join the corps de ballet of the New York City Ballet in 1955.136 In this company he would soon rise to become one of its principal dancers by 1959. Under the tutelage of George Ballanchine, he led an incredible career with the ballet for over the next fifteen years. Ballanchine, New York City Ballet’s artistic director and choreographer, advocated for Mitchell throughout his time with the New York City Ballet, at times responding to racist inquisitions from the press and audiences by saying, “If Mitchell doesn’t dance, New York City

Ballet doesn’t dance.” At other times, he would encounter racism from members of his own company. When parents would complain that their children had to dance with a black man,

Ballanchine would advise them: “Then take them out of the company.”137

134 Victoria Hutter “Arthur Mitchell, Giving Back to the Community.” NEA. National Endownment for the Arts, Accessed January 28, 2020. https://www.arts.gov/NEARTS/2016v1-telling-all-our-stories-arts-and-diversity/arthur- mitchell. 135 Hutter, “Arthur Mitchell, Giving Back to the Community.” 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid.

Ballanchine’s advocacy for Mitchell at the height of the civil rights movement is a reminder to us all of the incredible force and courage it takes to speak up and advocate for justice. Arthur Mitchell started dancing with the New York City Ballet in the same year that

Rosa Parks refused to get up from the segregated bus, and two years before the Little Rock Nine were met by the National Guard and a screaming mob when they tried to enter the newly unsegregated public school.138 This paints a picture of how emblematic Mitchell’s struggle was for the time: a black man occupying the space of a principal dancer in one of the biggest ballet companies in the country, in an art form that was (and continues to be) “a product of the imperial courts of France and Russia, …ballet is steeped in the aristocratic ideals … its history was a patrician vision of purity, uniformity, and whiteness.”139 Arthur Mitchell would later found the

Dance Theatre of Harlem in what has been called a “graceful moment of artistic resistance” on the company’s own website.140

Within this scenario, Arthur Mitchell nonetheless thrived and built an incredible career with the New York City Ballet. With the company, George Ballanchine wrote key roles for him, such as the first inter-racial pas de deux in Stravinsky’s ballet Agon.141 On this, Arthur Mitchell remembers:

The whole secret of that pa de deux is the woman must let me do everything to her. Balanchine used the masculine way I danced against her femininity. I do feel that skin color was part of the choreography. Agon doesn’t look the same if you see two white

138 “Civil Rights Movement,” History.com, Accessed March 1, 2020. https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rights-movement. 139 Hutter, “Arthur Mitchell, Giving Back to the Community.” 140 Djassi Da Costa Johnson, “Dance Theatre of Harlem, Our History” Dance Theatre of Harlem. Accessed May 1, 2020. https://www.dancetheatreofharlem.org/our-history/ 141 Jennifer Dunning, “Arthur Mitchell is Dead at 84, Showed the Way for Black Dancers,” New York Times, September 19, 2018, Accessed March 1, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/obituaries/arthur-mitchell-dead.html

people doing it or two black people doing it. You see, my skin tone against her skin tone made a big difference.142

Recalling on the tension Ballanchine felt about this moment in history, he remembers

Ballanchine commenting on the importance and weight of that historical moment. “This is the hardest thing I have ever done, everything needs to be right.”143

A Fortuitous Collaboration

In 1968, on a cultural mission, Mitchell would go to Brazil to help start this new ballet company in Rio de Janeiro, the Ballet do Teatro Novo do Rio de Janeiro. There he would create the choreography for Rhythmetron to which Marlos Nobre would set the music. Marlos Nobre and Arthur Mitchell’s meeting would create one of the ballets that would be set into the Dance

Theatre of Harlem’s repertoire for the following decade. On April 4th, 1968 on one of his many trips to Brazil to work with the ballet company, Mitchell would hear about the assassination of

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr:

…on a commission from the American government to assist in the founding of the National Ballet of Brazil, Mitchell decided to return to the US to try to make a difference in his community by teaching ballet classes in his native Harlem. At the height of the civil rights movement, in a graceful moment of artistic resistance, he created a haven for dancers of all colors who craved training, performance experience and an opportunity to excel in the classical ballet world.144

Mitchell would return to Harlem to work with his community, and in a clearly politicized act towards education, Mitchell would establish the Dance Theatre of Harlem school as well as a professional company. The edification of a professional company, not just a school, was to give black dancers an outlook, a place to aspire to, as ballet was still very segregated at the time.

142 Hutter, “Arthur Mitchell, Giving Back to the Community.” 143 Brandy, “Arthur Mitchell on ‘Agon’: ‘My Skin Color Against Hers.” https://www.pointemagazine.com/arthur-mitchell-agon-discrimination-ballet-2492509312.html 144 Johnson, “Dance Theatre of Harlem – Our History.”

Rhythmetron would join the company’s repertoire for the following decade, and Mitchell continued to use Marlos Nobre’s music in his programing, including the ballet Biosfera. String

Quartet No.1, Op. 26, named Biosfera, was commissioned by the University of Rio de Janeiro’s string quartet in 1967. When Nobre was commissioned to compose a ballet for the Teatro Novo in 1968, the same company for which he wrote Rhythmetron, he decided to explore the ideas from the first and second movements of his string quartet, resulting in Biosfera (Pas-de-deux),

Op. 26a. This ballet, like Rhythmetron, was premiered by the Brazilian Ballet Company in 1968, with choreography by Arthur Mitchell. Mitchell would also include Biosfera (Pas-de-deux), Op.

26a in his programming for the Dance Theatre of Harlem in the years to come.145

When the lives of these two men intersect, although they work within completely different mediums and must bridge a language barrier, their work and their lives create a dialogue that ultimately complements each other. On the one hand, Marlos Nobre’s unwillingness to subscribe to any specific compositional school, or to connect to a certain telos of brasilidade, speaks to his place as a composer working in his time, with agency to ingest his environment the way he pleases. So, even though the usage of these sonic elements brought from maracatú and samba are not, to him, political in nature, they do enact a sonic memory of resistance that compliments Arthur Mitchell’s militance. On the other hand, although Arthur

Mitchell deflects associations with deliberate militancy, we see in the praxis of his art and educational methods notions of Pan-African inspired resistance. One thing is clear: social alienation was not a “symptom of post coloniality” that neither Marlos Nobre or Arthur Mitchell

145 Ilka Vasconcelos Araujo, "The Musical Language of Marlos Nobre through His Orchestral Works." (DMA diss, University of Florida, 2007), 82.

60 embodied, but instead, in the words of Latin American scholar Gerard Béhague, they moved towards a socially relevant engagement.146

146 Béhague, "La Problemática De La Posición Socio-Política.” In this article he addresses the socio-political implications that the Latin-American and Caribbean composers face. Gerard Béhague offers Marlos Nobre’s work, Rhythmetron in particular, as an example of a work of art that in fact does reflect the composer’s own socio- political reality.

CHAPTER FOUR. GENRE

A Reflection on Musical Genres

In Rythmetron, Marlos Nobre incorporates maracatu and samba in the first and third movements. Nobre draws maracatú and samba from his musical memory, which he claims is the

“basic essence of my rhythmic formation, in its most intense, most elementary form.” These memories consist of genres whose histories are none other than artifacts of the postcolonial encounter. Their sonic make-ups are indebted to their hybridity and their history of cultural mixing. In this chapter we will trace the historical development of these genres, ultimately connecting them to Rhythmetron.

In a speech given at the third forum of Caribbean composers in San Juan Puerto Rico in

1990, Latin American scholar Gerard Béhague critiques Latin American composers of new music on perpetuating Eurocentric aesthetics as a product of colonization.147 That is, he suggests that third world composers’ obsession with the methods, techniques, and aesthetics of Europe is none other than a de-valorization of their own creative potentials, and is divorced from their own social reality. In this speech, however, Béhague describes Marlos Nobre’s Rhythmetron as a work that aligns with the vanguard techniques of the time, but nevertheless holds an unmistakable native sense, validating the work as socially relevant. 148 Béhague offers Marlos

Nobre’s work, along with works by other composers, as examples of compositions that offer alternatives to the colonial violence inherent in mimicry.

147 Gerard Béhague, "La Problemática De La Posición Socio-Política Del Compositor En La Música Nueva En Latinoamérica," Latin American Music Review 27, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2006): 47. 148 Ibid., 55.

Fanon’s ideas about the effects on the psyche of the colonized may offer us a better understanding of causes of the socio-political alienation that Béhague warns against:

When we consider the resources deployed to achieve the cultural alienation so typical of the colonial period, we realize that nothing was left to chance and that the final aim of colonization was to convince the indigenous population it would save them from darkness. The result was to hammer into the heads of the indigenous population that if the colonists were to leave they would regress into barbarism, degradation, and bestiality.149

Fanon shows that colonialism affects the ways in which colonized people experience reality in their daily lives, which consequently has an influence on culture.

[The] colonized intellectual has thrown himself into Western Culture. Like adopted children who only stop investigating their new family environment once their psyche has formed a minimum core of reassurance, the colonized intellectual will endeavor to make European culture his own.150

The traces of colonial violence on the psyche are delineated at the level of the unconscious, and ultimately work their way in to critical output such as musical compositions – this is what

Béhague is addressing in his speech to Latin American and Caribbean composers. Béhague critiques some Latin American and Caribbean composers’ whose ethnocentric works alienate listeners from their own socio-political realities, and offers examples of composers whose work

“contributes to aesthetic developments based on an authentic existential consciousness, whose socio-political dimensions does essential transcendental labor.”151 Arguably it is through this

149 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 149. 150 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 156. 151 Béhague, "La Problemática De La Posición Socio-Política,” 56. My translation; original: Otra obra posterior de Nobre, Rhythmetron (1968), para 38 instrumentos de percusión (tocados por diez percusionistas), denota un sentido “nacional” de baile ritualístico aunque sea una obra experimental. No solamente utiliza algunos instrumentos tradicionales brasileros, pero a través de una polirrítmia de acentos que quiebran constantemente la regularidad métrica, crea una energía coreográfica que recuerda, de lejos, los maracatús de Recife y las escuelas de samba de Río. Creo que aquí tenemos obras perfectamente vinculadas a técnicas de vanguardia de la época, pero sin embargo de sentido nativo inconfundible.

63 unconscious mind that Marlos Nobre conjures such musical material. What is present in Nobre’s work that Béhague is trying to clue us into? How does a work by a composer who avoids any association of his work with a political agenda, somehow works towards this “essential transcendental labor?”

I would like to argue that one of the elements within the ballet Rhythmetron that does this labor is the citation of musical genres whose histories illuminate racial tensions in Brazil, articulate brasilidade, and articulate colonial tensions in culture production. So, then, does simply quoting genres whose histories have been shaped by colonialism make a work of art socially relevant? To this I turn once again to Fanon, whom reminds us of the pitfalls ‘native intellectuals’ stumble upon when trying to articulate a national culture:

Terribly sterile clichés – He (a native intellectuals) places emphasis on customs, traditions, costumes, and his painful, forced search seems but a banal quest for the exotic.”152

The colonized intellectual, at the very moment when he undertakes a work of art, fails to realize that he is using techniques and a language borrowed from the occupier… strangely reminiscent of exoticism.153

Is it the fact that Nobre did not identify as a nationalist himself that sets him apart from this exoticist undoing? Perhaps intention is in play. If not of a nationalist essence, what then does

Béhague mean when he says Marlos Nobre’s Rhythmetron remains true to his own socio-political positioning without falling into exoticist tropes? I suggest that the brasilidade inherent in his construction of the work, the embodied nature in which he summon musical material from his musical memory, is what makes the work “socially relevant,” to use Béhague’s description.154

152 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 158. 153 Ibid., 160. 154 Gerard Béhague, "La Problemática De La Posición Socio-Política,” 47.

Rhythmic Fragments in the Music

Much has been written about the invention of the “African” rhythm, and a notable figure in this deconstruction is postcolonial scholar Kofi Agawu.155 In a similar way that “African

Rhythm” is summoned as a Western homogeny (as if the amplitude of African musical traditions could be summed into one), imagined homogenies are summoned by Arthur Mitchell in his presentation of Rhythmetron to New York City school children. He describes Rhythmetron as:

An abstract version of an African ritual and the last movement, which you will see, is where the dancers come in – in almost a trancelike state, and they start to walk, and the music accelerates and gets faster and faster and it’s almost like the dancers go into a state of trance and they’re gonna dance on and on and on… 156

This type of homogenization uses this invented, imagined view of Africa in order for it to be digested as the other in a consumable package. The argument that it is unproductive to use such homogenies is understandable. Likewise, one can see Arthur Mitchell’s summoning of such discourses as strategic timing. The insertion of the rhythmic cells from the score grounds

Rhythmetron in a web of hybridity and specificity. Connecting Rhythmetron to specific rhythmic formulations, and specific genres, we dispel this myth of “Brazilian” or “African” rhythm, as well as the “African ritual” Arthur Mitchell invokes. In actuality, Rhythmetron draws from real, lived experiences, rooted in the hybrid cultural manifestations. The specifity of the rhythmic

I suggest that this notion of connectedness to a socio-political reality in which Gerard Béhague identifies in Nobre’s work is indebted to the notion of brasilidade as praxis, as seen in anthropophagy. That Nobre did not use these rhythmic formulations as mere tools from ‘toolbox’ of musical material, rather these were expressions of real experiences that are ingrained in his bodily memory. 155Kofi Agawu, "The Invention of "African Rhythm"." Journal of the American Musicological Society 48, no. 3 (1995): 380-395. 156 Dance Theatre of Harlem, “Rhythmetron: The Dance Theatre of Harlem with Arthur Mitchell” Capital Cities Communications and McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973. Accessed: March 1, 2020. https://archive.org/details/rhythmetronthedancetheatreofharlemwitharthurmitchell

65 quotation of maracatú in Rhythmetron dispels this myth of the “African ritual,” because maracatú is not African, but a syncretic genre that draws Afro-diasporic elements. Rhythmetron is a modern expression of blackness.

In Rhythmetron’s first-movement, the emblematic gonguê pattern from the maracatú traditions is found throughout the movement, and is of structural importance. The gonguê is a bell-like instrument similar to the more well-known agogo, and was brought to Brazil by the

Bantu peoples of Central Africa.157 The instrument’s main difference to the agogo is its size, the gonguê being much larger than the agogo, so that it can project over the numerous zabumbas, or large bass drum-like rope drums, that are central to maracatú.158 In measure 40, Nobre presents the maracatú gonguê rhythmic:

EXAMPLE 4.1 Gonguê, maracatú rhythm.

In this following example, you see these pattern as it is first presented on measure 39:

157 “Gonguê.” Universidade Federal da Paraíba - UFPB Laboratório de Estudos Etnomusicológicos LABEET. Laboratório de Estudos Etnomusicológicos, Accessed December 9, 2016. http://www.ccta.ufpb.br/labeet/contents/paginas/acervo- brazinst/copy_of_idiofones/gongue. 158 Ibid.

EXAMPLE 4.2 Rhythmetron, mm. 39-41.

159

This rhythmic element is present throughout the first movement, and not only in the agogo bells. We hear it again in the timpani in measure 139, and successively in a canon-like manner by the bongos, followed by the tom-toms.160

EXAMPLE 4.3 Rhythmetron, mm. 136-142. Canon-like Presentation

159 Marlos Nobre, Rhythmetron. Darmstadt: Tonos, 1975. 160 Ibid.

A similar canon-like presentation is seen on measure 173:

EXAMPLE 4.4 Rhythmetron, mm. 171-177. Canon 2.

161

In measure 211, Nobre employs the canon-like treatment of the maracatú rhythmic cell once again, this time in a denser instrumentation. In this iteration, the bongos and timpani are in unison (seen in brown), as well as the afoxe and pandeiro (seen in yellow). These four instruments are subsequently joined by the reco-reco (seen in blue).

161 Marlos Nobre, Rhythmetron. Darmstadt: Tonos, 1975.

EXAMPLE 4.5 Rhythmetron, mm. 208-215. Canon 3.

162

This rhythmic superimposition builds to the movement’s largest dynamic moment, and to its most dense instrumentation, culminating in the movements dramatic ending, a fortississimo gong note.

In movement three, there are tangential elements that are arguably influenced by samba.

For instance, the persistent use of the bass drum as seen from measure 37 through measure 42, accentuating beats two and four, is reminiscent of the role played by the surdo in urban samba, providing the rhythmic backbone to the more intricate, faster moving rhythmic lines of the other

162 Marlos Nobre, Rhythmetron. Darmstadt: Tonos, 1975.

69 instruments.

EXAMPLE 4.6 Rhythmetron, Movement Three, mm. 41-45. Bass Drum Part.

163

The notation used for the pandeiro part throughout movement three is also notable.164

The manner in which it is notated seems to imply that there are both a higher and a lower pitch, but this is not the case for this part. The use of multiple lines on the staff indicates the different regions of the drum that should be played. However, these different regions of the drum are proportionally the same distance away from the edge, thus they produce approximately the same pitch. The part is notated in this way in order to illustrate that this part should be played in the

163 Marlos Nobre, Rhythmetron. Darmstadt: Tonos, 1975. 164 pandeiro: Brazilian style of frame drum with inverted jingles. This drum is used prominently in choro, samba, and pagode traditions. A specific technique is employed to play this drum, differing it from the Western tambourine.

Brazilian style of pandeiro playing, with the left hand holding the drum. Through the rotation of the left hand, the player can achieve the sixteenth-note pattern by placing the right hand over the drum. This is a specialized and idiomatic pandeiro technique, which differs, for instance, from how a Western-trained orchestral percussionist would play Tchaikovsky’s virtuosic tambourine part in The Nutcracker, which is notated in the more typical manner using only one line of the staff. Thus, the extra-musical information about genre becomes important in the performance practice of Rhythmetron. The performers must have some awareness of Brazilian music and its idiomatic techniques to achieve a successful performance of the work.

EXAMPLE 4.7 Rhythmetron, Movement Three, mm. 56-60. Pandeiro Part.

165

These musical examples serve to illustrate how Rhythmetron’s structure and rhythmic make-up are undoubtedly influenced by maracatú and samba. However, I would like to

165 Marlos Nobre, Rhythmetron. Darmstadt: Tonos, 1975.

71 encourage an analysis that considers the entire work as both rhythmically and culturally informed by samba and maracatú. Nobre explains that his rhythmic formation comes from these traditions. He did not seek to directly quote a specific musical genre, rather, they make their way into the work because they were an integral part of his sonic world. Arguably, some level of cultural literacy in these traditions is important for a more meaningful and accurate performance.

For instance, consider the aforementioned pandeiro technique utilized in the third movement, which is typical of the Brazilian style of pandeiro playing. An American or European student without the same background may use the orchestral tambourine techniques employed to play

Tchaikovsky’s Danse Trepak or Dvorák’s Carnaval Overture, even if he were to encounter this novel notation.

When I prepared the BGSU Percussion Ensemble for our performance at PASIC in 2018,

I observed these performance practices. For example, the aforementioned bass-drum part in the third movement was played with intentional rhythmic muffling. This gesture would be stylistically appropriate, as it alludes to way in which the surdo is played in a samba performance.166 So, while a rhythmic analysis reveals musical elements in Nobre’s composition that are clearly drawn from (or even direct quotes of) maracatú and samba, a certain degree of cultural literacy is also important. An understanding of the traditions from which these elements are drawn informs the performance of the piece, and is at times even reflected in Nobre’s notational choices. For this reason, I will now turn to a more culturally-focused analysis of the various genres that are embedded in Rhythmetron.

166 surdo: Large bass-drum that is played in samba.

Marlos Nobre and a Palimpsestic Memory

We can start to unravel this by looking into the histories of the genres present in his work, starting with maracatú and samba, both of which are genres with hybrid implications, and whose formulations are indebted to the black Atlantic (the transcultural flow between Atlantic cultures).

These genres bring racial markers to the identity of Rhythmetron. I also argue that Rhythmetron’s inherent brasilidade, its articulation of identity as an embodied praxis, distinguishes it from simple genre-quoting. The genres present in Rhythmetron come from Marlos Nobre’s memory in an embodied sense. These rhythms were, in a sense, “housed” within his cultural memory—they were not only “tools” that he drew from his toolbox, but rather something that he lived.

I had the chance to interview Nobre myself, and I asked if there was any programmatic intentionality in using the genre maracatú in his work, to which he replied:

In reality all the rhythms, the free rhythms created by the bodies in motion, and the samba and maracatú, were integrated in my memory in such way that they worked as a single unit. In other words, it was the sublime expression, through percussion, of the musical ideas that marked my creative mind since my infancy in Recife.167

Marlos Nobre is referring to himself as a locus of culture: that which he experienced in his youth is embedded within him. Is this brasilidade, that which is embedded in Nobre’s body, perhaps what Béhague is trying to articulate when he says the work has an “authentic existential consciousness” that does “transcendental labor?”168 I bring attention to my interview with the composer:

I was born and lived until I was 12 years old on Rua de São João, a street in downtown Recife, where, during carnaval, all the agremiações would parade through my street, the Caboclinhos, Maracatús, Frevos, I used to run through them, dancing, I would throw myself into the crowds, in the mass of people, above all, the negros and mulattos and mulattas that danced in a frenzy. That atmosphere was not something I observed, but

167 Marlos Nobre, e-mail correspondence with the composer, June 6, 2019. 168 Gerard Béhague, "La Problemática De La Posición Socio-Política,” 56.

lived intensely. My mother, many times would go after me like a mad woman in the streets asking for my whereabouts. I would sometimes be taken home by the hands of helpful negro women saying “I found this boy. He is crazy about maracatú!….” So that’s what it was, I was “crazy’ about maracatú169

The genres brought up ‘indirectly’ through Marlos Nobre’s pen and paper have their own sonic traces of memory. The memories that are enacted and performed within these genres are marked by historical re-negotiations of identity. The genre’s own histories were constructed out of both state censorship and sponsorship, as well as resistance movements. Throughout Brazilian history, genres, instruments, and symbols of the African diaspora have had their own processes of political reification. By uncovering these histories, which are sonically present in

Rhythmetron, Rhythmetron becomes a site of intersection between samba, maracatú, lundu, classical ballet, and Western Art Music. What does it mean to have these Afro-diasporic genres

(maracatú, samba) in a historically white genre (ballet), and moreover, can it be seen as a form of resistance? What are the memories that are sonically enacted within these genres? We can continue to reflect on these issues after a discussion on the censorship practices that riddle the historic formulations of these genres: the ways the black body is regulated.

To better understand the significance of these sonic memories, I introduce here the notion of the palimpsest, in which I draw from American film theorist Robert Stam’s interpretation of this concept.170 A palimpsest is a parchment or other writing surface where the original text has been erased, but an imprint of the original text remains on the parchment even as it is recycled and reutilized, superimposing new text on the parchment while effacing the memory of the old text. I argue that Rhythmetron is palimpsestic: its diverse set of cultural signifiers compete with

169 Marlos Nobre, e-mail correspondence with the composer, June 6, 2019. 170 Robert Stam "Palimpsestic Aesthetics: A Meditation on Hybridity and Garbage." in Performing Hybridity ed. May Joseph and Jennifer Fink (University of Minnesota Press), 59-78.

74 each other, infiltrate each other, and interweave a multilayered cultural inscription. The palimpsestic nature of Nobre’s work opens up the possibility of reconceptualizing the relationship between space, place, and the work’s Afro-diasporic identity. By this, I mean that to think about the superimposition of text (or in this case genre) is to bring forward the idea of superimposition of meaning. In this palimpsestic reading, at any given moment meanings are multi-layered and complex. What this imagery summons, is that the genres that have been

“erased” from the text are brought anew in rhythmic fragments and cultural memories that weave in a wealth of imaginaries, fortifying the work with rich meaning. Maxixe, for instance, is not a genre we could quote as being present in Rhythmetron, although its cultural imprints are the make-up of samba. In this manner, I suggest that we explore the history of the genres present in

Rhythmetron, as well as their predecessors, in order to key us into the cultural inscriptions that are encoded with these rhythmic formulations. As we shall see, the histories of samba, maracatú, lundu, and maxixe, have been shaped by race relations in Brazil.

Maracatú

The maracatú has its roots in the congos and congadas, which were dramatic dances performed within the slave populace in colonial Brazil. In his book which focuses on the influence of the African diaspora on Brazilian popular musics, English Marxist writer and journalist Peter Fryer relates that the congadas were derived from African coronation ceremonies, and they originated in lay societies of black artisans that were formed in Brazil in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church.171

Under colonial rule, the slave population organized under brotherhoods and these societies - with

171 Peter Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance: African Musical Heritage In Brazil (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 56.

75 support from the Catholic Church - were influential in preserving African-heritage in Brazil.172

These slave societies were encouraged by the colonizers because it brought them closer to the church: “the Church gained at least nominal converts; by embracing Catholicism, at least nominally, the slaves not only protected essential aspects of their culture but also saw that culture winning wider and wider acceptance.”173 For slaves in colonial Brazil, whose own musical practices were censored, the imposition of the Catholic Church meant that, under the veneer of

Catholicism, they were able to infuse African elements in their newly imposed religious ceremonies, preserving their own cultural heritages.

These lay brotherhoods would elect African Kings and Queens each year, crowned symbolically by a Priest at the church door, and followed by a procession.174 This would be the origin of maracatú in Recife. The maracatú is a processional dance, like the Congada, with syncretic European and Afro-Brazilian influence. The characters in this processional dance include: “King, Queen, Maids of Honour, Ambassador (standard beater), Dama-do-Passo, Baliza

(Drum Majorette), and dancers known as baianas.”175 These characters would play the batuque up to the Catholic Church, in commemoration of a catholic saint that is a “profoundly complex parodic ceremony, which both celebrates and mocks the power relations of colonial slavery, while alluding to social structures within monarchies of Yorubaland.”176 Here we see a genre whose cultivation and creation is intrinsically tied to the censorship practices around the black

172 In the teeth of persecution, these brotherhoods helped keep intact much of African culture including: language, religion, traditional music and their different ethnic nations, known as nações. 173 Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance, 58. 174 Ibid., 61. 175 Ibid., 67. 176 Marcus Wood, "Slavery and Syncretic Performance in the Noite do Tambores Silenciosos: Or how Batuque and the Calunga Dance Around with the Memory of Slavery." Journal of American Studies 49, no. 2 (2015): 383-403.

76 body. Its sounds carry the sonic memory of resistance and censorship. Maracatús emergence, as well as its sustained tradition to this day in the northeast of Brazil, attests to an incredible power of resistance. I argue that its sonic enactment in Rhythmetron connects the work to the racially driven historical processes of resistance and censorship around the genres of maracatú and samba.

Precursors to Samba

Samba is another genre that Marlos Nobre cites as being essential to his rhythmic vocabulary. As Latin American historian Bryan McCann has noted is his book Hello, Hello

Brazil, the case of samba in Brazil is a culmination of a gradual process from censorship to the celebration of a symbol of national identity, all through a long process that invented and cultivated samba’s authenticity.177 This evolution, from the censorship of ethnic symbols and their ultimate “elevation” into national symbols, “masks a situation of a racial domination.”178

Even before we delve into the specific constructions of samba as a political act, we can look at samba’s predecessors to clarify that this has been a continuous process throughout Brazilian history.

Brazilian social anthropologist Hermano Vianna claims that the historical formulations of the modinha and the lundu, two of the predecessors to Brazilian popular musics that were popularized in the late eighteenth century, speak to the colonial context in which they developed.179 Both are genres whose syncretic formulations are, in part, a product of the social

177 Bryan McCann, Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 45. 178 Peter Fry “Feijoada e Soul Food,” in Para Inglês Ver: Identidade e Politica na Cultura Brasileira, 52, ed. (Rio de Janeiro, Zahar Editores, 1977), 45. 179 Vianna, The Mystery of Samba, 17. modinha: a lyrical sentimental song genre that was cultivated in the early eighteenth century.

77 relations enacted through colonialism. In conjunction with this idea, ethnomusicologist Tamara

Livingston addresses the ways in which miscegenation was an idea to which Brazilian intellectuals, artists, and writers turned to fashion “a unified, distinct Brazilian cultural identity from the disparate fashions left over from colonialism.” She addresses such issues in her apt account of the Brazilian popular music genre choro, in her book: Choro: A Social History of

Brazilian Popular Music.180 I draw from Livingston’s text as samba and maracatú share common roots with the genre choro. At the end of the nineteenth century, intellectuals, scholars, and artists turned to the idea of miscegenation with increasing pressure to be able to articulate a

Brazilian identity in the wake of country’s independence and changing political makeup.

Livingston points out that this turn to the idea of miscegenation, or the blending of

African, European, and Indigenous races in Brazil, was the factor that distinguished Brazilians from other nationalities.181 She also points out that, even though theoretically this may seem like an equalizing force, especially given the cultural elite’s obsession with European aesthetics as seen in the Belle Èpoque, the process became known as a branqueamento, or literally a

“whitening” with a goal of “eventually eradicating the undesirable races with the influence of

White European blood.”182 The logic behind this lies within a propagation of the ideas behind

Social Darwinism, that “the rapid decline in indigenous populations and the perceived drop in birth rates of African slaves were produced as ‘scientific evidence’ that the Aryan race was stronger.”183 This paradoxical situation, although incredibly racist and unfounded, approved the

180 Tamara Elena Livingston and Thomas George Caracas Garcia, Choro: A Social History of a Brazilian Popular Music. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 19. 181 Livingston and Garcia, Choro, 19. 182 Ibid. 183 Ibid., 21.

78 idea of miscegenation as they practiced racism.184 Through analyzing the texts by these aforementioned authors, we can gain insight into the ways that racial dynamics have always shaped Brazilian popular music genres.

Batuque

Before I enter a discussion about maxixe, and lundu, I would like to discuss the different drumming manifestations in colonial Brazil that many times were referred to as batuques.

Discussions around the term batuque are riddled by a “cluster of terminological problems which are typically Brazilian.”185 The same name is given to multiple genres of different regions, in both secular and in religious settings. The two main trends of musical performances that it seems to delineate are “secular dances that came from Kongo-Angola culture area” and “a generic term for any kind of black dance.”186 These musical gatherings would become the transformative sites for precursors of samba (maxixe, lundu,) and eventually into samba itself. The term was used by

Europeans in colonial Brazil to describe any loud sound made by blacks, and was eventually used as a general term for communal singing, dancing and/or music making.187

One can trace racial dynamics in black music practices in colonial Brazil through colonial archives and their descriptions of different batuques. Fryer shows some pointed examples of what is present in these archives throughout his book Rhythms of Resistance: African Musical

Heritage in Brazil, of which I cite a few:

184 Ibid. 185 Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance, 95. 186 Ibid. 187 Claus Schreiner, Música Brasileira: a History of Popular Music and the People of Brazil (New York: M. Boyars. 1993), 41.

1802 - Luis dos Santos Vilhena, Regius Professor of Greek:

It does not seem very prudent, politically speaking, to tolerate crowds of Negroes of both sexes performing their barbarous batuques through the city streets and squares to the beat of many horrible atabaques, indecently dancing to pagan songs, [dançando deshonestamente canções getilicos], speaking various languages, and that with such frightful and discordant clamour as to cause fear and astonishment.188

1816-1822 Augustine Saint-Hillaire, French Naturalist:

The creole Negroes danced batuques… some Mozambique Negroes formed a circle in the middle of which sat two or three musician who began beating in strict time on small and not very loud drums. The dancers accompanied them with their songs; they jumped as they went round and round in the same direction, and each time round their movements became livelier. Knees bent, fists closed, forearm upright, they moved forward on prancing feet…

Soon… there began the batuques, those lewd [obcènes] dances which the inhabitants of Brazil have borrowed from Africans. They were danced only by men to begin with. Nearly all of them were whites: they could not want to fetch water or wood like their Negroes, but they did not think they were demeaning themselves by copying the ridiculous and uncouth contortions of the latter. The Brazilians show a good deal of indulgence to their slaves, with whom they mingle so often, who have perhaps contributed to teaching them the systems of agriculture they practice and the way they extract gold from streams, and who moreover were their dancing-masters.189

These accounts of the batuque by foreigners in Brazil show that racial dynamics in black performance practices in colonial Brazil, although they were regulated and censored, were founded in interactions between the while populace and the African slaves. Historian Marc A.

Hertzman depicts the way in which fear of black performance practice would culminate in the late nineteenth century with further state sponsored censorship in his Making Samba – A New

History of Race and Music in Brazil:

An 1889 law banned batuque in Rio, and a similar law was passed in Salvador in 1904… during the 1910s police in both cities intermittently prohibited pandeiros, samba and batuque in their celebrations.190

188 Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance, 57. 189 Ibid., 101. 190 Marc A. Hertzman Making Samba: a New History of Race and Music in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 34.

Hertzman demonstrates further documentation of the censorship of black performance:

No instrument drew more attention or elicited fear among travelers and elites than the drum. Drums of various shapes and sizes were prominent in the massive gatherings that took place every Sunday at the Campo de Santana… authorities regulated and often forbade large slave gatherings, especially those with music… In 1849, the police broke up a group of more than two hundred slaves performing batuque.191

Consequently, the term batuque became synonymous with blackness. The censorship of sound thus becomes a way to regulate the black body. At times censorship was used to ban any gathering of four slaves or more, and offenders were punished with one hundred and fifty lashes in fear that “black dances would indirectly promote unity among slaves of different nações, with potentially dreadful consequences.”192 Thus we see further evidence that Brazilian popular music genres were entangled in racial power dynamics from their conception.

Lundu

Lundu, a predecessor of samba, has been called “Brazil’s first national dance.”193 It arose in the eighteenth century as a music from the Bantu slaves.194 It was perhaps the first musical genre performed in Brazil influenced by African rhythms and European Harmony.195 The lundu’s syncretic nature shares aesthetic similarities to the modinha. What eventually distinguished them from each other were the social classes in which they were performed, the lundu being associated with the lower classes, and the modinha with the social elites.196

191 Ibid., 18. 192 Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance, 96. Slaves were brought to Brazil from different parts of the African continent, spoke different languages and held very different customs from each other. Nações, or nations, were different ethnic groups of African Slaves. 193 Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance, 116. 194 Livingston and Garcia, Choro, 27. 195 Ibid., 28. 196 Ibid.

The lundu dance was a genre in which drums and voices were mainly used. In the late nineteenth century, an instrumental form of the lundu had become popular. This greater reliance of the genre on melodic instruments such as the clarinet, flute, guitar, viola,197 and a six-stringed violão, makes the lundu a precursor to other popular genres such as the maxixe.

Maxixe

The history of the maxixe as a genre maps the crossing and re-crossing of the Atlantic.

Maxixe is a genre with roots in European forms of polka and the Cuban habanera, and was created by a population that had been dancing the lundu for two or three generations.198 The maxixe precedes samba in street carnaval. This hybrid genre evolved from a population that was dancing the tango which later would be ‘Africanized’ and given the name of tango brasileiro, and would eventually become the maxixe.199 The maxixe was perhaps the first musical genre in

Brazilian history to be denoted as having a “national essence.” “This political construction calls attention to a notable contrast: it was precisely their unruly characteristics, and in particular their association with marginalized Afro-Brazilian communities, that lent first maxixe and then samba to theoretical attributions of national essence.”200 Here we see the use of the word “brasileiro” applied when African elements are infused into European genres. Thus, we already see how the articulation of identity in Brazil is reliant on notions of blackness through its associations with elements of the diaspora.

197 This was the name for a five-course guitar. 198 Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance, 154. 199 We see the use of the word brasileiro (Brazilian) applied when African elements are infused into European genres. Thus, we start seeing how ideas around the articulation of identity in Brazil are convoluted with notions of blackness. 200 McCann, Hello, Hello Brazil, 45.

Polka’s “Africanization” into the maxixe in the nineteenth century foreshadows sambas’ nationalization. This ‘Africanization’ was due, in part, to the large number of free slaves that now migrated from rural parts of Brazil to the coast (slavery was abolished in 1888), many of whom were highly trained musicians. Peter Fryer discusses at length the contributions and impact that the slave orchestras had from as early as 1610.201 This socio-cultural shift in Brazilian culture was partly due to the changing socio-political make-up of the country. From the creation of an independent nation in 1822, the halting of forced migration in the 1850s, the abolition of slavery in 1888, to the influx of slaves from rural parts of Brazil to Rio de Janeiro (including these trained musicians), a need to articulate a sense of national unity was percolating in the nation. All these phenomena contributed to the proliferation of hybrid genres in the nineteenth century. It bears mentioning that these migrating former-slave musicians were in fact encouraged in

‘erudite’ music, playing works by Haydn, the Latin Mass, and even an account of a performance of Stabat Mater, perhaps by Giovanni Battista Pergolessi, in the 1840s in the state of Minas

Gerais.202 When they arrived in the coastal towns of Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and Recife, many were very accomplished musicians, and there was great demand for their musical skills.203 The flourishing of these slave orchestras also “did much to validate and make widely acceptable the slaves own approach to music making…when they played European dances, they tended to

‘creolize’ the rhythm.”204 These slave musicians played a pivotal role in setting the stage for an openness to the proliferation of cross-class hybrid genres in the nineteenth century.

201 Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance, 134. 202 Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance, 135. 203 Ibid., 136. 204 Ibid.

The maxixe has been described as an “intermediate phase between the lundu and samba.”205 One of the main differences between the lundu and the maxixe is their respective places of origin; the lundu has rural associations while maxixe was viewed as a “‘modern’ urban form offering a close encounter with the submundo… The music’s [maxixe’s] association with the Mangue, the cities’ red-light district, made the music an ideal vehicle for delivering long- standing stereotypes about race and sexuality,”206 and provided an additional vehicle to propagate the idea, which became a hallmark of national identity, that “Brazil was the unique product of an amorous relationship between a white man and a slave woman.”207 For this reason, the maxixe too came under scrutiny of censorship. It was “condemned as a lower class, vulgar, and lascivious dance that took place in halls frequented by loose women and unscrupulous men…The maxixe exhibiting overt African Rhythmic influences were seen as the moral decline of Brazilian society that moved it away from genteel European models into decadence.”208 Thus, we see further evidence that race, class, and censorship were inseparable to the processes that generated Brazilian popular music genres.

In 1907, cultured members of society insisted on the police closing down dance halls where maxixe was practiced. What was more outrageous to the upper class was that maxixe dance was rather sensuous, and included a rippling movement of the hips. People were outraged when the dance was performed by inter-racial couples, particularly white women with black men.209 Again, we see a policing of the black body as a central theme in the propagation and censoring of the genres that precede samba. The re-Africanization of the maxixe eventually

205 Ibid., 145. 206 Hertzman, Making Samba, 91. 207 Ibid. 208 Livingston and Garcia, Choro, 33. 209 Ibid.

84 transforms it into the urban samba.210 At the beginning of the twentieth century, genre boundaries and classification of maxixe vs. samba were very subjective. A maxixe would have been classified as a samba, or vice versa, depending on who was referencing the piece of music.

Again, we see how genre boundaries are fluid. Nonetheless, by the second decade of the twentieth century we have clearer delineation of samba as national genre and an abandonment of maxixe.

Samba

Samba’s emergence as a genre is attributed to popular dance parties in the downtown area of Cidade Nova in Rio de Janeiro in the 1910s. These took place at the private homes of baianas located near Praça Onze.211 Samba drew from West African antecedents and existing popular music genres, such as the maxixe and lundu. Like the maxixe, samba was associated with lower classes, and was at times repressed.212 Samba, as well as the genres that informed its formulation, received repressive government measures due to its “unruly characteristics, in particular their association with marginal Afro-Brazilian communities.”213 It is these “unruly characteristics,” notably their Afro-Brazilian traits, that made both samba and the maxixe ideal genres for articulating a Brazilian essence. Samba was co-opted to construct a popular Brazilian mythology

(and at times a state-sponsored ideology) that lended “credence to a rhetoric of racial democracy which pointed to esteem for Afro-Brazilian culture as evidence that racism did not exist in

210 Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance, 157. 211 Praça Onze is where the infrastructure called the sambodromo is located. This is where the yearly samba parades are held in Rio de Janeiro. Baianas are Afro-Brazilian women from the state of Bahia. These women, who migrated to Rio de Janeiro from the Northeast, hosted the musical gatherings in which samba is said to have emerged. 212 McCann, Hello, Hello Brazil, 45.. 44. 213 Ibid., 44.

Brazil.”214 So how does a genre whose entire emergence has been riddled with censorship suddenly become a celebration of a Brazilian essence? Certainly, the genre did not represent a national essence when Donga officially registered the first samba “Pelo Telephone” in 1916-

1917.215 It happened as a gradual cross-class social process. McCann reflects on this process:

The spread of this conviction from a few local voices to a national choir depended on a massive transformation in the understanding of Afro-Brazilian cultural heritage, as well as the growth of a music industry capable of disseminating its products throughout Brazil. The early attributions of national essence to maxixe indicate that this transformation did not emerge suddenly out of a vacuum in the early 1930s: the seeds of samba’s consecration were planted early in the century, before the genre itself had cohered in any meaningful ways.216

With the advent of samba, we see that the process of its solidifying as a genre was as much social as it was political. Musicologist and cultural critic Robert Walser’s work Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, reminds us of the ways in which musical genres have always enmeshed into larger political structures. “Music has always been supported by the interests and patronage of particular social groups and enmeshed in institutional politics, mechanisms of distribution, and strategies of promotion.”217 This was no different for samba. Popular imagery for the emergence of samba harkens to the morro, the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro. This is because of the co-optation of the state’s (Getúlio Varga’s) agenda of promoting the idea of a Brazilian racial democracy. The logic was as follows: if samba is celebrated by the state for its national essence, and it is a genre that is exclusively associated with black communities, then we hold evidence that afro-Brazilian culture has been integrated into a national consciousness at a level where racial democracy is incontestable. This ideology

214 Ibid., 43. 215 Schreiner, Música Brasileira, 102. 216 McCann, Hello, Hello Brazil, 45. 217 Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993), xii.

86 was very much state-sponsored. In ethnomusicologist Andrew Connell’s PhD dissertation, he discusses the ways in which the state intervened in popular culture as a means to produce a nationalist sentiment:

While Vargas was said to have an unassuming public presence, he had an astute understanding of the power of popular culture. During his regime the state took an unprecedented role in the production and distribution of culture, instituting vigorous media censorship. Opposing voices were repressed. Samba and carnaval became tools in the manipulation of Brazilian nationalist sentiment.218

During samba’s advent in the 1930s, and with now increasing sponsorship by the government, the government imposed new rules to the samba parades, including the requirement to perform sambas with national themes, promoting the folkloric idea that samba was of the favela.219 Samba’s notion of authenticity is itself “invented and cultivated.”220 In fact, “the poor black inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro favelas did not create samba in isolation from the rest of the inhabitants of Brazilian society, that [sic] people of other classes, other races, even other nationalities participated in the process, if only as active spectators who encouraged musical performances.”221 Samba’s construction happened in the morro, in the cidade, on the radio, and with state sponsorship.

In Charles A. Perrone and Christopher Dunn’s chapter “Chiclete com Banana” in

Brazilian Popular Music & Globalization, they discuss the globalization of Brazilian popular music. Perrone and Dunn acknowledge that in Getúlio Varga’s regime, samba would be co-opted

218 Andrew Mark Connell "Jazz Brasileiro? Música Instrumental Brasileira and the Representation of Identity in Rio De Janeiro" (PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 2002), 55. 219 McCann, Hello, Hello Brazil, 60. 220 Vianna, The Mystery of Samba, 15. 221 Vianna, The Mystery of Samba, 16.

87 to “sing the praises of a unified, harmonious, and hard-working nation.”222 This was done in part by the fortification of the Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda (DIP), that held institutional control over the press by upholding censorship practices. Further impact was also done by the

Varga administration’s creation of “A Hora do Brasil” (The Brazilian Hour) in 1935: “mandating that all stations air it each night between 7 and 8 P.M.” Combining news, political speeches, and propaganda, with music performed by popular artists such as Francisco Alves and Carmen

Miranda, “A Hora do Brasil” reached up to two-thirds of all Brazilian households.223

As a genre, samba is historically implicated in propagating the idea of racial democracy in Brazil. The propagation of this “myth of racial democracy” is present in both popular and official discourses around samba. The effect of this history, this construction of a myth around samba, is that it deflected race-consciousness dissent.224 Maracatú, maxixe, lundu, and samba each have sonic memories. The sound of samba connects us to its history of resistance and the censorship practices that have been ever-present in its history. At the same time, these sounds are palimpsestic: their sonic memories also convey sounds of the lundu, the batuques, the slave gatherings, and the history of a people. The imagery of the palimpsest brings to mind how these histories are dependent of each other, and that their presentations are multi-layered, and this reading can bring us to a nuanced understanding of Rhythmetron.

222 Charles A. Perrone and Christopher Dunn “Chiclete com Banana” in Brazilian Popular Music & Globalization ed. Charles A. Perrone and Christopher Dunn (New York: Routledge Press, 2002), 12. 223 Connell, "Jazz Brasileiro?,” 56. 224 Perrone and Dunn, “Chiclete com Banana,” 26.

CHAPTER FIVE. RHYTHMETRON PERFORMANCE AND LINEAGE

Before last Friday I had never seen a black ballet dancer. I could not even imagine black people dancing classical ballet.

– Cynthia Bellamy, Bay State Banner

In this chapter I will look at the performance history of Rhythmetron with the Dance

Theatre of Harlem. Rhythmetron foreshadowed a lineage of hybridity within the Dance Theatre of Harlem’s repertoire. With this in mind, I will also discuss a select group of ballets in the company’s repertoire that exemplify this trend.

In 1967, Arthur Mitchell arrived in Rio de Janeiro on a cultural mission with Gloria

Contreras, a Joffrey ballet dancer, to organize and direct Brazil’s new Companhia Nacional de

Ballet. This was funded by the U.S Department of State in agreement with Brazil’s Ministry of

Education and culture.225 Throughout 1967, Arthur Mitchell was introduced to Rio de Janeiro’s culture scene as he worked to create the first federally funded classical ballet company in Brazil.

This work was funded through the support of the Brazilian and American governments (although we will learn that Arthur Mitchell was not fully paid). As early as 1967, we see Arthur Mitchell and Gloria Contreras’ cultural presence in an ad placed in the Rio de Janeiro newspaper the

Correio Da Manhã. It reads as follows:

Teatro Municipal, Saturday the 18th at 20:45 – Ballet – Arthur Mitchell and Glória Contreras with the Companhia Nacional de Ballet – Municipal Theatre Orchestra – conductor: Nelson Nilo Hack – This is the first classical ballet company funded by the federal government, boasting the highest level of artistry, thanks to the excellent national

225 Lynn Garafola “Arthur Mitchell: Harlem Ballet Trailblazer,” Rare Book and Manuscript Library, (New York, NY, Columbia University), Accessed on March 1, 2020. https://exhibitions.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/mitchell/arthur-mitchell- artist/timeline

elements, and the exquisite technique of the guest artists. – Tickets available at the box office of the Municipal Theatre, at the following prices…226

EXAMPLE 5.1 Correio da Manhã, Newspaper Clipping.

227

This shows that Arthur Mitchell had an impact on the cultural landscape of Rio de Janeiro within the first year of his arrival in Brazil. By the year of 1968, Arthur Mitchell was going back and forth between New York and Rio de Janeiro every other week. During this time, while juggling a busy professional life between the two cities, he started working at the St. James Presbyterian

Church at 141st St. and Nicholas Ave. in Harlem. There he directed an after-school program, a

226 “Teatro Municipal, Companhia Nacional de Ballet” Correio da Manhã, March 14, 1967. newspaper clipping, Biblioteca Nacional, Accessed: March 5, 2020. http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/Hotpage/HotpageBN.aspx?bib=089842_07&pagfis=805 18&url=http://memoria.bn.br/docreader# 227 Ibid.

90 division of the Dorothy Maynor’s Harlem School for the Arts, and it is here that his idea for the

Dance Theatre of Harlem would blossom.228

It was also during this time, but back in Rio de Janeiro, that he was asked to direct and choreograph new works for another dance company, the Teatro Novo do Rio de Janeiro. This venture, unlike the last, was not state sponsored, but instead had the funding of a private business man.229 It was for this company that he created the work Rhythmetron, as well as Biosfera, two ballets written by Marlos Nobre. Arthur Mitchell said on his work in Brazil:

When the Brazilian government asked for a cultural exchange, they sent me there, to Brazil, to create the first national ballet company. I went over there with Gloria Contreras and Suzanne Ames. I was supposed to just direct but I ended up dancing as well. We inaugurated the brand new Theatre Castro Alves in Bahia, a gorgeous Theatre. Unfortunately, at the end of the Brazilian president’s term, the new administration didn’t pay, but we were such a success anyways that I was asked to come back. Paulo Ferrare, whom I call the Brazilian Lincoln Kirsten – he’s in shipping, salt mining, all that - bought a theatre and a company of dancers. During this past season I was commuting back and forth every two weeks, a nine hour flight.230

Rhythmetron was first premiered in the Teatro Novo do Rio de Janeiro, with the private sponsorship of Paulo Ferrare. The “intersection of a series of coincidences,” as Nobre called them, were the circumstances under which Rhythmetron was premiered on June 11, 1968 by the

Companhia Brasileira de Ballet of Teatro Novo in Rio de Janeiro by the theatre’s 31 newly contracted dancers.231 This premiere performance would be the first of many performances of

Rhythmetron all over the world in the upcoming two decades.

228 Jennifer Dunning, “A Dancer Who Had a Dream” New York Times, April 14, 1974. Accessed: March 6, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/1974/04/14/archives/a-dancer-who-had-a- dream-a-dancer-who-had-a-dream.html 229 Marlos Nobre, email correspondence with the composer, June 6, 2019. 230 Ric Estrada, “Three Leading Negro Artists, and How They Feel about Dance in the Community,” Dance Magazine, Vol. 42, No. 11, November, 1968. 231 Garafola, Lynn, “Arthur Mitchell: Harlem Ballet Trailblazer.”

On one of his last trips to Rio de Janeiro in his cab ride to the airport, Mitchell heard the news of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination.232 At that moment, he decided to stop focusing on his work abroad and focus on the place where he grew up, the New York borough of Harlem.

The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968 triggered the epiphany that prompted Mitchell to change course and begin the process that would spark a cultural sea change with the creation of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, although he did not immediately give up his connection with the Brazilian ensemble, even hoping for a time that collaboration with his new American group might be possible.233

Arthur Mitchell returned to New York City. Influenced by his work with the Dorothy Maynor

School, Mitchell opened a classical dance school in Harlem, and subsequently a professional dance company. In the wake of the civil rights movement, Arthur Mitchell’s channelization of his professional experience into liberatory educational practices is moving. Arthur Mitchell opened the Dance Theatre of Harlem with the intent of opening up a space for black performers in classical ballet. After all, during his time with the New York City ballet he had been the only

African-American dancer. Rhythmetron thus surged during a critical career change in Arthur

Mitchell’s life. At this point in his life, he began looking outward, into the ways he could positively influence the lives of others through dance. Since Arthur Mitchell had recently choreographed Rhythmetron and the performing rights to other ballets were very expensive (he would later get the rights to the Ballanchine ballets), he would consequently program his newly choreographed work Rhythmetron, with his new professional dance company, the Dance Theatre of Harlem.

232 “Arthur Mitchell: Strike a Pose:” Independent, March 21, 2004. Accessed March 6, 2020. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre- dance/features/arthur-mitchell-strike-a-pose-65534.html 233 Ric Estrada, “Three Leading Negro Artists.”

I will now bring our attention to the noteworthy performances of Rhythmetron by the

Dance Theatre of Harlem during a span of over two decades. Most of these are listed on

Columbia University’s website under the special collection entitled “The Arthur Mitchell

Letters.” I have extracted any mention of a performance of Rhythmetron from the database as seen on Appendix B.

I also point out that the timeline from the Columbia University Archives is not exhaustive, and although many performances are listed, not all include repertoire, as seen with the 1981 Japan tour. In this timeline, they mention that the Dance Theatre of Harlem toured

Japan “under the auspices of the Nippon Cultural Centre, performing in Tokyo, Osaka, and

Kobe, Nov 13-19, 1981.”234 There is no mention of the repertoire of this tour on the timeline, but we can find more information in the programs available in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Columbia University. There I compiled the following information about the Japan performances: The Dance Theatre of Harlem prepared two programs to perform in Japan of which they performed program B only once and program A in 7 other performances.

Rhythmetron opened program A, which was performed in the Sun Plaza in Tokyo five different times, in Kyoto at the Kyoto Kaitan Dai-ichi Hall, and in Kobe at the Kobe Bunka Hall. 235 In my interview with Marlos Nobre he also relates the following:

In one of my trips something interesting happened. I was in Australia, in Sydney, and I went to dinner after my concert, and everyone there already knew of me as the composer of the ballet Rhythmetron, because Mitchell’s Dance Theatre of Harlem had performed there prior to my visit.236

234 Ibid. 235 “Arthur Mitchell: Harlem’s Ballet Trailblazer.,” Programs and Playbills, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York., NY. Accessed March 1, 2020. https://exhibitions.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/mitchell/dance-theatre-of- harlem--compa/programs-and-playbills 236 Marlos Nobre, email correspondence with the composer, June 2019.

One can gather from this notoriety enjoyed by Nobre during this time that the Dance

Theatre of Harlem most likely performed the piece quite often during the 1970s and 1980s, and that it was at times (if not frequently) programmed in their overseas engagements. In a phone conversation with one of the Dance Theatre of Harlem dancers from the 1980s, Lorraine Graves, she mentioned that she performed the role of the high priestess in Rhythmetron throughout the

1980s.237

Rhythmetron is also present in many of the Dance Theatre of Harlem’s educational efforts, as seen in the 1973 PBS special released by McGraw-Hill. Here Arthur Mitchell introduces Rhythmetron to a group of public school children. In this educational effort, Arthur

Mitchell sought to bring the language of classical ballet to public school children. By relating classical ballet techniques to modern “folk” dances, Mitchell tries to break down classical ballet’s elitism. Here he introduces the ballet to a group of school kids in New York City:

Now what we’d like to show you for the last style, it’s basically the style that Dance Theatre is working for, here we take African, Jazz, and modern movements and combine them with the classical technique so you get a totally different look, line, and style. But just before we go into that I always like to go in the side and watch the audience and also watch the dancer’s naturally, because many times, in particular for the fellas – oh ballet, I don’t know anything about ballet – but ballet is nothing but a terminology – it’s any sequence steps put together will become a ballet, and it also is a style of dancing, and what we’ve taken is taken many social dances, folk dances, and refined them to their furthest points…238

237 Lorraine Graves, phone conversation with the dancer in the Fall of 2017. 238 Dance Theatre of Harlem, “Rhythmetron: The Dance Theatre of Harlem with Arthur Mitchell” Capital Cities Communications and McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973. Accessed: March 1, 2020. https://archive.org/details/rhythmetronthedancetheatreofharlemwitharthurmitchell

Mitchell continues to elaborate on how ballet is similar to dances the kids are familiar with, but with a different (classical) technique, bringing classical ballet into a reality to which the children can relate.

Now what we’d like to do is show you the last movement of a ballet called Rhythmetron. Now I’ll tell you the idea of the ballet, it’s an abstract version of an African ritual and the last movement, which you will see, is where the dancers come in – in almost a trancelike state, and they start to walk, and the music accelerates and gets faster and faster and it’s almost like the dancers go into a state of trance and they’re gonna dance on and on and on. It’s for a 33 percussion instrument score by the young Brazilian composer Marlos Nobre, so what we’d like to do for you know is a ballet called Rhythmetron.239

What is notable about Mitchell’s explanation to the children is the connections he makes with hybridity – pointing out the mixture of styles between jazz, abstract art, and “African” music - and ultimately the way he links everything back to an imagined notion of Africa. What is also telling is how he mentions that Rhythmetron is in a style the “Dance Theatre of Harlem is working for.” This foreshadows works such as Dougla, and Creole Giselle, which became staples of their repertoire - works whose use of hybrid subjects carve out a space for the black body in classical ballet. A clearer explanation of how these works function within the DTH’s repertoire, and how it relates to Rhythmetron, is discussed later in this paper.

I would now like to draw our attention back to Essence magazine’s 1972 review of

Rhythmetron. This comes from the very early years of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, when they were still carving out a space for themselves as a school and as a company, both within the ballet world but also amongst from the black community. The article reflects a sentiment (at least partially) of the black community. In the article Morton asks the black community to reflect:

What is the role of a black classical ballet company in the twentieth century? How can we get

239 Ibid.

95 black investors to pay attention? As Essence magazine is a historically black publication, it positions itself in dialogue with the African American community. Morton’s article reflects further on the novelty of a black ballet company:

A Black dance company that works within the realm of ballet is not so far out of sight, as long as the artists do not become preoccupied with the rigid rules of Euro-ballet, but instead allow their natural Blackness to express itself. The latter is exactly what goes down when the Dance Theatre of Harlem performs, you aren’t a passive member of the audience, watching and waiting to clap politely at the end of a polite performance. No, with this company the audience is involved, is drawn to the stage, is a party to each leap… each pivot… each action. And, the living, breathing humanness of it all with the pretty girls smiling at their handsome partners – not the usual plastic, emotionless faces characteristic of many white ballets. It is an experience of Blackness.240

Essence magazine ultimately recognizes that something different is happening with the Dance

Theatre of Harlem, that “Blackness” (capital “B”) is being expressed, and the writer asks the black community (particularly investors) to pay attention. Morton connects this notion of blackness to the sonic presence of the instruments:

When Patricia Ricketts, Lydia Abarca, Walter Raines and the rest of the company perform ‘Rhythmetron’ to the music of Brazilian composer Marlos Nobre, you’ll know what I mean. Mitchell’s choreography, plus percussion – gongs, drums and bells, and the free exotic motions of the dancer-priestess all shout of Africa! Africa! Africa! And the Blacks in the audience are exalted and warm all over.241

The gongs, bells, drums, and percussion are acknowledged in making a connection to blackness, further connecting the ballet’s sonic world to black identity – here we see a manifestation that this sonic world departs from a theoretical basis of anthropophagy and genre studies – and in fact blackness is translated to an audience and to critics. Morton makes us aware of the sonic elements (percussion, gongs, drums, and bells) that help bring forth such imagery.

240 Morton, “The Dance Theatre of Harlem,” 58. 241 Morton, “The Dance Theatre of Harlem,” 58.

Cynthia Bellamy of the Bay State Banner of Boston wrote the following of Rhythmetron in 1971:

Before last Friday I had never seen a Black ballet dancer. I could not even imagine black people dancing classical ballet. Somehow, classical ballet brought to mind a vision of aristocratic Europe. So when the Dance Theatre of Harlem, the all-black classical ballet company under the direction of Arthur Mitchell, stepped on the Loed stage, it was an exciting and inspiring awakening… The final and most exciting dance of the evening was “Rhythmetron,” made of two words, rhythm and meter. The dance presents an abstracted tribal ritual in three parts – The preparation, The Chosen One and Rite. The dance began with Patricia Ricketts standing alone in center stage. She was draped in a long robe which flowed from her shoulders almost to the full extent of the stage. Slowly, wires lift the robe up and out of sight. The priestess is now dressed in a brown leotard. Finally she begins to move, really move!... Beautiful. When the performance was over there was several minutes of applause. Arthur Mitchell came out to take a bow with the company. And I left, hoping they would come back to Boston.242

Not only does Bellamy’s article give the Dance Theatre of Harlem a great review in one of their first touring seasons, but it illustrates how blackness was central to decodifying the performance. “I could not even imagine black people dancing classical ballet.”243 With this background, the Dance Theatre of Harlem started carving out a space for the black body in classical ballet, redefining for audiences, critics, and through their educational efforts even school children, the spaces in which the black body could excel. At the heart of this effort is

Arthur Mitchell’s engagement with hybrid subjects. Rhythmetron’s inherent hybridity was central to this discourse. Rhythmetron’s hybrid identity would also foreshadow hybridization practices upheld by the company in many of the works they would put on throughout the years in subsequent ballets.244 As said by dance scholar Dr. Carrie Gaiser, “Mitchell's discursive framing of hybrid technique fused white ballet steps and black body in such a way that positioned DTH

242 Cynthia Bellamy, "Black Ballet is Beautiful," Bay State Banner, 1971, sec. VI. 243 Ibid. 244 More detail on this will be shown in the final chapter.

97 on the cutting edge of ballet.”245 Dance Theatre of Harlem would perform works choreographed by various choreographers, but only a few of these were originally choreographed by Mitchell himself, another marker that set Rhythmetron apart from the DTH repertoire.

In the summer of 2019 I had the opportunity to visit Washington D.C to watch the Dance

Theatre of Harlem in their fiftieth season at the Kennedy Center, and also to visit the National

Museum of African American History and Culture where there is a section dedicated to the

Dance Theatre of Harlem. The trip materialized for me what I had intellectually understood, that the company that started in a church in Harlem made its way into the cultural memory of a nation. This is important in understanding the cultural gravitas of the DTH. The Dance Theatre of Harlem’s program for their fiftieth season included Glinka’s Valse Fantasie, featuring

Ballanchines’ choreography, Dianne McIntyre’s Change, Claudia Schreiner’s Passage, and

Geoffry Holder’s Dougla. The program highlighted main themes in DTH’s repertoire, an acknowledgment to tradition (the Ballanchine ballet), new innovative works (Holder and

Schreiner’s work), and their continued use of hybridity (Holder’s Dougla). Dougla tells a story of the Caribbean wedding ceremony of the Dougla, Trinidadian people who are mixed Indian and African descent. This type of hybridization was foreshadowed by the ballet Rhythmetron, so

I will briefly touch upon the importance that hybrid subjects came to hold in DTH’s repertoire. I will follow with a brief glimpse into how hybridity was used by DTH’s ballets Dougla and

Creole Giselle in order to get a glimpse of the labor that DTH sought out with hybridized subjects.

245 Carrie Gaiser, "Caught Dancing: Hybridity, Stability, and Subversion in Dance Theatre of Harlem's Creole "Giselle," Theatre Journal 58, no. 2 (2006): 288.

The ballet Dougla:

Drawing inspiration from the fusion of Trinidadian Indians and Africans, Holder created a rousing piece for the Dance Theatre of Harlem that speaks with spiritual authority, and the revival of the 1974 work was a huge hit. Anthony Santos served as something of a shaman, leading what amounts to a series of processionals that vibrated with power. The women were costumed in traditional Indian garb with an Islands flair while the men were attired in African tribal wear. Their bouncing scarlet pompoms lent an avian quality to the dancing that enhanced the ritual nature of the work. It’s one of those rare pieces that everyone should see.246

Dougla, one of DTH’s most celebrated works throughout its career, is a continuance of DTH’s engagement with hybridity. Another notable work is DTH’s Creole Gisele. In Creole Gisele,

Arthur Mitchell tries to address the “critical catch-22” encountered by African American dancers at the time. That if they presented “racially specific” dances, their recognition would be limited, but if they staged works deemed appropriate by white artists they “risked being labeled as imitative.”247 Arthur Mitchell addressed this by pointing out that the American School of ballet was already hybridized, pointing to Ballanchine, whose work in indebted to African to a wide variety of African American dance.248

Here was one solution to the critical Catch-22: African Americans dancing Balanchine ballets could not be called derivative or imitative artists, since Balanchine technique at its base was already informed by African American dance forms; nor could DTH be pigeonholed as ethnic, given the centrality of Balanchine ballets (which were still read as white by the critics) to their repertoire. Positing hybridity at the level of ballet technique thus helped establish the validity of African American participation.”249

Arthur Mitchell changes the setting to the antebellum South and presents the classical ballet Giselle as Creole Giselle in which “this invocation of biological and cultural mixture

246 Andrew Blackmore-Dobbyn, “Dance Theatre of Harlem: Beauty is in the Eye of Holder” Bachtrack, April 9, 2018, Accessed on March 1, 2020. https://bachtrack.com/review-dance-theater-harlem-city-center-new-york-city-april-2018 247 Gaiser, "Caught Dancing,” 273. 248 Ibid. 249 Ibid., 273-274.

99 through the word ‘creole’ signaled the centrality of hybridity as Creole Giselle’s chosen mode of negotiating ballet’s racial divide.”250 I believe similar negotiations were at play with the use of hybridity in Rhythmetron, a negotiation between the fine lines of exoticism, appropriation, stability, and subversiveness. Gaiser reminds us that: “The complexities of performing blackness and exploitative colonial contexts with which it is associated, the term “hybridity” ultimately carries an unavoidable resonance that renders perpetually incomplete its application as a liberating construct. The limited application of hybridity… resides not so much in questions of exploitative globalization, or naïve celebrations by privileged First World Scholars, but in the legacy of racism that necessitates the rubric of hybridity as a mode of cultural negotiation.”251

Arthur Mitchell was negotiating the legacy of racism through the use of hybridity. In this manner he juggled with the legacy of colonialism, a legacy and a history of censorship and exclusion. By asserting hybridity he asserts a sense of belonging, while simultaneously negotiating and redefining the expectations of the black body.

250 Ibid. 270. 251 Gaiser, "Caught Dancing,” 289.

100

CHAPTER SIX. CONCLUSION

In 2018, I prepared the music from Rhythmetron for a performance at the Percussive Arts

Society International Convention. This was to be featured in one of their Focus Day concerts, a series of concerts throughout the four-day conference that focuses on contemporary works for percussion. The theme of the 2018 Focus Day concerts was “Forgotten Treasures.” These concerts were to feature works for percussion that have historically, for some reason or other, not received the attention they deserve by the percussion community. I had already begun my research on this document by the time the organizing committee announced the theme for the conference and asked for submissions from the international percussion community. I am grateful for my advisor, Dr. Daniel Piccolo, who encouraged me to submit an entry for a performance slot featuring myself as the director of the BGSU Percussion Ensemble.

Fortunately, the organizing committee accepted our submission, and through the support of the

College of Musical Arts at Bowling Green State University we were able to perform at the conference on November 15, 2018. My experience at PASIC was a glimpse into the way this particular institution, the Percussive Arts Society, attempted to address exclusionary historicizations. It also made me reflect on how these same regulatory censorship practices, similar practices to the ones that shaped the musical genres of samba and the maracatú, find their way into contemporary situations.

As our mid-morning performance came to a close, I was approached by an influential educator, performer and member of the percussion community. In our brief interaction, he let me know that (1.) he had heard about this piece for many, many years and that (2.) it was very simplistic and he wished to never had to hear it again. His comments clarified for me (I did not ask – he went out of his way to be heard) that he was displeased by the aesthetics of what had

101 just been presented. I brushed this comment off at this time and did not think too much of it, and continued my day, celebrating with my peers on our accomplishments—for most of us it was our very first time performing at PASIC. I received praises from other colleagues, and the experience of conducting a piece of music that has a special connection to my home country, and in particular to the city of Rio de Janeiro (I lived in Rio de Janeiro for 8 years of my life), was an important milestone.

French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste articulates the ways taste is asymmetrically influenced by class, and that patterns of cultural production are determined by socio-economic structure.252 Music critic Carl

Wilson’s book Let's Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste is an interesting read in which the author critiques himself, and the field of musical criticism in general, for being rooted in the ways aesthetics and class act in the formation of cultural judgements. 253 These are only two selected examples of how taste and class act in tandem as determining factors about what we deem culturally valuable. This is an entire field of research that I certainly do not intend to oversimplify. I provide these examples to illustrate the importance of the aforementioned post- performance interaction. While it may be simpler to set aside issues of “personal taste,” that individual’s perspective, particularly as an influential member of the percussion community, depicts the ways in which methods of gatekeeping are upheld.

The use of the word “simplistic” to describe something such as a work of art harkens back to the familiar and patronizing Orientalist practice of essentializing non-Western subjects.

252 Pierre Bourdieu Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.) 253 Carl Wilson, Let's Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (New York: Continuum, 2007.)

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In a perhaps subconscious effort to announce the supremacy of a particular aesthetic (in this case white Euro-American), such censorship practices make their way into our programming and educational practices. What is also telling is that this particular program was included in the

Focus Day events, an event that mainly features contemporary works for percussion. Perhaps this person’s reaction was due to the fact that the work was not relegated into one of the “world” music events, but that it somehow it snuck its way into the realm of the contemporary – into the realm of the “highbrow.”

Furthermore, if relative simplicity is a measure by which we say there is a lack of sophistication in musical structure, (according to my critic, this was the reason Rhythmetron displeased him) – that is, if structure is where sophistication is embedded - what would we say about Earle Brown’s graphic scores, John Cage’s chance processes, Pauline Oliveiro’s deep listening, or even minimalism? If we consider Steve Reich’s music - Clapping Music, in particular - whose pattern is but one ghosted note away from a Yoruba bell pattern, how could we consider that to be more musically complex, or more refined? Or what about James Tenney’s frequently programmed Having Never Written a Note for Percussion, whose entire premise lies on the extended crescendo and decrescendo of a single note (I often perform this work myself on the gong, for instance)? In its simplicity, audience members are able to focus on the complexities of the instrument’s timber. Simplicity of form opens up our ears to other sonic complexities.

Considering the cultural capital that Reich’s, Tenney’s, Oliveiro’s, and the aforementioned composers’ music holds, one can then come to the conclusion that simplicity alone is not the reason for such exclusions, and so we must acknowledge that there are other systems at work.

Nor do I agree, for that matter, that Rhythmetron’s structural construction or harmonic presentations is simple.

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In his DMA document “Development of the Percussion Ensemble Through the

Contributions of Latin-American Composers Amadéo Roldán, José Ardévol, Carlos Chávez, and

Alberto Ginastera,” John Richard Hall attempts to redefine and rediscover anew parts of our history, and to tell stories that haven’t yet been told. Hall focuses on the historical exclusions of

Latin American composers from the Western canon. 254 To quote the author: “Latin American composers continue to be marginalized and their contributions unrecognized.”255 Hall engages with racist reasoning for the exclusion of such repertoire (such as the omission of Amadeo

Roldan’s influence in the percussion ensemble genre in The New Grove Dictionary) as unwarranted.256 Hall comments “ Milhaud is praised for incorporating Brazilian popular music into his Saudades do Brazil. At the same time, skillful Latin American composers are ignored or disdained for turning into their native cultures for inspiration.”257 It seems that the use of

“folkloric” material is only acceptable in the hands of the Euro-American composer. Through colonial discourse, the Latin-American composer is relegated to a very specific way in which he is allowed to engage with popular and folk culture. These characterizations of a hegemonic discourse, this fixed manner in which the Latin American composer is expected to engage with popular and folk cultures, is a shadow of the lasting imprint colonialism left in the Americas.

This stereotype becomes a strategy to frame cultural othering as “a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place,’ already known, and

254 John Richard Hall, "Development of the Percussion Ensemble through the Contributions of the Latin American Composers Amadeo Roldán, José Ardévol, Carlos Chávez, and Alberto Ginastera. " (DMA diss., The Ohio State University, 2008), 2. 255 Ibid. 256 Ibid., 81. 257 Ibid., 81.

104 something that must be anxiously repeated.”258 Perhaps my critic interpreted our performance of

Rhythmetron as a Latin American composer, once again, feeding into familiar colonial expectations. The anxious repetition of the expectations placed on the Latin-American composer

– this is what music from this part of the world sounds like. In this reading, the use of folk and popular becomes an uncritical engagement. However, as I have demonstrated, Marlos Nobre was not merely repeating rhythms and motifs borrowed from a culture that was different from his own. On the contrary, his engagement with samba and maracatú express a unique existential consciousness, a consciousness that expresses his unique positioning as a postcolonial subject, a positioning which reflects an authentic brasilidade.

In a discussion on the discipline of anthropology, cultural and social anthropologists

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús and Jemima Pierre remind us of the following:

Often, our analyses are described as lacking “nuance” or “sophistication.” These claims are themselves constructed through the logic of white supremacy, as they are usually linked with the implication that “real theory” is about mastering and referencing a select group of white French or German poststructuralist (cisgender) male scholars (Foucault, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Derrida, and so on). It is here that the production of anthropological scholarship – how we cite and discuss our practices, writing and critiques of each other’s work – is implicated in furthering white supremacy.259 I argue that the same systems are in place in the Euro-American model of higher musical education. I would replace De-Jesús and Pierre’s implications of “real theory” for “real music,” or music that has been deemed (or deems itself) worthy of the eyes of Western scholarship.

Furthermore, I argue that what we play, what we program, what we teach, and what we censor is implicated in furthering this supremacy. On locating such exclusionary practices, Aisha M.

Beliso-De Jesús and Jemima Pierre comment:

258 Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question: ‘The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse’,” in Twentieth Century Literary Theory, in Newton K.M. ed. (London: Palgrave, 1997), 293. 259Aisha M. Beliso‐De Jesús and Jemima Pierre, "Special Section: Anthropology of White Supremacy." American Anthropologist (2019). 6.

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A historicized understanding of global white supremacy therefore does not locate it as a relic of the past. Rather, global white supremacy points to a connected set of relations and logics that emerge at particular moments, in varying contexts, that persistently endure ‘through spectacular and mundane violences that reaffirm empire and the economic, social, cultural, and political power while continuing to uphold, globally, the dominant position of whiteness.260

The focus on the mundane is important, because it locates such violences not only in extraordinary occurrences, but in our everyday lives. “First, we must recognize that white supremacy is structural and pervasive. This means that it informs institutions, habits, laws, policies, representations, pleasures, desires, and so on.”261 By locating these silences that white supremacy instills in everyday life, we can also recognize that the remedy lies in the mundane, in quotidian practices.

Archives serve as a reservoir of our cultural memory, and there are political implications found in the guarding of certain cultural memories, or in the erasing of others. Arguably, one of the goals of these conferences is to share our work, and add to an ever-growing body of celebrated works for our instruments. In 2018, Brazil suffered a great loss with the burning down of the 200-year-old National Museum. The fire engulfed the building within an hour, and over

20-million artifacts were lost from the collection.262 Some items among the collection included the oldest skeleton in the Americas (the 12,000 year-old “Luiza”), a meteorite found in 1784, and numerous other pieces of Brazilian cultural memory.263 The museum was one of the most

260 Ibid., 4. 261 Ibid., 7. 262 Meilan Solly “Around 2,000 Artifacts Have Been Saved From the Ruins of Brazil’s National Museum Fire.” Smithsonian Magazine. February 15, 2019. Accessed March 1, 2020. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/around-2000-artifacts-have-been-saved-ruins- brazils-national-museum-fire-180971510/ 263 “Brazil Museum Fire: ‘incalculable’ loss as 200-year old Rio Institution Gutted” The Guardian. Accessed March 1, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/04/brazil- national-museum-fire-collection-destroyed-not-insured

106 important museums of natural history and anthropology in the Americas, and one of the most important in the world. Unfortunately, state sponsored negligence had an effect on our cultural memory, and much of what was lost is irreplaceable. Archives are power laden. The stories we choose to tell, the music we program, and what we choose to write about, all matter.

In his essay “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” anthropologist reflects on the ethnographer’s role in adding critically to the “consultable record of what man has said.” This is particularly striking to me when I think about the erasure of cultural memory – evidenced by the burning of the National Museum.

To look at the symbolic dimensions of social action--art, religion, ideology, science, law, morality, common sense--is not to turn away from the existential dilemmas of life for some empyrean realm of deemotionalized forms; it is to plunge into the midst of them. The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said.264

Thinking back to my performance at PASIC, as I approached the stage with mostly undergraduate students from the midwestern United States to perform Rhythmetron, the memory of the burning museum was on my mind, and in some sense I felt like I was resisting against the erasure of history. The study of this piece, its story catalogued in digital archives, safeguards an incredible story about a ballet, about the people involved, about their cultures - it encapsulates a moment in time. That moment in history will never come back, and even as some of our institutions are literally burned to the ground, there are gestures we make that add to our

“consultable records.” And yet, there is an immediacy to this work.

The museum was also the home to the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro’s anthropology department, housing numerous archives and research databases. 264 Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 16.

107

Geertz’s essay provides a valuable framework by positing that cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. “It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right.”265 Not all questions are to be answered. Some only receive gestures, and in these gestures we move towards perhaps another gesture: possibility. This “essentially contestable” schema is where deeper meanings can be found. In the experience – the research, the rehearsal, the performance, the presence of sound, this search for meaning – the place where I feel I have come closer to understanding philosopher’s Marcia Sá Cavalcante’s Sá’s “unspeakable language of the heart,” that which articulates a certain brasilidade:

Anthropophagic education does not seek to teach anything to anyone, not the colonizer, nor the colonized, neither the imperial forces nor their targets. Anthropophagic education exposes that difference is not opposition between here and there, between I and other, but a verb of dis-appropriation…In an extended sense, anthropophagy may be a knowledge that one may only know with the heart, the dynamics of this unspeakable language, a language of feeling/thinking, the language of a certain “brasilidade.”266

Brasilidade is that action, it is an unspeakable language of the heart. What else is this, if not a continuous resistance, a continuous decision to grow, to transform, to digest, and ultimately to regurgitate?

To understand the condition in which we find contemporary society, steeped in the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (to borrow critical race theorist bell hook’s phrase), it is necessary to excavate the mundane.267 It is necessary to dig deeper and reflect: What are the

265Ibid. 16. 266 Schuback, Olho a Olho. 45-46. All translations of this text are mine, not published in English. 267 “bell hooks, Cultural Criticism and Transformation,” DVD, directed by Sut Jhally (Northampton MA: Media Education Foundation, 1997).

108 exclusionary practices we uphold? Where do they come from? Where did we learn them? Such meditations on the origins of our biases are necessary in order to interrogate the ways in which we uphold and perpetuate those very biases. Ultimately, what anthropophagy shows is that there is value in the ways in which we experience the world. During my trip to Washington D.C. in

June of 2019, I was able to witness the cultural institution that the Dance Theatre of Harlem has become. It was one of those nights that I will never forget, and as a curious witness, I was focused on the audience’s reaction to the Dance Theatre of Harlem before, during, and after the concert. It was clear to me that something special was in the air. We were witnessing a path that was carved out by the courage of a single man, witnessing resistance, and witnessing the rewriting of history. As an artist, it was refreshing to be presented with actual proof of the power that is inherent in the arts, a power to unify and uplift. So, as we excavate these “mundane” injustices, it is also important to recognize that it does not render us a sort of cultural paralysis, but as shown in Arthur Mitchell’s life they can become catalysts for an authentic existential consciousness.

The personal biographies of the creators of tis ballet, Marlos Nobre and Arthur Mitchell, reflect their unique position in a postcolonial society. In Arthur Mitchell’s case, he deals with the legacy of colonialism by trying to systematically dismantle racial segregation in classical ballet through educational efforts in the Arts. With Marlos Nobre, his postcolonial position is seen in

Distinguished Professor and author, bell hooks is known to work in the intersectionality of race, capitalism and gender. “To me an important breakthrough, I felt, in my work and that of others was the call to use the term white supremacy, over racism because racism in and of itself did not really allow for a discourse of colonization and decolonization, the recognition of the internalized racism within people of color and it was always in a sense keeping things at the level at which whiteness and white people remained at the center of the discussion. In my classroom I might say to students that you know that when we use the term white supremacy it doesn't just evoke white people, it evokes a political world that we can all frame ourselves in relationship to.”

109 his unique compositional style that is not plagued with nationalist sentiment, but is a reflection of his own socio-political reality. The genres present in Rhythmetron (through sound) are multi- layered, and their superimposed meanings are just like the palimpsest parchment – effaced, yet lingering. Although the original text is not present and another has been superimposed, there remains a memory of its existence and resistance. Through Marlos Nobre’s use of the rhythmic structures of maracatú and samba, we are able to be transported through genre’s sonic memories.

Rhythmetron shows us that art can transport us to entirely different places, at times imagined and other times embedded in other historical grounds. It can bring us to the streets of Recife’s maracatú, or Rio de Janeiro’s Praça Onze samba parades, or to as Essence magazine exclaimed, to “Africa! Africa! Africa!”268

268 Morton, “The Dance Theatre of Harlem,” 58.

110

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APPENDIX A. MARLOS NOBRE INTERVIEW Marlos Nobre Interview Translated to English by Henrique Batista

Nobre: Dear Henrique, I’ve had a series of problems, the biggest one was the extraction of three infected teeth, something rather unpleasant, but I will try to answer the questions bellow, hugs, and I wish you the most success, always.

Batista: The ballet was written in Brazil and premiered by the ballet of the Teatro Novo in Rio de Janeiro?

Nobre: In reality the ballet of the Teatro Novo theater in Rio de Janeiro commissioned the piece. This group was formed with the name Companhia Brasileira de Ballet of Teatro Novo with Italian scenographer and theater director Gianni Ratto as its director, whom had settled in Brazil, at the time, for over 20 years. To direct the ballet dancers of this theater, they invited the North- American dancer and choreographer Arthur Mitchell, that came from New York, where he had founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem. My name came up, as a suggestion from Gianni Ratto himself, that wanted something new, with a new composer, a ballet company with new dancers, and a new and recognized choreographer. Everything was an intersection of a series of coincidences, between people who did not know each other (which was the case with Mitchell), and also many of the dancers, with people who did know each other like Gianni Ratto and some of the dancers of the Municipal Theatre. So, my ballet was not created for the Dance Theatre of Harlem, but obviously after everyone’s enthusiasm, and Arthur Mitchell went absolutely nuts with my music, the next step was the creation of the ballet in New York by DTH by Mitchell. The most curious part about the whole process is that Mitchel had already conceived the entire ballet without music! So, I participated in various sessions where the dancers danced the choreography created by Mitchell and from these annotations and observations I created the music. It was a very dangerous process for me: either I got it right or everything would go under! So I took everything down in notes and created Rhythmetron in three movements, The preparation, The Chosen One, and The Ritual, without any influence from Mitchell, but logically the memory of Stravinsky’s Rite in the chosen titles was obvious to me.

The magic moment, and very much anticipated was when Mitchell put my studio recording on and the dancers started the dancing choreography like angels. Everything came together, as by a miracle, the sounds of my music with Mitchell’s choreography. He was absolutely beside himself with the result and the dancers were incredibly vibrant as well. But in it, there was in that situation something very special, but also very dangerous for me: If the music was a flop, I would be put aside. The world premiere in the Teatro Novo in Rio de Janeiro was an absolute with the critics and the audience. Which was not very common with ballet premieres in Rio de Janeiro at the time. The ballet was performed for months in Rio de Janeiro, always sold out performances, a complete success. Nobre: Na realidade o ballet RHYTHMETRON foi encomenda a mim pelo Ballet do Teatro Novo no Rio de Janeiro. Este corpo foi criado com o nome da Companhia Brasileira de Ballet do Teatro Novo, sendo o diretor deste novo teatro o cenógrafo e diretor teatral italiano Gianni

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Ratto, radicado no Brasil na época ha mais de 20 anos. Para dirigir o novo corpo de baile deste teatro, foi então convidado o dançarino e coreógrafo norte-americano Arthur Mitchell, que veio de New York onde tinha começado lá, o Dance Theatre of Harlem. O meu nome surgiu, portanto, de uma sugestão do próprio Gianni Ratto que queria algo novo, com compositor novo, um ballet com gente nova e um coreógrafo novo e reconhecido. Tudo então foi a conjunção de uma série de coincidências, entre pessoas que não se conheciam (como era o caso do Mitchell) e também muitos bailarinos, com gente que se conhecia, como o Gianni Ratto e alguns bailarinos do Teatro Municipal. Então o meu ballet não foi criado para o Dance Theatre of Harlem. Mas obviamente depois do entusiasmo de todos, e do Arthur Mitchell ter ficado enlouquecido como minha música, o passo posterior foi a criação do ballet em New York pelo DTH do Mitchell. O mais curioso de todo este processo é que o Mitchell já tinha concebido todo o ballet sem a música! Eu então fui a diversas seções onde os bailarinos dançaram os passos criados pelo Mitchell e a partir destas anotações criei a música. Era um processo muito perigoso para mim: ou eu acertava tudo ou ia tudo abaixo. Então eu anotei tudo e criei Rhythmetron em três movimentos, A Preparação A Escolhida, O Ritual, sem qualquer influência nos títulos do Mitchell. Mas logicamente a lembrança da "Sagração” de Stravinsky nos títulos foi evidente para mim.

O momento mágico e tão esperado por todos foi quando o Mitchell colocou a minha gravação em estúdio da música e os bailarinos começar a dançar como anjos. Tudo se encaixava, como por milagre, o som da minha música e a coreografia de Mitchell. Ele ficou absolutamente enlouquecido com o resultado e os bailarinos vibravam como loucos também. Mas havia naquilo tudo uma situação muito especial e perigosa para mim: caso eu falhasse com a música, eu estaria posto de lado. A estréia mundial no Teatro Novo foi um estrondoso sucesso de público e de crítica e, o que era muito pouco usual com estreias no Rio de Janeiro de balés, o espetáculo ficou por meses seguidos em cartaz sempre com lotações esgotadas, um êxito total portanto.

Batista: Is there any documentation of the original production in Brasilia? Nobre: Unfortunately, I don’t have any documentation of the production in Brasilia, but maybe you are mixing things up a bit, because he original ballet was not by the National Ballet in Brasilia, but with the brand new company of TEATRO NOVO DO RIO DE JANEIRO, created by Gianni Ratto, with the sponsor of an important business man of the time that agreed to finance the entire thing. Something extremely rare in Brazil. At the time, I had never seen anything like it around here, a business man that backs a project like this, a black North American dancer- choreographer extremely famous as a dancers with the New York City Ballet and founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem a company exclusively of black dancers. Batista: Há alguma documentação da produção original com o Ballet Nacional em Brasilia? Nobre: Resposta: Infelizmente eu não tenho nenhuma documentação da produção em Brasilia, mas talvez você esteja fazendo certa confusão, pois a produção original do ballet não foi pelo

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Ballet Nacional em Brasilia, mas sim com o novíssimo Ballet do TEATRO NOVO DO RIO DE JANEIRO, criado pelo Gianni Ratto, com o patrocínio de um grande empresário da época que topou assumir toda a empreitada financeiramente. Algo realmente totalmente inédito no Brasil, este conjunto de coisas jamais vistas por aqui, um empresário que assume tal projeto, um bailarino e coreógrafo norte-americano negro e famosíssimo como bailarino do New York City Ballet e criador do novo Dance Theatre of Harlem exclusivamente de dançarinos negros. Batista: In the work, there are rhythmic cells that sound like a traditional maracatú, Was there any programmatic intention in the usage of this rhythm in your work? Nobre: I had no direct intention to this specific Brazilian rhythm, or samba, or any other for that matter. Miraculously, Mitchell’s choreography, which I annotated, aligned with the rhythm of certain percussive gestures that I assimilated in my youth, in this specific case, the maracatú of Recife. So, in creating the music for the ballet, I instinctively let myself be taken by the memory of the fundamental rhythms of my musical learnings in Recife, without any programmatic intentions, or any extra-musical inductions. In reality all the rhythms, the free rhythms created by the bodies in motion, and the Samba and Maracatú, were integrated in my memory in such way that they worked as a single unit. In other words, It was the sublime expression, through percussion, of the musical ideas that marked my creative mind since my infancy in Recife. Batista: Na obra há células rítmicas que soam como um maracatú tradicional, havia alguma intenção programática na escolha do maracatu como ritmo nessa obra? Nobre: Eu não tive qualquer intenção dirigida a este ou aquele rítmo brasileiro, específicamente, nem samba, nem Maracatu, nem qualquer outro. Milagrosamente os passos coreográficos do Mitchell que anotei batiam em sintonia com a rítmica de certos gestos percussivos que eu assimilei em minha infância, neste caso específico, o do Maracatu do Recife. Então ao criar esta música para este ballet, eu instintivamente me deixei levar pelas lembranças rítmicas fundamentais de minha formação musical no Recife, sem qualquer tipo de escolha programática, nem qualquer indução extramusical. Na realidade todos os rítmos, tanto os rítmos livres dos corpos em movimentos quanto as batidas do samba e do maracatu, estavam de tal forma integrados em minha mente que funcionavam como uma coisa só, ou seja, a expressão sublimada na percussão das ideias musicais que marcaram a minha mente criadora desde minha infância no Recife. Batista: The ballet is in three parts, The Preparation, The Chosen One, and The Ritual, Is there any programmatic influence from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring? Nobre: As I have mentioned, the Stravinsky influence was extremely natural in my music at that time, as it has been in other creative times for me as well. When I was 14 in Recife, I used to go the Discoteca Municipal, and there they had many recordings that one could listen to as a free public service, in booths that were isolated acoustically. I used to go there almost daily from when I was 15 until I was about 19 years old. There I was able to listen to all of Stravinsky’s ballets as well as Ravel, Debussy, Hindemith, and even Webern Schoenberg and Alban Berg, and

126 arriving at Stockhausen. Due to this, when I arrived in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in 1960, after I won the first place prize in Concurso Música e Musicos do Brasil with my trio for piano, violin and cello, I already knew more about the modernists than anyone in Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo at the time. At the time, when I met with Koellreutter in the Summer Festival courses in Teresópolis, and showed him all that I knew about modern and contemporary music, he asked me: “Boy, What planet have you come from? “and I said “From Recife”. O ballet esta divido em três partes, A preparação, A escolhida, O ritual, há alguma influencia programática com a Sagração da Primavera de Stravinsky? Resposta: Como eu disse esta influencia sobretudo de Stravinsky era extremamente natural em minha música naquele período como foi em outros períodos de minha criação própria. Eu aos 14 anos no Recife, frequentava a Discoteca Municipal e lá eles tinha gravações que podiam ser ouvidas como serviço público gratuito em cabines bem isoladas acusticamente. Eu era um frequentador quase diário, desde meus 15 anos aos 19 anos, e ali eu consegui ouvir todos os ballets de Stravinsky, além de Ravel, Debussy, Hindemith, e mesmo Webern, Schoenberg e Alban Berg, chegando a Stockhausen. Assim eu ao vir para o Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo em 1960, após ganhar o 1º Prêmio do Concurso Música e Músicos do Brasil com meu Trio para piano, violino e cello, eu sabia e conhecia mais sobre a música moderna e atual da época que todos os compositores jovens ou não do Rio e de São Paulo. Na época ao me encontrar com Koellreutter nos Cursos de Férias de Teresópolis e ao mostrar que conhecia tudo da música atual na época, ele me perguntou: "Rapaz e que planeta você veio"?.... e eu disse: "do Recife". Batista: How was your first meeting with Arthur Mitchell? Nobre: It was a very special meeting. He radiated vitality and a sort of verbal explosion, a rhythmic force even when he spoke. I didn’t speak English that well at the time, but we understood each other well, with little words, and a lot of music. When he first heard the recording of Rhythmetron for percussion, completely written off of his choreography (and not the contrary, which it seems to me, a first in History…) as he heard the recording, right after I left the studio with the musicians, he simply lost it. He immediately scheduled a session with the dancers, and everyone left dancing in the wildest happiness, everything fit in perfectly with the choreography created by Mitchell, it seemed miraculous. I was tense and extremely nervous, because if it failed, everything would’ve gone under for me, as I was very young still, I knew I would immediately be set aside, immediately left out of the game. It was a dangerous game, and I, in my fleeting youth, and extreme self-confidence, I didn’t even think of what could’ve happened. I knew everything was going to work out, and that’s how it was, Arthur went mad as well as all the dancers, directors, Ratto, everyone. It was a very special moment for me. It was really out of the ordinary, but as I have said, If I had failed, I would’ve been out of the game. Batista: Como que foi o seu encontro com o Arthur Mitchell? Nobre: Foi um encontro muito especial. Ele irradiava vitalidade e aquele tipo de explosão verbal, de força rítmica até mesmo no falar. Eu não era ainda muito versado em inglês, mas nos

127 entendíamos bem, com poucas palavras e muita música. Ao ouvir a primeira gravação do meu Rhythmetron para percussão baseado inteiramente na coreografia dele (e não o contrário, o que era, me parece, a primeira vez que isso acontecia na história da música...) ele ao ouvir esta gravação logo após minha saída do estúdio com os músicos, ele simplesmente "enlouqueceu". Marcou logo uma sessão com todos os bailarinos e colocou a gravação e todos saíram dançando, na mais louca felicidade, tudo se encaixando perfeitamente com os passos criados pelo Mitchell. Parecia um milagre, eu estava tenso e nervosíssimo, pois se eu tivesse errado, tudo teria ido por água abaixo e ainda jovem como era, eu sei que eu seria imediatamente colocado de lado, imediatamente eliminado do jôgo. Era um jôgo perigoso, e eu, na minha juventude fulgurante e auto-confiança desmedida que tinha em mim mesmo, eu sequer pensei pudesse acontecer. Eu tinha certeza que ia encaixar tudo perfeitamente e assim foi. Arthur "enlouqueceu" e assim foi com todos os dançarinos, diretores de cena, o Ratto, todos enfim. Foi um momento muito especial, muito fora do comum mesmo, mas como eu disse, se eu tivesse falhado eu estaria fora do jôgo Batista: Were you at the United States premiere? Nobre, Unfortunately, I was not. Arthur invited me at the time but I had a lot of trips planned to Europe at the time and I could not have gone to the USA for the premiere. But one time, I did go to New York, Mitchell was there, and he took me to see the company in Harlem, his creation. It was enormously moving for me, because, even though I loved world premiere by the Companhia Brasileira de Ballet, that company in New York, trained by Mitchell, with his iron hand and indomitable strength, was a revelation for me. That day I understood exactly what Mitchell wanted me to do with the music for his company. I will never forget it. After that, in one of my trips something interesting happened, I was in Australia, In Sydney, and I went to dinner after my concert, and everyone there already knew of me as the composer of the ballet Rhythmetron, because the Mitchell’s Dance Theatre of Harlem had performed there prior to my visit. Batista: Você estava na estreia da obra nos EUA? Nobre: Resposta: Não, infelizmente. O Arthur me convidou, eu na época tinha já muitas viagens para a Europa e não pude ver a estréia nos EUA. Mas uma vez sim, estive em New York, o Mitchell estava lá e me levou para ver o ballet pela companhia Harlem, a criação dele. Para mim o impacto foi enorme, pois mesmo adorando a Companhia Brasileira de Ballet que dançou a estreia mundial, aquela companhia de dançarinos de New York, treinados pelo Mitchell como mão de ferro e força indômitas, foi uma revelação para mim. Naquele dia eu senti, exatamente, o que o Mitchell queria que eu fizesse como música para a companhia dele, na realidade. Foi inesquecível. Depois em minhas viagens um fato interessante ia ocorrer: estava na Austrália, em Sidney, e fui a um jantar após meu concerto, e todo mundo lá simplesmente me conhecia já pelo Ballet Rhythmetron, pois o Harlem Ballet do Mitchell tinha se apresentado por lá com este ballet. Batista: How was Rhythmetron conceived?

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Nobre: Rhythmetron’s creative process had two phases: the first I tried to create the music itself, let’s say, free from the choreography. I ended up writing the entire first movement, I made a version for a few instruments, I showed it to Mitchell, he brought it to the dancers, and it was horrible because the music did not fit into the choreography he had already created. It was to be expected but at the time I had not realized yet what needed to be done. Only after this first failure, I threw out all my initial ideas and asked Mitchell “Can you make the dancers dance the choreography ten, twenty times.. and I will annotated all the rhythms in their feet.” He said “Is this possible….?” and I replied “I don’t know, let’s see”. It was a dangerous game. The premiere was scheduled, the dancers had learned the choreography already, I had to create music that fit in perfectly with the choreography, and at the same time had its own musical logic, its own structure, and autonomy. Only in this way would it work out. I had that epiphany and started taking notes on everything I saw, the accents on the feet, the rhythm on the bodies, the syncopation, the slow movement had an arch that went from a pianissimo to a fortissimo, the third movement that started slowly and gradually picked up rhythmic changes, arriving at an explosive sonic conclusion. I wrote everything down. I confess that I do not know how I managed to pull it off at the time, having never written a ballet before (but above all, having to write for a work that was already choreographed), Although these circumstances, I was able to, miraculously achieve a result that drove Arthur Mitchell to madness and left the dancers in the clouds. They danced like angels, and everything seemed like a miracle to me, the result went above and beyond what they expected. I can guarantee that it was a success from the very first moment they danced it. Nobre: Resposta: A concepção de Rhythmetron teve duas etapas: primeiro eu tentei criar uma música própria, digamos livre das marcações do ballet. Cheguei a escrever todo o primeiro movimento, fiz uma versão para poucos instrumentos, mostrei ao Mitchell, ele levou para o ballet dançar e foi horrível, pois a música não encaixava com o ballet previamente criado por ele. Isso era previsível mas eu não tinha e dado conta do que tinha de fazer. Só então, após este primeiro fracasso, eu retirei tudo de minha cabeça e disse ao Mitchell: você faz os bailarinos dançarem dez, vinte vezes e eu vou ter de anotar toda a rítmica dos pés deles no meu papel. Ele falou: "This is possible?..." eu somente disse: " Não sei, vamos ver". Era um jôgo perigoso. A estreia do ballet estava marcada, os bailarinos já dançavam uma coreografia prévia sem a música, e eu tinha de criar uma música que encaixasse perfeitamente com os passos do coreógrafo e que ao mesmo tempo tivesse uma lógica musical própria, uma estrutura própria, uma forma própria e autônoma. Somente assim daria certo. Eu tive então este estalo e anotei tudo, os acentos dos pés, os rítmos corporais, as síncopes, o movimento lento com o arco que ia do pianíssimo ao fortíssimo, e o movimento final que começava lento e pouco a pouco levava a mudanças rítmicas, desembocando na explosão sonora conclusiva. Anotado tudo eu, confesso que não sei como consegui fazer naquela época, não tendo jamais escrito para ballet (mas sobretudo tendo de escrever para um ballet já existente), eu apesar de tudo isso consegui milagrosamente um resultado que deixou Arthur Mitchell enlouquecido e os bailarinos na nuvens. Eles dançaram como anjos e aquilo tudo parecia um milagre, um resultado além do

129 esperado por todos. Posso garantir que foi um sucesso desde o primeiro momento que dançaram. Batista: Do you know if Arthur Michell had live professional musicians playing at every performance of you work? (Last week I watched them at the Kennedy Center and premiered a ballet written for 8 percussionists and they were playing ) Nobre: I know they had an excellent musician that was also a composer (I don’t remember her name right now), and when she received the score she studied it with a select group of 10 North- American percussionists that were the very best in New York City. Years later, I was in New York and went to a performance of Rhythmetron and it was fascinating. That night Gene Kelly was in the audience and he absolutely love the music and the ballet. It was very special for me. Batista: Você sabe se nas performances nos EUA com o Dance Theatre of Harlem se eles utilizavam músicos profissionais para tocarem as partes em todas as performances (Na semana passada eles estrearam um ballet para 8 percussionistas e eles estavam tocando no fosso)? Nobre: Resposta: Eu sei que eles tinham uma excelente musicista que era também compositora (não me lembro do nome dela agora) e ela ao receber minha partitura estudou com um grupo seleto de dez percussionistas norte-americanos que são a nata em New York. Alguns anos depois eu estive em New York e vi uma apresentação do ballet Rhythmetron e foi fascinante. Naquela noite estava presente o Gene Kelly que ficou enlouquecido com a música e o ballet. Foi algo muito especial para mim. Batista: Could you speak about the three movement structure of the ballet? The second movement is very unique, what was your inspiration for this sonic world? Nobre: First off, the ballet’s structure is in direct correlation with the choreographic structure invented by Mitchell. It’s very curious, but something I hadn’t really thought about was the global structure of the piece. It was already done, complete, by the choreographer and by the dancers. What I invented was very new to me, Create a sonic work for a pre-established set of moves. What I ended up creating was, the atmosphere of each movement. The second movement, as you mentioned is very rich, with a large timbral spectrum and its own atmosphere. As I have said, my point of departure was directly influenced by the impressions that the movements created in me. He imagined the ballet, and I imagined the music. It was as if the dancers’ movements created the music in my mind. The music took as a departure point the bodies in motion, the force that emanated from bodies in motion. It was all very new to me and I believe that creation always has a magical element that is impossible to describe in words. Batista: Você poderia falar sobre a estrutura de 3 movimentos do ballet? O segundo movimento é muito único, qual foi a sua inspiração para esse mundo de timbres? Nobre: Resposta: Em primeiro lugar estrutura de toda o ballet é um resultado direto da estrutura dos passos coreográficos inventados pelo Mitchell. É muito curioso, mas uma coisa que eu não tive de realmente pensar foi a estrutura global da peça. Ela já estava feita, completa, pelo

130 coreógrafo e pelos bailarinos. O que eu inventei foi, de forma muito inédita para mim, adequar a obra sonora à estrutura dos passos pré-estabelecidos. Naturalmente o que eu criei foi, isto sim, a atmosfera de cada movimento. O segundo movimento, como você fala é muito únicos com uma gama bastante rica de timbres e uma atmosfera muito própria. Eu, como disse, parti do "tempo" coreográfico para a música em si mesma. Então a minha inspiração foi diretamente um resultado da impressão que me causaram os movimentos coreográficos criados por Mitchell. Ele imaginou o ballet e eu imaginei a música a partir dele. Algo assim como se os movimentos coreográficos criassem em minha mente uma música em consequência deles, uma música que tomava como ponto de partida os movimentos corporais, a força que emanava dos corpos em movimento. Tudo foi muito novo para mim e creio que a criação sempre tem um aspecto "mágico" impossível de ser descrito em palavras Batista: What role does percussion play in your body of work? Nobre: It plays a fundamental role. As I have said: I was born and live until I was 12 years old on Rua de Sao Joao street, in downtown Recife, where, during carnaval, all the agremiacaoes would parade through my street, the caboclinhos, maracatus, frevos, I used to run through them, dancing, I would throw myself into the crowds, in the mass of people, above all, the negros and mulatos and mulatas that danced in a frenzy. That atmosphere was not something I observed, but lived intensely. My mother, many times would go after me like a mad woman in the streets asking for my whereabouts. I would sometimes be taken home by the hands of helpful negro women saying “I found this boy he is crazy about Maracatu!….” So that’s what it was, I was “crazy’ about Maracatu, and that’s the basic essence of my rhythmic formation, in its most intense, most elementary form. It’s this essence that to this day is the magical basis of my rhythmic formation. Abraços Marlos Nobre Rio de Janeiro, 06 de junho de 2019 Qual papel que a percussão brasileira faz em sua obra? Resposta: O papel é fundamental. Já disse antes: eu nasci e morei até meus 12 anos na Rua de São João, no centro do Recife, onde nos Carnavais passavam todas as agremiações o Recife, os Caboclinhos, os Maracatus, os Frevos, e eu corria atrás deles, dançando e me metendo na multidão, na massa sobretudo de negros e mulatos e mulatas que dançavam em frenesi. Aquela atmosfera portanto não foi algo que eu via, mas que eu vivia intensamente. Minha mãe muitas vezes saia como louca nas ruas, perguntando por mim. Algumas vezes eu era trazido pelas mãos de negras prestimosas dizendo "encontrei esse menino, ele é "louco" por Maracatu....." .Então é isso mesmo, eu era e sou "louco" por Maracatu, a essência básica de minha formação rítmica, mais intensa, mais elementar. É desta essência que é feita até hoje a base mágica de minha formação rítmica.

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Abraços Marlos Nobre Rio de Janeiro, 06 de junho de 2019

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APPENDIX B. PERFORMANCE DATES

1969 Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH) makes its Philadelphia debut at the Academy of Music with a program that includes Rhythmetron, November 1969

1970 Dance Theatre of Harlem perform Rhythmetron: May 21, 1970, William Penn High School, Philadelphia. Principal dancers: Patricia Ricketts, Llanchie Stevenson, Clover Mathis, Lydia Abarca, Walter Raines, Virginia Johnson, Samuel Smalls.

Dance Theatre of Harlem presents “Ballet’s Greatest Moments,” with New York City Ballet’s Jacques d’Amboise and Melissa Hayden as guest stars, Academy of Music, Philadelphia, March 15, 1970. In addition to Mitchell’s Rhythmetron, the performance includes choreography by George Balanchine.

Makes first Caribbean tour, performing in as the major attraction of the First Bermuda Arts Council Summer Festival, June 17-20, and also appearing in Nassau, the Bahamas (June 24-27) and Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles (June 29- July 1). The company performs Holberg Suite, Biosfera, Tones, Ode to Otis, and Rhythmetron, all by Mitchell, and Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, a company premiere.

Appears at Jacob’s Pillow, Becket, Massachusetts, August 18-22, 1970. Presents four works, all choreographed by Mitchell – Holberg Suite, Biosfera, Ode to Otis, and Rhythmetron.

Makes its official New York debut on January 8-10, 1971 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Three works by Mitchell – Tones, Fête Noire(a premiere), and Rhythmetron – are performed.

Dance Theatre of Harlem perform Rhythmetron: May 21, 1970, William Penn High School, Philadelphia. Principal dancers: Patricia Ricketts, Llanchie Stevenson, Clover Mathis, Lydia Abarca, Walter Raines, Virginia Johnson, Samuel Smalls

Makes its Broadway debut in the City Center American Dance Marathon, ANTA Theatre, New York City, March 8, 10, and 12, 1971. Repertory includes Biosfera, Fun and Games, Fete Noire, and Rhythmetron, all by Mitchell, Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, the premiere of Mitchell’s Fun and Games, and DTH premieres of John Taras’ Design for Strings and Jerome Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun.

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Makes Chicago debut under the auspices of the Chicago Urban League, Auditorium Theatre, Chicago, May 9-11, 1971. The repertory includes Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, Jerome Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun, and Mitchell’s Fete Noire, Ode to Otis, Biosfera, Tones, and Rhythmetron.

Presents two free programs for more than 3,000 schoolchildren at McMillan Theatre, Columbia University, New York City, June 2, 1971.

1972 Returns to Southern California under the auspices of the Inner City Cultural Center, Inner City Theatre, Los Angeles, January 7-9, 1972. The repertory includes The Beloved, by Angeleno choreographer Lester Horton, Balanchine’s Agon and Concerto Barocco, Louis Johnson’s Forces of Rhythm, and Mitchell’s Fete Noire, Rhythmetron, Biosfera, and Fun and Games pas de deux. Makes Washington debut at Kennedy Center Opera House, Washington, D.C., February 21-23, 1972. The repertory includes Balanchine’s Agon and Concerto Barocco, Louis Johnson’s Forces of Nature, Lester Horton’s The Beloved, and Mitchell’s Biosfera, Fete Noire, and Rhythmetron.

1973 New York City Community College, Klitgord Auditorium, Brooklyn, February 10, 1973. Performs Forces of Rhythm (Louis Johnson), Afternoon of a Faun (Jerome Robbins), Agon (Balanchine), Rhythmetron (Mitchell).

Dances Forces of Rhythm (Louis Johnson), Afternoon of a Faun (Jerome Robbins), Agon (George Balanchine), and Rhythmetron (Mitchell) at Lyric Theater, Baltimore, March 24, 1973. The performance, which is presented by the Baltimore Chapter of Yong Audiences, Inc., is preceded by several days of lecture-demonstrations at city and county schools.

The prize-winning documentary Rhythmetron aired on PBS, March 26, 1973.

Returns to the Auditorium Theater, Chicago, May 18-19, 1973. In addition to Milko Sparemblek’s Ancient Voices of Children, a premiere, the company dances Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, Louis Johnson’s Forces of Rhythm, Jerome Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun, Ruth Page’s Carmen and José, and Mitchell’s Biosfera and Rhythmetron.

Returns to Los Angeles, performing at Ingalls Auditorium, East Los Angeles College, under the aegis of the Inner City Cultural Center, May 31-June 2, 1973. The company performs Louis Johnson’s Forces of Rhythm, Mitchell’s Biosfera and Rhythmetron, Ruth Page’s Carmen and José, Milko Sparemblek’s Ancient Voices of Children, George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, and Jerome Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun.

Appears at the Connecticut College American Dance Festival, performing Walter Raines’ Haiku, Milko Sparemblek’s Ancient Voices of Children,

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Mitchell’s Tones and Rhythmetron, Louis Johnson’s Forces of Rhythm, and George Balanchine’s Agon, New London, Connecticut, July 20-21, 1973. Makes a third European tour, including Yugoslavia and Spain.

1974 Gives its first season at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London, August 5-24, 1974. A special return season by popular demand is given September 9-14, 1974, following performances in Oslo, Helsinki, and Belgium. The London repertory includes Afternoon of a Faun (Jerome Robbins), Agon and Concerto Barocco (George Balanchine), Caravansarai (Talley Beatty), Le Corsaire (Karel Shook), Dougla (Geoffrey Holder), Design for Strings (John Taras), Forces of Rhythm (Louis Johnson), and Holberg Suite, Rhythmetron, and Tones (Mitchell). 1975 Gives first season at Broadway’s Uris Theater, New York City, April 7-May 11, 1975. The season begins with two Arts Exposure Weeks of lecture- demonstrations and reduced-price performances for children and senior citizens, followed by a Gala Benefit Performance on April 22, under the umbrella title “The Evolution of an Idea.” The repertory includes premieres of William Scott’s Every Now and Then and Walter Raines’ After Corinth, New York premiere of Karel Shook’s Don Quixote (Pas de Deux), and company premieres of Balanchine’s Bugaku and Allegro Brillante. Holberg Suite, Rhythmetron, and Fête Noire (Mitchell), Forces of Rhythm (Louis Johnson), Le Corsaire (Karel Shook), Design for Strings (John Taras), Afternoon of a Faun (Jerome Robbins), Dougla (Geoffrey Holder), and Agon and Concerto Barocco (Balanchine) complete the offerings.

Returns to the Auditorium Theater, Chicago, appearing in its Dance Series, May 23-24, 1975. The repertory includes Allegro Brillante and Bugaku (Balanchine), Rhythmetron (Mitchell), Dougla (Geoffrey Holder), Don Quixote and Le Corsaire (Karel Shook), After Corinth (Walter Raines), and Every Now and Then (Walter Scott)

1976 Gives third New York season at Broadway’s Uris Theater, February 25 March 28, 1976. The repertory includes the premiere of Gabriella Taub- Darvash’s Romeo and Juliet (Balcony Scene pas de deux), New York premiere of Mitchell’s Manifestations and Ruth Pages Carmen and José, and New York company premieres of William Dollar’s Mendelssohn Concerto and The Combat. Fête Noire, Biosfera, Holberg Suite, and Rhythmetron(Mitchell), Don Quixote and Le Corsaire (Karel Shook), Forces of Rhythm (Louis Johnson), Every Now and Then (William Scott), Caravansarai(Talley Beatty), The Beloved (Lester Horton), Dougla (Geoffrey Holder), Afternoon of a Faun (Jerome Robbins), Design for Strings (John Taras), Agon, Bugaku, and Allegro Brillante (Balanchine) complete the offerings. At the closing night party, company members and ticket holders sing “Happy Birthday” to Arthur “Aries” Mitchell.269

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APPENDIX C. RHYTHMETRON SCORE USE AUTHORIZATION