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PIANOLATRIA IN CAFELÂNDIA: MÁRIO DE ANDRADE’S “SOCIAL EVOLUTION OF MUSIC IN BRAZIL” AN ANNOTATED TRANSLATION

by DENISE CRISTINA PELUSCH B.A. Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil, 1999 M.M. University of North Dakota, 2004

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Music 2011

This doctoral dissertation entitled: Pianolatria in Cafelândia: Mário de Andrade’s “Social Evolution of Music in Brazil,” An Annotated Translation written by Denise Cristina Pelusch has been approved for the College of Music Department of Musicology

Dr. Brenda M. Romero, Chair

Dr. Kwasi Ampene

Dr. Jay Keister

Dr. Tania Martuscelli

Dr. Jeremy Smith Date

The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline.

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Pelusch, Denise Cristina (Ph.D., Musicology)

Pianolatria in Cafelândia: Mário de Andrade’s “Social Evolution of Music in Brazil,”

An Annotated Translation

Dissertation directed by Associate Professor Brenda M. Romero

This dissertation is an annotated translation from Portuguese to English of the essay

“Evolução Social da Música no Brasil” (“Social Evolution of Music in Brazil”), published in

1939 by Mário Raul de Morais Andrade (1893-1945). I approached the translation keeping in

mind that Mário de Andrade’s linguistic style has an important function and carries in itself a

meaning. Andrade was in search of the flow and tone of the authentic “Brazilian” idiom, and my

translation seeks to impart the literary experience of his colorful and rich writing in Portuguese.

I have concluded that this may bring the reader closer to the mindset of the author.

In my annotations, I work in detail aspects that Andrade’s text alluded to, and also

discuss the intellectual foundations of the author. My methodology was to read the same texts

that Andrade read, as well as writings by other intellectuals of the Brazilian modernist

movement, of which he was a major figure. In addition, I analyzed musical pieces by composers

of his generation. My conclusion is that composers who were Andrade’s contemporaries

radically changed their musical orientations after their encounters with him. In this sense,

Andrade’s essay represents today a primary source of study on the history of Brazilian music and

ethnomusicology. I also found in his text a rhetoric that favors aspects that resonate with the

modernist’s nationalism. I argue that, when writing the essay, Andrade was not only stimulated

by a modernist nationalist agenda but also prescribed it. My research has revealed that

Andrade’s essay figures among the earliest examples in literature on music to promote the

iv inclusion of Afro-Brazilians as an equal part in the formation of Brazilian culture (with Native

Indians and European immigrants). In this sense, Andrade’s proposition of nationalism promoted a unique modernist challenge to the classical music establishment. I conclude that the essay has also played an important social and intellectual role in the formation of Brazilian music epistemology.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to give special thanks to my committee members Prof. Tania Martuscelli, Prof.

Jeremy Smith, Prof. Jay Keister, Prof. Kwasi Ampene, and my advisor Prof. Brenda M. Romero, to whom I owe particular gratitude for her guidance in my search for larger significance in

Andrade’s essay and for her time, knowledge and kindness.

I want to thank Prof. Carlo Caballero, Prof. Daphne Leong, Prof. Keith Waters, Prof.

Thomas Riis, and Prof. Rebecca Maloy for scholarly guidance while at C.U. A special thank you to Elissa Guralnick who guided me during the beginning process of my writing.

I appreciate Prof. Marcelo Schincariol and Prof. Jay Keister for carefully proofreading

my translation. I thank Prof. Jeremy Smith and John and Renata Smathers for suggesting edits in

my final writing. I thank Sr. Carlos Camargo for helping me with the process of acquiring the

rights to translate the essay of his uncle, Mário de Andrade.

I wish to express my appreciation to Dr. Gerald Gaul for his generous financial support

and friendship. I forever am grateful.

Agradeço meus pais, Ervino e Janet, e meus irmãos, Carlos e Fábio, pelo suporte

emocional e financeiro, pelos telefonemas de apoio ou de simples conversas, pelos exemplos de

conduta e de trabalho, pelas idas e vindas do aeroporto. Por me darem amor e por acreditarem em mim.

I will endlessly thank and cherish my husband Dan Smathers for his unfailing love and patience, emotional and material support, and help at any time; and our son, Luca, for his cheering smiles and inspiring will to play!

CONTENTS

Chapter

I. Introduction ...... 1 São Paulo, February 1922: Week of Modern Art ...... 5 February 13, 1922 ...... 5 February 15, 1922 ...... 6 February 17, 1922 ...... 8 Outcomes of the Week...... 10 From the Week to “Social Evolution of Music in Brazil”...... 12 Commentaries in Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 ...... 16 Overview Chapter 2: Intellectual Context ...... 16 Overview of Chapter 3: Mário de Andrade’s Notions of Nationalism...... 19 Overview of Chapter 4: Introducing the Essay...... 20 Essay Section I...... 21 Essay Section II...... 22 Overview of Chapter 5: From Love Towards Nationalism ...... 24 Essay Section III ...... 24 Essay Section IV...... 26

II. Intellectual Context and Notions of Nationalism...... 30 Collectivitism in Music...... 30 Conceptual Artistic Framework for an Autonomous Brazilian identity...... 34 Virtuosity ...... 35 Governmental Subsidies for Music Schools...... 37 Andrade’s Views on Italianisms ...... 38 States of Consciousness: How Structuralism Shaped Andrade’s Analysis ...... 39

III. Mário de Andrade’s Notions of Nationalism...... 46 Heitor Villa-Lobos...... 49 Miscegenation in Mário de Andrade’s the Nationalism ...... 55 Conclusion ...... 57

IV. Introducing the Essay ...... 58 Essay Section I...... 58 “Pianolatria” in the “Cafelândia” ...... 58 Mário de Andrade and the Conservatório...... 65 Essay Section II – God First ...... 66 Jesuit Villages (Aldeiamentos cristãos)...... 66 Jesuits, Religion, and Liturgical Forms ...... 75 Jesuit Music and the Expansion of Merchant Centers...... 76

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V. From Love Towards Nationalism ...... 79 Essay Section III: Love...... 79 Music during the Brazilian Império: Love and Internationalism...... 79 Secular Music...... 83 Francisco Manuel: The Foundation of the Conservatório ...... 87 Antonio Carlos Gomes...... 89 Essay Section IV - Nationalism ...... 93 Inter-Nationalism ...... 93 Pre-Nationalism ...... 95 Second Republic: the Birth of a New Nationalism...... 97 The Music Scene in the Brazil during Mário de Andrade’s Days ...... 100 Conclusion ...... 105

VI. Evolução Social da Música no Brasil ...... 108 Notes on the Translation ...... 108 General Conventions...... 111 Social Evolution of Music in Brazil...... 112 I ...... 112 II...... 118 III...... 124 IV ...... 130

Bibliography ...... 145

Appendix...... 156 Personages in the essay...... 156 Conservatório Dramático e Musical de São Paulo ...... 156 Personage Associated with the Opera Scene in Colonial Brazil...... 158 Internationalist Composers ...... 159 Nationalist Composers...... 167

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FIGURES

Figure 1: Excerpt from Candido Inacio da Silva’s “Busco a Campina Serena” (Alvarenga 1950, 287, 289) ...... 85

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

To celebrate Brazil’s centenary independence, intellectuals and artists proposed a

movement whose ideal was to create a Brazilian artistic identity, independent from European

models. To promote their ideas, they organized the Semana da Arte Moderna (Week of Modern

Art), where participants lectured, performed, read poetry and displayed plastic arts at the Teatro

Municipal de São Paulo. In retrospect, the Week was a monumental event that marked the beginning of a unique modernist and nationalist movement in Brazil. Although it had

ramifications in all the arts, most important of all was its daring challenge to the musical

establishment.1

The Week of Modern Art in São Paulo took place on alternating evenings from February

13 to 18, 1922. During that week, artists from literature, painting, architecture, sculpture, and

music presented works that paved a new path for the arts in Brazil. The intent underlying all the

principles of that group of artists was the creation of independent artistic thought by specifically

rejecting Romantic2, Parnassian3, and Realist4 practices in vogue within conservative Brazilian

1 To my knowledge, nowhere else in the Americas (including the United States) had anyone previously dared to issue such a challenge.

2 Brazilian Romanticism is considered to have started in 1836, with the publication of Nictheroy in Revista Brasiliense, by Gonçalves de Magalhães. It is divided into three phases: Indianism, where the main authors were Golçalves de Magalhães and Gonçalves Dias; Ultra-Romanticism, with Casimiro de Abreu and Álvares de Azevedo; and the last phase, Condoreira, with Castro Alves. This last phase is also seen as a transition to Realism for its social concerns.

3 Parnassian poetry, in Brazil, is said to have been the art of the ruling elite in the second half of the nineteenth- century through the early twentieth-century. In a way, this is because of its refinement and poetic rules, but also because its topics reflect European values and frequently refer to Greek mythology and classic culture. The three main poets that represent this phase are Olavo Bilac, Alberto de Oliveira and Raimundo Correia, who constitute the so-called Parnassian triad (tríade parnasiana).

intellectual circles at the time. In their new order, the artists proposed that folklore, spiritualism,

social consciousness, and aspects of everyday contemporary life would provide the materials for their art. The final result would be the creation of a unifying artistic style and consequent

national idiom.

The modernists’ intellectual foundation reflected European avant-garde artistic

movements, namely Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism. Furthermore, the Week in Brazil

was a natural consequence of key events in other countries and in all the Brazilian arts during the

previous decades. In Latin America, modernist literary discussions were in full swing by the

turn of the century. Among others, Rubén Darío (1867 – 1916) from Nicaragua, José Martí

(1853 – 1859) from Cuba, and José Enrique Rodó (1872 – 1917) from Uruguay, all had

addressed and problematized the influence of colonialist ideas in one way or another. In the

United States, the Armory Art Show in New York had challenged traditionalism in the visual arts

in 1913.

Similarly, in 1912, Oswald de Andrade (1890 – 1954) introduced the ideas of Italian poet

Filippo Tomaso Marinetti to the literati of São Paulo.5 Oswald had learned about Marinetti’s

“Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo” (“Foundation and Manifest of Futurism”)6 while in

Paris. Initially, the Manifesto had a direct resonance with Brazilian modernism, particularly the

4 The publication of Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, by Machado de Assis in 1881 marked the beginning of Realism in Brazilian literature. Its main characteristic was the objective look at social issues and the reality of the human condition.

5 Marinetti and his wife Benedetta traveled to Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay in 1926. In Brazil, he lectured in the largest theaters of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Santos. His lecture tour was widely covered by the press. In his unpublished Velocità Brasiliane (Brazilian Velocity), written from one of his talks in Rio, Marinetti portrays an entirely successful journey. Many Brazilian intellectuals of the time indeed agreed; however, other Brazilian writers, including Mário de Andrade felt otherwise. In the early 1920’s, Marinetti’s thoughts were widely accepted by Brazilian modernists, but by the middle of that decade the group had grown apart. The modernists began to feel that Futurism was in fact inaccurate, and a growing empathy between Futurism, fascism and ultra-nationalism fueled the opposition of many of the modernists.

6 Marinetti’s article “Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo” was published in Paris in Figaro, on February 20, 1909.

literary commitment to contemporary life and new technologies, as well as its stand against the

worship of academia and the favoring of a discourse of freedom. From the start, probably

because of the modernists’ search for originality and even more the idea of breaking with the

past, Andrade did not accept the title of “Futurism” for their group.

In 1919 Manuel Bandeira (1886 – 1968) wrote “Os Sapos.” Bandeira’s poem portrays

three toads, as three poets, figuratively praising Parnassian poetics. Representing the non-

Parnassian poet was the most common toad in Brazil, the sapo cururu (cane toad). Because

Bandeira rejected Parnassian poetry in a joking manner in this poem, he received the nickname

“John the Baptist of the modernists.” His poem was recited on the second evening of the Week.

Mário de Andrade (1893 – 1945), the “Pope” of Brazilian modernism, wrote a syndicated

series entitled “Mestres do Passado” (“Masters from the Past”)7 for Jornal do Commércio São

Paulo in 1921. The following quote from his article on Passadista8 poetry informs us well of the

content of his writings: “Damned forever the Masters from the Past! May the simple memory of

one of you enslave your spirits in the love of form! May Brazil be unhappy because it created

you! May the universe dismantle because it accommodated you! And may it remain nothing!

Nothing! Nothing!”9

7 It was Oswald de Andrade who introduced Mário to the public in 1921 through an article entitled “Meu poeta futurista” (“My Futurist Poet”), also for Jornal do Commércio São Paulo. Andrade later denied being a Futurist poet.

8 Passadista poetry can be defined by the following characteristics: use of meter, rhyme, and frequently the sonnet; the subject themes are not taken from the quotidian and are always related to love, reflection, death, mythology, religion, and the past; frequent use of figurative language and archaic words reinforce its non-quotidian aspect. The modernists in Brazil used the term passadista to also refer to all literature from the past.

9 Andrade’s series “Mestres do Passado” was published in Jornal do Commércio from August through September of 1921. “Malditos para sempre os Mestres do Passado! Que a simples recordação de um de vós escravize os espíritos no amor incondicional pela forma! Que o Brasil seja infeliz porque os criou! Que o universo se desmantele porque vos comportou! E que não fique nada! Nada! Nada!”

In the visual arts, one main event that preceded the Week was Anita Malfati’s exhibit on

December 12, 1917. Malfati (1889 – 1964) was Brazilian but had lived in Germany and in the

United States prior to her exhibit. Intending to show the artistic tendencies of the time around

the world, she also included other artists’ works in her exhibit. She unsuccessfully tried to avoid

controversy by excluding her nude figures, instead displaying her Expressionist works with

tropical themes.10

In music, Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887 – 1959) had started to provoke controversy in traditional music circles for his use of avant-garde elements around 1917. Before that, he was writing “deliberately internationalist” music, to use music historian Avezedo’s words (1956,

256).11 Villa-Lobos then brought a more national preoccupation to his works, namely the use of

themes and motives taken from popular and folk music. One main work here is the piano suite

Prole do Bebê.12 The piece has eight movements, each one built on a children’s folk song. It

particularly impressed Arthur Rubinstein, who was on a tour in Rio that year and included the

work in the repertoire for his main concerts in Europe, helping to bring an initial renown to the

young composer.

In 1918, musicians of the Instituto Nacional de Música in Rio, refused to play Villa-

Lobo’s Amazonas (1917), arguing that the work was too dissonant. Oscar Guanabarino, one of

the most active critics opposing the modernists wrote for the Jornal do Commércio: “the talent of

10 Despite not attending the exhibit, novelist and critic Monteiro Lobato harshly criticized her works in his article “Paranóia ou Mistificação?” (“Paranoia or Mythification?”), published in O Estado de São Paulo (http://www.pitoresco.com.br/brasil/anita/lobato.htm, accessed on December 18, 2010).

11 The list of works from that phase includes his opera Izaht (1914), in which the plot takes place in Paris, Sinfonieta (1916), written on a theme by Mozart, and Danças Africanas (1914-1915), for piano.

12 The title is not usually translated, but is literally Baby's Progeny.

Villa-Lobos has been perverted” (in Damasceno 2007, 83).13 Villa-Lobos responded, saying:

“What I write is a cosmic consequence of the studies that I have made, of the synthesis to which

I have arrived in order to mirror Brazilian nature. I proceeded, confronting these studies of mine with foreign works, and I searched for a point of support to firm the personality and immutability of my ideas” (in Silveira 2007, 32).14 Villa-Lobos’s commitment to finding national music, as

well the lack of comprehension from musicians, public, and traditional criticism towards his

music attracted him to the modernists and vice-versa.

São Paulo, February 1922: Week of Modern Art

February 13, 1922

Poet Graça Aranha (1868 – 1931) commenced the Week announcing that the public was about to experience “horrors” in those days. His lecture was entitled “A Emoção Estética na

Arte Moderna” (“Aesthetic Emotion in Modern Art”). Aranha proposed restructuring artistic concepts according to works realized in music by Villa-Lobos, in sculpture by Victor Brecheret

(1894 – 1955), and in painting by Emiliano Di Cavalcanti (1897 . 1976), Anita Malfati, Vicente do Rego (1899 – 1970), and Zina Aita (1900 – 1967). In literature, the goal should be to write poetry that combats archaic, purely academic, and provincial works.

His talk was musically illustrated by “d'Edriophthalma,” the second movement from Erik

Satie’s Embryons desséchés, with Ernâni Braga at the piano. Aranha was convinced that modern

13 “O talento de Villa-Lobos está transviado.”

14 “Não escrevo dissonante para ser moderno. De maneira nenhuma. O que escrevo é consequência cósmica dos estudos que fiz, da síntese a que cheguei para espelhar uma natureza como a do Brasil. Prossegui, confrontando esses meus estudos com obras estrangeiras, e procurei um ponto de apoio para firmar o personalismo e a inalterabilidade das minhas ideias.”

French music, particularly that of Erik Satie, had the right sarcasm to shock the São Paulo public.

“D'Edriophthalma,” is organized in A – B – A form, with the A section in minor, and B in a

major key. It is full of quotations from Chopin’s Marche Funèbrè. It is difficult at first to

determine whether this is a serious and simplified allusion to, or a satire of Chopin’s music. The

latter is confirmed when a staccato bass line punctuates the middle section. Its performance may

have also symbolized a mock burial for old tendencies.

The second half of the evening’s events featured Villa-Lobos’s music. When the

musicians entered the stage, the public was surprised with the vernacular percussion instruments

that they were carrying (tamburim, puíta, ganzá, reco-reco and adufos). Villa-Lobos’s orchestral

instrumentation displayed the composer’s “re-discovery” of Brazilian roots. An anecdotal

account tells us that mocking sounds played on a harmonica came from the audience in the

theater’s mezzanine when Villa-Lobos’s Danças Africanas started to become more rhythmically

energetic, towards the middle (Bopp 1966, 22). The rhythmic accelerando of the piece derives

from the rhythmic narrative of many Afro-Brazilian and Brazilian Native songs. According to

Villa-Lobos, the themes in the piece were inspired by melodies that he heard from the Caripunas

Indians in Mato Grosso state.15

February 15, 1922

Mário de Andrade read portions from his poem A Escrava que Não é Isaura (The Slave that Is Not Isaura), as one of the highlights in the second evening of the Week. His poem was written as a parable, as Andrade described it, being one of the first attempts to describe Brazilian modern poetics. The “slave” is stripped away from “old dresses” and “ornaments” to have her

15 Other pieces by Villa-Lobos performed that evening were Segundo Trio, Valsa Mística, Rondante, and A Fiandeira.

“skin” exposed to the “wind” of an educated society and to be “dressed” with modernity. At the

end, the “slave” is revealed to be poetry. The blatant sensuality in Andrade’s poetry denotes well

the rebel tone with which the modernists wanted to convey their ideas. Furthermore, it is written

in free verse, with no attention to rhymes. Andrade was still reading his poem when the

audience started to boo him to express their disapproval.

Pianist Guiomar Novaes performed works by Debussy on this evening. “Guiomar, beloved of the paulista16 audience, was the only artist that could be heard in silence” (Bopp

1966, 24).17 Her presence in the Week was important for attracting a much greater audience for

that evening’s events than the literati would have been able to attract (Wisnik 2004, 166).

Debussy’s music was selected because of the composer’s innovative concepts of harmony,

rhythm, and tonality that broke away from the traditional norms of composition. He also searched for inspiration from poetry and painting by contemporary artists. Debussy represented a model composer for Brazilian modernists in the sense of his artistic independence and freedom, as well as his up-to-date searches for inspiration.

It was also in the second evening of the events that Oswald de Andrade delivered a lecture entitled “Carlos Gomes versus Heitor Villa Lobos.” The essence of his discussion was in fact to polarize Passadistas from modernists. His lecture opened with the statement: “Carlos

Gomes is horrible.”18 His reading went on to decry Carlos Gomes as the symbol of an entire

musical past that the modernists wanted to destroy in order to find new directions. The text concluded by saying that “it were better if he had written nothing…” (in Silva, 2009). Oswald’s

16 Paulista refers to the population of São Paulo state.

17 Raul Bopp (1898-1984), the author of this comment, was a modernist poet of the later generation. He wrote the poem Cobra-Norato, considered a very significant example of primitivist poetics. The Portuguese version of his saying writes: “Guiomar, querida da platéia paulista, foi a única que conseguiu ser ouvida em silencio.”

18 “Carlos Gomes é horrível.”

tone of destruction of the past resonates closely with Marinetti’s Futurism. It is important,

however, to note that it differs from other modernists’ views. For example, Mário de Andrade

talked in terms of reconstructing the arts without disregarding the value of earlier works. His

preoccupation was focused on decentering the role of colonialism in music. This subtlety

already points to the future split within the group.19

February 17, 1922

The last evening of events was entirely musical, and solely featured Villa-Lobos. The

organizers of the Week did not anticipate any uneasy reaction from the audience in that

evening’s performances. Bopp defined the program as “more to the taste of the public” (1966,

24).20

Frutuoso Viana played the piano pieces and various musicians performed the choral and

orchestral works. From the list of his works performed, it is interesting to note that the majority

belongs to his “internationalist” phase, as defined by Mário de Andrade because of their French influence. For Andrade, Villa-Lobos’s use of folklore in his music at this point did not fit with

nationalism because it was exotic21 (evoking foreign places and/or times ) and romanticized.

Still, as noted briefly above, in the beginning of the Week, Aranha announced Villa-

Lobos as the role model for the modernization of Brazilian music. To advocate in favor of both

views, I would offer that the performance of Villa-Lobos’s “internationalist” works at the Week,

while suggesting a contradiction in terms of the ultimate goal of nationalizing Brazilian music,

19 Mário de Andrade criticizes directly the notion of destoying the past in Ensaio sobre a música brasileira, from 1928. In the same text, he talks about the ingenuity of Carlos Gomes.

20 “Mais ao gosto do público.”

21 Exoticism in music, as in the other arts has been problematized in most contemporary literature.

epitomized parameters of “modern” music. Modernism and nationalism have always been seen

as one single movement in Brazil, even by the founders of the modernist movement. The

distinction may be suggested in music, however. Villa-Lobos had found a modern musical idiom

while looking for the national and he took that model to predict a future Brazilian encounter with

nationalism. Villa-Lobos’s “internationalism” simply went against the grain.

A brief look at two of the pieces performed that evening can explain this point further.

"Historiettes” (from French, “Short Stories”) was composed in 1919 or 1920. Vasco Mariz has

classified the piece as “semi-nationalist” (Mariz 1983, 188). Many of its aspects show modernist

notions, whether national or foreign influences. With regard to the national, the piece displays a

few examples of Brazilian constâncias22 and has four Brazilian poems, by poets who were

contemporaries of Villa-Lobos. With regard to the foreign, aside from its title, the remaining

two poems are by French poet Albert Samain (1858 – 1900) and the music is overall Debussyan.

Another piece performed that evening was the piano work "Camponesa Cantadeira," the

second movement of Suíte Floral (1918). It was played by Frutuoso Viana. Villa-Lobos’s piano

works displayed new formulae for piano writing in search of sonic effects that would represent

Brazilian nature. The resulting Suíte Floral was still a sound clearly influenced by Debussy.

Nonetheless, his search for genuine Brazilian sounds through unconventional, modern writing,

all for the ultimate goal of establishing national aesthetics, was in tune with the ideals of the modernists.23

22 Constância is Andrade’s term for melodic and rhythmic motives constantly found in Brazilian musics.

23 The other pieces performed that evening were Terceiro Trio, Segunda Sonata, Num Berço Encantado, Dança Infernal and Quatuor (for women’s choir).

Outcomes of the Week

Up until the Week, modernist ideals were not widely known. The modernists intended

for the Week of Modern Art to expose their ideals to the light of a much larger audience.

Nationalism in music started to be formally shaped around the modernist ideas after the Week,

mainly with theoretical works by Mário de Andrade.

Much of this process continues to influence Brazil today. Andrade in musicology and

Villa Lobos in composition became the central figures in music circles. Andrade continued to

stress that the most important work Brazilian musicologists had on their hands was folklore and

popular music research. He justified the research saying that to nationalize Brazilian music,

Brazilians should assimilate the concept of “primitivism” to their work. Such research interestingly implied the inclusion of the music of Afrodescendents and indigenous peoples as part of Brazilian culture – a new and revolutionary concept for the time (this is discussed further in chapter 3). Brazilian music thus gained a significant social value. For composers, the task was to normalize (his term is systematize) the use of ethnic elements and more importantly,

assimilate them in such a manner that they would no longer be treated “exotically” or

“romantically.” For that, Andrade wrote detailed directions. Andrade himself took an important step towards accomplishing the task in his Ensaio sobre a música brasileira (Essay on Brazilian music), the first compilation of folk melodies that he had collected in the countryside to provide source materials for composers. The book starts with a discussion on the general precepts of

Brazilian melodies, rhythms, forms, and textures, and talks about specific ways to approach them in compositions. Directly or indirectly, Mário de Andrade mentored an entire generation of composers, testifying to the continuity and importance of Andrade’s ideas.

Villa-Lobos continued to write from the nationalist orientation, although often attributing

it to his intuition and to his own independent ideas. For Mário de Andrade, it was not until the

end of that decade that Villa-Lobos had become truly a “folklorized” composer, to use Andrade’s

term in his chronicles “Villa-Lobos versus Villa-Lobos,” from 1930.

While Villa-Lobos provided the musical counterpart of nationalism for the modernists,

the Week in turn served him to legitimize his ideas. The modernists protected Villa-Lobos’s

work from criticism and propelled his music through conferences. With a certain amount of

fame, the composer travelled to Europe in 1923, from where he returned definitely a consecrated

composer.

The joke-poem (poema-piada) in Brazilian literature was invented in the Week and

became one of the most valuable weapons of the modernist poets (Duarte 1971, 21). Later, in

the same year, Andrade published twenty-two poems in his Paulicéia Desvairada (Hallucinated

City), prefaced with Prefácio Interessantíssimo (Very Interesting Preface), where he lays out the

proper ways to write modern literature. This is the first book of Brazilian poetry to have free

verses. Paulo Duarte has argued that Modern poetry in Brazil was born with Mário de Andrade’s

Paulicéia Desvairada (ibid., 20). It is important to know these two aspects of Andrade’s writing

style in order to understand Andrade’s joking or ironic comments in “Social Evolution of Music

in Brazil,” as well as in other of his writings mentioned in my study.

It took the modernists another ten years to solidly establish their ideas throughout Brazil.

Antonio Candido talked about routinization of Modernism in the 1930’s, an idea loosely inspired in the routinization of charisma by Max Weber (1922). Weber explained routinization as attaining and establishing a historical structure. Candido’s transference of the term to the modernists in the 1930’s refers to a certain degree of normalization of their ideologies and

propositions: the exceptional had become usual; what was limited became widened;24 individual

sentiments and interests became collective.

At the end of the 1930s, a few composers had already adopted modernist ideas and were

composing national music according to the aesthetics that the modernists proposed; this is

discussed in depth below. Composers such as Luciano Gallet, Lourenço Fernandez, and

Camargo Guarnieri were Andrade’s disciples. Mário de Andrade’s desire to change the attitudes of the remaining composers reasonably follows from the modernist idea that the construction of a national idiom in music would only be rendered possible when the entire nation was in accord with the same aesthetic.

From the Week to “Social Evolution of Music in Brazil”

Mário de Andrade wrote the essay “Social Evolution of Music in Brazil” in 1939, in a mature phase of his work, where he added a preoccupation with a more immediate past –

basically corresponding to the years after the Week of Modern Art from 1922 until 1939 – to his

original efforts to interpret Brazilian culture.

Andrade’s text uncovers the social realities of the history of music in Brazil, at the same time it takes us to the personal and professional struggles of someone who experienced frustrations after the joys of a promising period, as reflected in the following passage: “The modernist movement, eminently critical by nature, appeared to imply a great ulterior cultural evolution, which, however, did not happen” (138). Vivacity and excitement were negated by a disappointing conclusion, all of which seems to have delineated Mário de Andrade’s years preceding the essay. A list of the disappointments he experienced, which culminated in this

24 Candido in Duarte 1971, xv.

13 aforementioned statement, should include the lack of engagement in modernist ideas among the youth, the pluripartition of the modernists to form other movements, and his forced departure from the Departamento de Cultura after the dictatorship was established in 1937 by the Estado

Novo. The latter led to his exile to Rio de Janeiro, from where he could do nothing but watch all of his achievements at that institution decay.

In “Social Evolution of Music in Brazil,” Mário de Andrade is perhaps less interested in presenting a social history or social data than he is with writing a convincing argument toward a change in the mentality of musicians and music audiences. Andrade’s criticisms constantly refer to the Brazilian importation of European models and trends, and he is especially concerned with blind imitation of European art and music, which he calls “macaqueação” (“monkey-action”).

He also saw this as a Brazilian tendency to passively accept whatever life imposes. At the time the essay was written, Andrade aimed it at the professional and lay reader of his time who was in tune with the political, historical, artistic and musical topics that the author tackled. Therefore, without taking the time for clarification or discussion of details, he laid out a sequence of social events historically associated with music in Brazil in a distinct tone of bias, favoring the aspects that were in consonance with nationalist notions the modernists proposed. There is little doubt, therefore, that Mário de Andrade’s text was stimulated by a modernist nationalist agenda.

In an effort to further elucidate “Social Evolution of Music in Brazil,” I attempt to construct a coherent view of Brazilian modernism and nationalism with regard to music prior to a full translation of the text. My study is organized into four chapters and an appendix, in addition to the introduction chapter and Andrade’s essay translation.

As Brazilian composers, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists of the twentieth and twenty-first century turn back to Andrade’s lessons in order to formulate their own ideas, I

investigate the intellectual and musical foundations from which his lessons originated. This is

chapter 2 of my study. In chapter 3, I discuss the notions and concepts of nationalism applied to

music and a short biography of composer Villa-Lobos, the initiator of nationalism in music,

according to Andrade. In chapters 4 and 5, “Social Evolution of Music in Brazil” is used as a

“roadmap” that will take me to varied topics on Brazilian music, social history and history of the arts, with which I intend to enrich the understanding of Andrade’s essay. Chapter 4 discusses the introduction and music in colonial Brazil, referent to sections I and II of Andrade’s essay. In chapter 5, I comment on the internationalist, pre-nationalist, and nationalist phases of music in

Brazil, according to suggestions from Andrade’s essay in sections III and IV. The final chapter brings the translation of the essay, through which I intend to make his work accessible to English speakers. The translation is prefaced by an introduction where I explain the process of translating Andrade’s essay and specific guidelines on his writing style.

In an Appendix, I offer biographic information of personages in Andrade’s essay that could not be discussed in the bodies of my chapters. My descriptions focused on aspects that are symptomatic of Mário de Andrade’s nationalism, showing that his attempts to redefine music in

Brazil were successful. I also bring to my text ways in which Andrade viewed their music from sources outside of the essay at hand, which also allows me to further explore aspects of his musical nationalism.

I chose the organization of this dissertation, with the contextualization preceding

Andrade’s essay, in an attempt to prepare the reader for a more illuminated understanding of

Andrade’s text. I also felt that ending this study any other way would be anti-climatic. The

reader is nonetheless invited to his or her own ordering. Finally, the bulk of my sources were

written in the Portuguese language. English translations of Portuguese quotes from these sources

are my own with the corresponding original Portuguese text indicated as a footnote, with

exception of the text referred to by footnote 118. Original Portuguese text is not provided when I

quote from Andrade’s essay. In such cases, I refer the reader to the essay translation page

number.

For Portuguese referred works, I have decided to keep the Brazilian Portuguese title capitalizations format, which is capitalizing the first word in the title, and after that, only proper names.

There are terms that were commonly used by Andrade and his contemporaries, but that

have since been problematized. I kept a literal translation in the essay, but in my commentaries I

adopted more current terms in most cases. Examples are:

a. Race: as many contemporary scholars have submitted, “race” is a social construction

and is not based on any intrinsic differences among humans, but rather cosmetic differences that

account for adaptations on which survival depends (Jablonski, 2006). In my commentaries I

replace the term race with words that convey a more specific meaning. In some cases I use

tradition, in other cases, ethnicities.

b. Blacks/Afrodescendents: Andrade used the Portuguese word negro, which is still today in wide use in Brazil. In my commentaries I adopted the terms that are more acceptable in the

United States, Blacks or Afrodescendents, depending on the context.

c. Mentalité: I discuss the subject “states of consciousness,” mentioned in the essay section III, which is attached to the term mentalité, today approached as worldview. As my

attempt in such discussion was to explain how Andrade understood it, I opted for the term as he

knew it, mentalité or “mentality (mentalities).”

d. Primitive/primitivism: the term was widely in use in Andrade’s time (please refer to

footnote 150). Andrade applied the concept of primitivism to the uncorrupted worldviews of

indigenous, Portuguese, and enslaved African (“immigrant”) peoples of early Brazil as well as to the “fresh” stage of nationalism in Brazil. For his personal take on the term, I refer to it within quotes in my commentaries.

e. Culture: In Andrade’s text, “culture” mainly stands for people’s education in the arts or acquired traditions. I attempted to particularize and reinforce the meaning of each passage by replacing “culture” with either term (education or traditions) when seemed necessary.

The Commentaries in Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5

Overview Chapter 2: Intellectual Context

In essay section I, Andrade introduces one facet of the modernists’ view on collectivism in art, more specifically saying that music requires collective attitudes in order to exist, which I want to associate with his argument towards a collective consciousness in the construction of a

Brazilian musical nationalism.

Andrade then goes on to discuss religion and liturgy in the early history of Brazil. For him, the liturgical singing of the Jesuits fulfilled the social function of binding together

(religare) the country’s different social groups. Based on Andrade’s concept of collectivity found in his other writings, I argue that the two ideas -- religion as it is described here, and collectivity-- are interrelated for this author. As support, I first consider his contention that

music in “those days became perfectly representative of that community without classes. It

became European…but it was at the same time national and ‘Brazilic’” (17). Even though

Andrade discusses nationalism in music per se later in the essay, his narrative here already conveys a sense of an all-inclusive practice that is drawn out of the nationalistic notion that all cultural manifestations, provided that they come from peoples living in Brazil, should be equally embraced in the formation of a national art. In Essay on brazilian music (1928), Andrade writes,

“national art is not made with a discretionary and dilettante choice of elements” (1928, 15, 16).25

Later in that same book he affirms that “the artist shall not be unilaterally exclusivist” (ibid.,

27).26 It is also necessary to point out that in Mário de Andrade’s narrative of the early colonial

period he favored the music made by the Jesuits for their multi-faceted and collectivist

characteristics.

Andrade considered that sculptor Aleijadinho27 had been able to provide a concept for a

artistic framework in his works that was properly Brazilian. I explain that Andrade’s statement

has a basis in two main ideals of the nationalists, namely the use of native materials for the

construction of the art, as well as the observation of the material’s context.

Virtuosity constituted a problem for the nationalization of music in Brazil because it

caused a separation of individuals, through a selective method. The public’s taste for virtuosity

in Brazil ultimately resulted from the Brazilian society that was organized around individual interests.

I argue that the foundation of the Instituto Nacional de Música with government funding represented for Andrade the bureaucratization of music teaching in Brazil. I propose that

25 “Uma arte nacional não se faz com escolha discricionaria e diletante de elementos.”

26 “O artista não deve ser nem exclusivista nem unilateral.”

27 Sculptor and architect Antonio Francisco Lisboa became known as Aleijadinho (“Little Cripple”) after becoming afflicted by a debilitating disease speculated to be leprosy, which he acquired in his early forties. Contrary to the impression it may convey in its English translation, Aleijadinho is an affectionate nickname in Portuguese.

Andrade’s terms to describe the organization of the Instituto resonate with Max Weber’s theory of the rationalization process (Weber, 1921). Andrade uses Weber’s theory in order to rationally construct Brazilian nationalism, applying the interpretation of Weber’s historical accounts to

propose a formula that would bring similar results to Brazilian music.

Italian influences prevailed in São Paulo in those days. The importation of Italian culture

in general was of major distress for Mário de Andrade for he believed that it was overtaking

Brazilian interests and it evoked his reaction against fascism and ultra-nationalism, which were

part of Marinetti’s Futurism.

Close to the end of this section, Andrade mentions the internationalist state of

consciousness that led composers of that period. This connects his text to the broader

sociological subject of the history of mentalities and links Andrade to the French intellectuals living in São Paulo at the beginning of the twentieth-century. In order to cover Andrade’s pathway crossing these two links, I recount the influence of the material read by Andrade as described by Telê Lopez. I then move on to investigate the influence of Lévi-Strauss and his

wife Dina Dreyfus, along with the influence of other French intellectuals from the beginning of

the twentieth-century, in the shaping of Brazilian modernists’ thoughts. These intellectuals were

primarily living in Brazil to teach at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), only recently founded

at that time. I will proceed to analyze specific facts behind the foundation of that university to understand how these intellectuals exerted their influence. I then investigate Mário de Andrade’s

connection with the university in order to understand in particular the impact that Dreyfus and

Lévi-Strauss exerted on Andrade’s thoughts on ethnography. Two conclusions emerge from this investigation: first, Andrade approached his readings and theories on sociology and ethnography

19 in conjunction with his previous fieldwork experience collecting folk material;28 second, and bearing in mind the first conclusion, Mário de Andrade decries an internationalist state of consciousness in “Social Evolution of Music in Brazil” his plea for a change to a national state of consciousness.

Overview of Chapter 3: Mário de Andrade’s Notions of Nationalism

Section IV of his essay focuses on the development of nationalist music. My discussion starts with a short overview on selected principles that play an important role in Mário de

Andrade’s view of nationalism, beginning with functional music, or to use his terminology, the principle of music utilitarianism: a composer’s concern with musically representing his time and place, as well as his awareness that his art should serve society. Secondly, and a consequence of the first principle, it is important to note that Andrade’s notion of value changes through time.

Andrade believed that composers of his time had to be conscious of their social roles in nationalizing music, but once this was met, they would be able to become “free aesthetic beings” and music would go from nationalist to national, as he puts it.

28 Andrade’s fieldwork in Brazil has often been compared to that of Béla Bartók in Hungary. Like Bartók, Andrade visited regions of his country to collect folk material and understand his own people through the materials he found. In addition to music, Andrade also collected legends, dances, and aspects of the people’s everyday life. Andrade himself compared his fieldwork to that of a tourist interested in learning about the realities of places and peoples that he visited. This is seen in his book O Turista Aprendiz, a type of travel diary of his 1927 and 1928 ethnographic trips to the Northeast and North of Brazil. Even before these trips, in 1924 Andrade had been to the countryside of Minas Gerais, accompanied by French poet Blaise Cendrars to investigate the work of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mineiro artists. His aim here was to learn from their works what constituted the Brazilian identity. In the 1930’s, Andrade made more “official” ethnographic trips with the sponsorship of the Brazilian government. These trips came to be called “Missões de Pesquisas Folclóricas” (Missions of Folklore Researches). His goal in these “missions” was to map out musics from several regions of Brazil. He was able to record melodies and transcribe song lyrics and dance choreographies. The material collected in all his ethnographic trips served Andrade in his research for a Brazilian identity as well as in diverse novels, such as Macunaíma and Na Pancada do Ganzá. Today, the material is available at the Centro Cultura São Paulo and constitutes an important primary source for Brazilian folklore study.

Villa-Lobos’s biography followed the discussion on nationalism because of his key role

in Andrade’s essay. Andrade considered that Villa-Lobos started Brazilian nationalism in music.

By examining here the mutual influence and admiration that Andrade and Villa-Lobos exercised

on/for each other, and in addition the differences between the two, it can be concluded that many

of Andrade concepts find a match in Villa-Lobos’s music. In turn, Andrade’s ideas on

nationalism were important to Villa-Lobos, even when the composer did not accept them. In

addition, Andrade’s writings “protected” and “propelled” the music of Villa-Lobos.

Finally, Andrade’s discussion on the use of all popular musics in Brazil entails the formation of Brazilian identities from the miscegenation of indigenous peoples,

Afrodescendents, and white Europeans, referred to in part in sections II and III. In turn miscegenation implied the rejection of regionalisms, which Andrade also called “unilateralism,” as mentioned above, meaning that Brazilian music is made of the blending of elements from diverse sources, such as the miscegenation that formed the Brazilian people. In the same fashion, composers should avoid selecting one or another ethnicity in isolation, which would only represent a specific tradition, not the Brazilian nation as a whole.

I also add that such a theory of miscegenation officially incorporated Afrodescendents and their traditions in the formation of Brazilian society. This was a relatively new concept in

Andrade’s days, the Blacks presence had been denied or omitted in earlier literature.

Overview of Chapter 4: Introducing the Essay

Clarity on topics that Mário de Andrade approached in “Social Evolution of Music in

Brazil” is needed for today’s reader, who is distanced by time (and possibly place), and consequently alienated from such information. In an attempt to explore the richness of his essay,

I will devote chapters 4 and 5 to an overview of the topics Andrade approached as well as to

external information that I have judged to further illuminate the context of his writing. I warn

the reader that there are moments in Andrade’s essay where the lack of specifics hinders a

definite interpretation – which could seem rather speculative and constraining. In such cases, I

offer my insight, noting its tentative aspect.

Essay Section I

Section I in Andrade’s essay mentioned issues from four centuries of music in Brazil that

are topically organized or, as he writes, by “cases.” Mário de Andrade either brought back or

related these cases to aspects discussed in the following sections, turning this section into a

quasi-preface. Briefly speaking, Mário tackles three social issues: Brazil, as a “young” nation

compared to those from Europe and Asia, developed unnaturally in order to catch up with the

older civilizations. Secondly, he takes up the issue of social function in music – the lack of it, to

be sure – through discussing the influence of the nineteenth-century societal elite in the music

making of the time. For him, the paulista “pianolatria,” meaning the São Paulo piano virtuosi, their European repertoire and the teachers, were a result of a growing capitalism and of a social

group unconcerned with nationalistic matters.

Essay Section II

In an extended introductory paragraph Mário de Andrade started the second section of his essay contending that the work of the Jesuits in Brazil, then called Terra de Santa Cruz,29 had an impact on the colonization rather than on the catechization of the country. To illustrate his point,

Andrade laid out different religious and musical practices, as well as names of artists who worked in Brazil in different periods. In his list, however, not only are certain aspects unidentified, but the elements that would tie their evolution together were also left out. Drawing upon the logic implicit in Andrade’s examples, I construct a possible interpretation of Andrade’s thought as follows:

I observe that Andrade first focused on the Jesuits’ efforts to accommodate into their enterprises the artistic needs of the peoples they encountered in the country. He did so by listing different enterprises organized by the Jesuits in slave villages. His list ends with the mention of a certain “theater for slaves,” which he leaves incognito. I suggest that Andrade is referring to the so-called autos, the Jesuit dramas staged with costumes and music (Appleby 1983, 5).

Next, Andrade slightly changed his direction by moving to what I classify as the eighteenth-century by-products of the Jesuits’ work in Brazil. He mentions the 1790 Brazilian performance of the opera Enzio in Roma, and the fate of Brazilian opera composer Judeu – although not necessarily of the music. I base my classification on the fact that both examples are related to quasi-religious music that originated from Jesuit autos.

29 Brazil received its current name in 1511, when the Brazil tree (pau-brasil) was discovered. It was first called by the Portuguese Ilha de Vera Cruz (1500-1510) and Terra de Santa Cruz (1510-1511). In this paper I will always use Brazil, regardless of the year.

Still from his introductory paragraph to this section, I lastly argue that Andrade pointed out his perceptions of the ways in which the Jesuits incorporated different cultural manifestations, such as language, theatricals and music into their services, and this was the basis of cultural miscegenation in Brazil. His examples start with religious practices in the city of

Salvador, the capital city of Bahia. This opens up the opportunity to examine Andrade’s analysis of witchcraft practices, which he determined as linking Amerindian, African, and Catholic traditions.

Andrade presents two other examples of cultural syncretism, mentioning the two main representatives of Catholic art at that time, both typifying mixed ethnicities: plastic artist

Aleijadinho, responsible for sacred art in Minas Gerais, and Father José Maurício Nunes Garcia

(1762 - 1830), mulatto composer of religious music and chapel master of the court of Dom João

IV while established in Brazil.

When merchant centers started to develop in Brazil in the second half of the sixteenth- century, social classes became more clearly defined. The transformation that occurs in music was for Mário de Andrade a disappointing one. Socially speaking, music went from “utilitarian to being utilizable” (23) and “ever since [such change] there is no longer proper music in the

Colony” (24).

Overview of Chapter 5: From Love Towards Nationalism

Essay Section III

Essay section III deals with the years when Brazil acquired its independence and became

an Empire (1822 – 1889). Dom Pedro I, son of the Portuguese king Dom João VI, became the

emperor. In Andrade’s view, the new political system and the aristocracy it created formed a

system that in practice kept Brazil under the tutelage of foreign powers. Andrade wrote that the

focus of music making moves from religious to secular, with characteristics of sensuality.

Different writings by Mário de Andrade explain that for him, the significance of musical elements are not confined within their pure sonic aspects, but rather they represent the embodiment of human feelings, actions, and social behaviors.

If the social systems had not changed a great deal, music, on the other hand, showed entirely new aspects. Its focus changed from religious to secular themes, represented in the salon modinha and melodrama. Romantic love is a commonplace theme found in both genres.

Musically, they incorporate elements that Andrade considered sensual. By analyzing

characteristics of the modinha and the melodrama in parallel with Andrade’s thoughts presented

in his writings Modinhas Imperiais and O Banquete, I will conclude that such sensual musical

elements of the modinha come from its syncopated rhythms, whereas the sensuality of the

melodrama is found in its hedonistic qualities, more specifically the “pure beauty” of its musical

elements that only provides pleasure – as opposed to fulfilling any social function.

Andrade discussed the new aspect of music education, which is the organization of a

music conservatory by Francisco Manuel da Silva, with governmental funds. The creation of the

Instituto Nacional de Música is an open-ended topic that allows us to cover many aspects of musical life in Brazil.

By providing brief biographical information on da Silva as well as on the Instituto’s history, I attempt to show that Andrade’s own efforts in relation to the Departamento de Cultura, which he directed from 1935 to 1938, have much in common with da Silva’s journey at the conservatory. More of such efforts of bureaucratizing music institutions were made by names such as Spaniard José Amat, whom Andrade mentioned with a negative connotation for being an

“imported” artist and lacking national interests. Composer Carlos Gomes was for Mário de

Andrade the most prominent student of da Silva. He wrote music in an Italian idiom, displaying a mature compositional technique. What this mainly reveals is that the internationalism, represented in the composer’s Italianism, was valued at the time. In the present discussion, this leads to a practical example of the prevailing Italian influences.

Andrade mentioned Gomes’s opera Il Guarany, saying that the work displays aspects of a

“naïve romantic Indianism.” Indianism was an official artistic project of the Government of

Dom Pedro II set to reinvent an imaginative origin of the nation by glorifying the native

“Indian.” However, Western values were imposed on the indigenous populations. In the opera, for instance, the main character is a Native who converts to Catholicism – the official religion of the metropolis. One interesting discussion to which Andrade’s mentioning of Indianism leads us is the modernist notion of the formation of Brazil. In contrast to Indianism, modernists believed that the Brazilian people are equally represented by a mixture of Natives, Afrodescendents, and whites. This has already been suggested in the previous section of Andrade’s essay, and he further discussed it the next, emphasizing the importance of Andrade’s positioning.

Essay Section IV

The final point I try to clarify before discussing Andrade’s section IV is that the

motivation behind his toil for a national idiom in music comes from his idea that an independent

art would put the country in a position of equality with the “developed” nations.

Andrade started this section with the news of the proclamation of Brazil as a republic in

1889, recognizing a political evolution, though with the disappointing news that the music made

in Brazil was still internationalist. As positive news, he announced that musical technique had

advanced because of the Conservatório Nacional de Música. In this scenario of higher quality

compositions, still set in the international trends, he mentioned composers Henrique Oswald,

Leopoldo Miguez, Glauco Velasquez, Gomes de Araújo, and the earlier music of Francisco

Braga and Barroso Neto. Andrade passed quickly by these names, and his text continues without

commenting on these composers’ music. I conclude that Andrade considered that these

composers had not yet achieved a full notion of nationalism because they were not serving

society as a foremost concern in their art.

Next in Andrade’s discussion, he arrived at the beginnings of nationalism, with composers Alexandre Levy and Alberto Nepomuceno as major representatives. For him, these were the first composers responsible for bringing some notion of collective state of mind to

Brazilian music. In their case, collectivism came as a result of their use of popular sources to write music, at a time when the country was experiencing a stronger sense of popular musics and manifestations of Brazilian culture. Both composers, however, could not succeed in achieving a

full sense of nationalism for expressing individualism in their works. From a brief investigation

of their music, I conclude that such individualism comes from the composers’ emulation of

European music. Their nationalism derived from Grieg and from the employment of popular

melodic themes they had observed in Russian nationalist composers from the Mighty Five

composers.30

Elaborating on the topic of popular musics and manifestations, Andrade recalled the genres of music and types of dances that became traditional, and by doing so, I will make the point that he was alluding to what he named constâncias31 of Brazilian music. Constâncias

constituted an important precept of Andrade’s nationalism theory and describe elements of music

that cross genres and establish themselves through the years, found repeatedly in diverse genres

and styles of popular musics.

Next, Mário de Andrade discussed the Second Republic coinciding with the birth of a

new nationalism, but not as a consequence of it. For him it was not this new political system, but

the Great War that involved the imperialistic nations that brought a bigger sense of

independence, patriotism and collectivism. Matters of the Second Republic will be further

elaborated on at the end of the essay discussion.

First, and following the sequence of Andrade’s book, I will note again that the main

composer of this phase is Villa-Lobos, whom Andrade defined as the initiator of music

nationalism in Brazil. Other composers Mário de Andrade mentioned in his text are Luciano

Gallet, Lorenzo (spelled by Andrade in its Portuguese form, Lourenço) Fernandez, Camargo

Guarnieri, Francisco Braga, Barroso Neto, Frutuoso Viana, Radamés Gnatali, and Francisco

Mignone.

30 The Mighty Five included Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Borodin.

31 Constâncias are short musical formulae that permeated different musics in Brazil.

The rest of his writing was to emphasize his point on economic issues and the need for a

greater involvement of the government in Brazilian musical enterprises. I have subtitled this

portion of my discussion “The Music Scene during Mário de Andrade’s Days.” In previous

discussions Andrade had blamed economic issues for musical tendencies divorced from the

national interest. Here he once again blamed the economy for the problems in the musical life of

his days, for composers, performers and performance mediums alike.

He particularized five issues:

First, he compared the difficult financial situation of Brazil with prosperous Argentina,

where musicians were offered better working conditions.

With regard to the second issue, Andrade talked about the decay of the coffee economy and its impact on the musical life of the country, which he considered “intolerable.” It is

important to understand here that Mário de Andrade was writing from the end of the decade of

the 1930’s, because, although he stood for the new political system of the Second Republic,

established at the beginning of the 1930’s, he no longer supported it at this point in time. For

this reason, my comments weave back and forth in time. The earlier period needs to be

discussed in terms of its economic and political distress as a result of the declining coffee

economy and its connection to the stock market crash of 1929. This resulted in the end of one

political regime and the beginning of another; political events of a later period involve the

dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas, which Mário de Andrade first supported, but that later victimized

him and caused him to lose his position at the Departamento de Cultura in São Paulo. Getúlio

Vargas’s dictatorship was also marked by censorship in the arts, and I will argue that it affected

Andrade’s text in the sense that the author had to be selective with his word choices. Andrade

chose to indirectly allude to certain facts.

A third aspect mentioned by Mário de Andrade was the reform of the Instituto Nacional de Música, which for him was inefficient. This revealed his dissatisfaction with music teaching, which he also emphasized in other writings. I have selected a few issues to bring to my discussion. Connected with this and the previous matter, Andrade added that the low number of orchestras and ensembles deprived young composers from having their works played and consequently from furthering their compositional practices since they could not listen to their own works. This constitutes his fourth issue.

Lastly, he commented that the few orchestras and ensembles in the country were being directed by foreign musicians with no interest in Brazilian nationalism. He said that encounters with foreign music groups, on the other hand, could be beneficial for Brazilian musicians.

Andrade concluded his discussion by saying that the government should intervene with financial help.

To conclude, I emphasize that Mário de Andrade’s rhetoric throughout the essay was designed in a way to convey his nationalistic agenda. More importantly, however, Andrade’s essay is a display of his social inclusion project, which resonates in Brazil to this day.

CHAPTER 2

INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT AND NOTIONS OF NATIONALISM

Mário de Andrade’s artistic projects were linked with leftist political views and their search to develop the Brazilian nation, behind other countries in many aspects, including (among others) education and the economy. His aesthetic and ideological positions were in synchrony with other left leaning intellectuals, such as Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1902 – 1982), Paulo

Duarte (1899 – 1987) and later Antonio Callado (1917 – 1997). Socialist ideas shaped many of

Andrade’s ideas, but he was never affiliated with any political party.

The nationalist concepts that are discussed below are taken from issues to which Mário de Andrade has alluded in “Social Evolution of Music in Brazil.” By examining them before presenting the essay, I intend to prepare the reader for a more holistic understanding of

Andrade’s social analysis.

Collectivitism in Music

Andrade believed that anonymous efforts would lead to communal interests and stimulate a rational and cohesive organization of Brazilian nationalism. Andrade’s notions of collectivity in music were an axiom that he discussed throughout his life.

“In Social Evolution of Music in Brazil,” Andrade reflects on the notion that music is necessarily a collective activity, and that it is “the most collectivist of all arts” (116), This, he argued, was because of a necessary interaction between composer, performer and audiences, as well as the ability of music making to bring people together. For Andrade, proof of the

interaction between composer and his/her milieu can be seen in the Masses of the colonial

composer Father José Maurício, as discussed in essay section I. Andrade described the

composer’s musical idiom as a reflection of the ability of the musicians that performed it:

Through its relative ease, through its humble polyphony, through the sweet solo- like divagations of his ensemble music, which were almost always harmonized vertically,32 his music proves in a decisive manner that even the most capable Colonial chapel, paid with the “fat” money of the king, had a mediocre proficiency (118).

Andrade illustrated his point by saying that during the Imperial Brazil (Império33 there were no properly skilled musicians in the country, and consequently the music written was

“humble.”

In order to point out that in the other arts collectivity is not as crucial a matter as it is in music, Andrade mentioned the example of the solitary work of eighteenth-century plastic artist

Aleijadinho, whose work is discussed briefly below for its importance in Andrade’s conception of nationalism.

In section II of Andrade’s essay, we find Andrade talking about collective music in the work of Jesuits in Brazil. This discussion also sheds some light on Andrade’s concept of primitivism (41), discussed below. Mário de Andrade took an unorthodox view of the concept of religion and liturgy when he talked about the music made in the early days of the Colony. His definition of religion relied on the Latin origin of “religare,” meaning to bind, encompassing

Andrade’s notion of the collective. Even though involving spirituality, the connotation that he gave to the word is distinct from the common Christian definition of religare of Man with God.

32 Mário de Andrade perhaps had in mind the visual aspect of the choral homophonic texture, in which all voices progress in the same rhythm, resulting in a score where the different voices are vertically aligned.

33 Please see footnote 121.

The religare he referred to is rather the binding of different social groups, which, he affirmed, happened through the Jesuit singing and teaching of music. From his essay, we read:

The sacred singing of the Jesuits also functioned as an element of religion, that is “religare,” a linking force, uniting, defensive and protective of the diverse social individuals who were gathering together with no law or king in the immediate post-Cabral34 milieu (121).

The phenomenon of binding occurs because each individual’s spiritual belief or veneration finds a means to manifest itself or connect with the immaterial agencies through the collective singing of the Jesuits. Andrade explained in his text that while God from the Bible was the object of Catholic veneration, Native peoples venerated the supernatural forces, and the enslaved African immigrants, their ancestors.

With a distinct form of spirituality that does not involve any spiritual being, but only emotions, Mário de Andrade included in his essay the mention of a group of Portuguese adventurers.35 The author’s brief investigation of the subject describes the circumstances these adventurers experienced in Brazil: “lack of infrastructure, the contact with the Indian, the distancing from civilized forces that leaned towards atheism, and this enormous disease without

34 Pedro Álvarez Cabral (1468 – 1520) was a Portuguese navigator and explorer, credited to lead the first European sailing expedition to see Brazil, in 1500.

35 The mention of this group makes reference to an extended discussion found in Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s Raízes do Brasil (published in 1936). It is first necessary to note that the adventurers were not one particular group of people, but a typology of people with a set of ethics, that regulated the activities developed by the collective social group. The goal of the adventurer, says Holanda, is “to harvest the fruit without planting the tree” (Holanda 2008, 44). He aims for immediate rewards and prosperity. Additionally, the adventurer is opposed to the “laborer,” who plans in advance, aims for future conquests, and has moral values. In rudimentary societies, they would be exemplified by hunters or harvesters. The adventurers Mário de Andrade was referring to in the early colonial period were the flag bearers, and later in the eighteenth-century, the Portuguese who migrated to Brazil in ships to become slave holding plantation owners. Perhaps the most interesting fact in Holanda’s discussion, and the one that best links with Andrade’s text, is that these adventurers manifested impressive adaptability to the new land and the people with whom they met. When in contact with the Natives, the adventurers ate the same food, hunted using the same objects, followed their routine, and participated in their rituals. That way, they favored social mobility and stimulated men to face the hardships resulting from untamed nature. José Olympio in 1956 wrote an essay on “Contribuição à História das Idéias no Brasil” (“Contributions to the History of Ideas in Brazil”), wherein he argued that the colonial formation of Brazil is based on the typology of the adventurer, who “opened the frontier and created a frontier spirit” and that of the Jesuits “educated a large part of the wealthy classes, who would be the future rulers of the country.”

remedy that is death” (120). The adventurers’ spiritual experience is therefore defined by a

phenomenon of novelty granted by their encounter with a land both strange and new, and contact

with the uncertain. According and Andrade, for them, the music of the Jesuits was a comforting

element that in a way brought them closer to Portuguese civilization as they knew it in Europe.

In conclusion, it is the spiritual search that provokes a phenomenon that unites the

different social groups. This phenomenon is what Mário de Andrade called “religare,” for it provides a binding of the groups.

His concept of liturgy referred to the essential part of “religare” practice, which is singing. For Mário de Andrade, the Jesuits promoted the binding of the social groups through music making, teaching and disseminating vocal music.

Andrade’s proposition is that the music of the first Jesuits in Brazil was liturgical in a social sense, for it functioned as an element of socialization for the first groups of colonists.

During the first years of the colonization of Brazil, the Jesuits attempted to evangelize the different social groups, teaching the Roman Catholic Church’s practices, while allowing some

practices of the other cultures to be also incorporated into their services. In his narrative

Andrade conveyed that a type of equalization of social classes was hence manifested. Mário de

Andrade said that music, and more specifically singing, as a universal form of communication, was a necessary element that allowed for communication among the groups, and it was an ever- present element in their gatherings.

For today’s reader, however, Andrade’s argument seems rooted in a rather romanticized view of the Jesuit’s “evangelizing” agenda. The Jesuits were in charge of furthering not only their Catholic religious beliefs, but also the political project of the Portuguese monarch.

Converting the Natives to European “civilized” ways was a means to ensure the Portuguese

domain over the land. Even though Andrade knew this (Jesuits “served Catholicism less and

colonization more,” 119), he still wrote: “religious music was not a necessary part of Catholic

liturgy, it was a liturgical element of socialization for the first groups. So much that it soon

became a perfect representation of a community without classes” (122). What is known now is

that the Jesuits ruptured indigenous cultural systems, destroying dimensions of Native self-

identity in order to fulfill the colonial religious-political mission (see Budasz, 2005).

Mário de Andrade implied collectivism with regard to the artistic music concepts of

virtuosity and primitivism, which is discussed later.

Conceptual Artistic Framework for an Autonomous Brazilian identity: the Work of Aleijadinho

As discussed in chapter 1, one of the premises of the modernists was to find an art that

would be independent from the imitation of European models. Andrade found that the mineiro

sculptor Aleijadinho’s art embodied two principles to be adopted by the nationalists. His work

incorporated native materials with respect their environment. If talked about in terms of an

artistic conceptual framework, the art of sculptor Aleijadinho translated into the use of materials

native to the land and the integration of art within its context. These became two ideals most

acclaimed by the nationalists.

Andrade made several trips to Minas Gerais to visit the Barroco mineiro art sites,

including a 1924 journey with a group of modernists.36 In his trips, he developed such an appreciation of Aleijadinho that he considered the concept behind his works to be the pathway to

36 Oswald de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade Filho, Carlos Drummond de Andrade Tarsila do Amaral, Blaise Cendrars, Olívia Guedes Penteado, and Gofredo Teles were also on the trip.

an autonomous Brazilian art.37 Aleijadinho’s most commonly used material for sculpting was

soapstone, very typical of that region. Oliveira has observed, “this in itself would make the

texture of his work different from almost anything in Europe” (1992, 190). Additionally, among

the most appreciated of Aleijadinho works are the twelve statues of the Old Testament prophets

that are situated in front of the cathedral of Congonhas do Campo. Oliveira also points to the

placement of these statues, suggesting that they “gain a lot from their setting among the barren

hills.”

Virtuosity

Virtuosity, for Andrade, posed a moral problem, not necessarily a technical one (Andrade

1977, 29). From the moment that music requires virtuosic skills from the musicians, it becomes

a selective medium whereby only the few may participate and is therefore the source of separation between popular and erudite art and artists. This virtuosity is imposed by the composer and by the elite public’s taste. The performer is the intermediary, but is also affected by the public’s taste. One event that exemplifies what Andrade is referring to, once again described by Azevedo, happened when Cristovão de Gouveia visited one Companhia in 1586

and determined that the Indian boys with “apparent talent” should be taught to sing. His

measure, therefore excluded those with no apparent aptitude for music. Later in 1658, Antonio

Vieira also established a law that ordered purchases of musical instruments to be distributed in

the Native Villages (1956, 12).

37 It was also from this trip that the modernists decided that the roots of Brazilian modernism/nationalism would be in the countryside (Mello 2007, 82).

The case of such Brazilian farms and their history, that forms a sociological continuum

with the Imperial phase that Andrade discussed next, requires additional understanding.

Andrade’s modernist colleague Sérgio Buarque de Holanda further illuminates the matter in

Raízes do Brasil (1936) saying that these farms were equipped with all installations commonly

found in small villages. Their agricultural system was founded on slave labor, monoculture, and

large land holdings – always taking from the land without giving anything back to it (2008, 51).

He explains that the earliest farms in Brazil cultivated mainly sugar-cane and cotton. Such farms were self-contained entities that cities depended on, a situation that changed only with the

Abolition of slavery in 1888. Each farm produced its own food, material for clothes (which often came from raising cattle, hunting, fishing, or cotton), as well as lumber and a furniture shop. Farms also had their own chapels where the owners and their workers participated together in services that followed the Catholic liturgy. Each farm was a universe immersed in itself (ibid., 81).

Of great interest is also the hierarchy in which farms were organized: the patriarch had indisputable authority over the rest of the family, as well as over all workers; the concept of

family is linked with the idea of slavery; even former slaves were subordinate to the patriarch.

The coming of the Portuguese royal family to Rio de Janeiro in 1808 changed part of this scenario, as discussed above, when the city became a political and cultural center. The plantation owners then transferred their homes to the cities, having their farms now as their sources of income. With them, however, they brought to the city the patriarchal mentality.

According to Holanda, an “invasion of the public by the private, of the State by the family”

(ibid., 82), suggesting that patriarchal authority exceeded the domestic domains to affect public

entities. To conclude, society became organized around individualistic interests. As a consequence, the collective was divided into classes, as Andrade argued in his text.

Governmental Subsidies for Music Schools

Mário de Andrade conceived that the creation of a strong music tradition in Brazil would

happen with a governmental subsidy in a sense that echoes the theory of rationalization process elaborated by Max Weber. When Weber studied the governmental-structured institution of

music education, he used his conclusions to uncover the rationalization of Western cultures, such

as the compartmentalized capitalistic division of labor and the increasing standardization of

traditional structures. The standardization of European music elements such as notation,

instruments, practices, was for him a result of the rationalization and bureaucratization of

traditional organizations that included the music produced in the Catholic Church (Weber, 1921).

As the rationalization of music is the key to the establishment of the standardization of

music in Weber’s theory, Andrade extrapolated that the teaching of music in Brazil needed to be

systematically subsidized by the government (its rationalization) in order to be established as a

traditional structure. In other words, it is plausible to interpret that Andrade proposed to

prescribe the steps described in Weber’s theory: Andrade suggested a look at the mechanisms

that formed history as the basis for a forward construction of national music. Therefore, Weber’s

influence on Andrade was not bound to the historian Mario de Andrade, but to the ideologist

Mário de Andrade. Weber’s findings on the genesis of standards in music form Andrade’s

matrix, or a template that he proposes to apply to the Brazilian reality in order to achieve a

standard national music. It is in this sense that Silva contributed to the construction of national

music in Andrade’s view (please refer to 87).

Andrade’s Views on Italianisms

Among all the international models embraced by Brazilian artists, the Italianisms seemed

to torment Mário de Andrade the most and he constantly discussed them. Macunaíma, his most

famous novel, just to cite one example, casts Venceslau Pietro Pietra as an anti-hero of Italian

origin. He is the major enemy of Macunaíma, the hero in the novel. Venceslau is a capitalist

who lives in São Paulo and steals the sacred rock that Macunaíma carried. Macunaíma gets his

revenge by evoking African-Brazilian spiritual entity Exu at a macumba ritual to possess

Venceslau. The Italian character then goes to Europe to try to find healing. At the end, however,

he falls inside a boiling-hot bowl of spaghetti and screams: “I want cheese” (Andrade 1996,

134).38 Schneider points out that “the marioandradian hero avenges the gringo in a very

Brazilian fashion, using resources from the afro-Brazilian popular tradition” (2005, 214).39

Schneider also suggests that Andrade was not opposed to the Italian immigration in São Paulo, but felt uncomfortable with it in the sense that it could create an imbalance in the Brazilian identity that he believed to be equally based on Natives, Afrodescendents, and Europeans.

One might also note that Andrade extended his adversity to other Italian things. Andrade once told a personal anecdote professing his dislike of the Italian Futurism founded by Marinetti:

“A friend of mine and I, as a joke, wrote ridiculous letters of praise to Marinetti, and sent him books with bombastic dedications…When he passed through São Paulo, giving lectures, I went to visit the man, curious. I found him very insignificant, re-stepping established ideas, which he

38 “Quero queijo.”

39 “O herói marioandradiano se vinga do gringo de um modo brasileiríssimo, usando a forçados recursos da tradição popular afro-brasileira.”

knew by heart” (Andrade 1983, 41).40 In 1925, when interviewed to talk about the Mês Futurista

(“Month on Futurism”) which was about to take place in São Paulo, he says: “Futurism …thus far has not found a humanly artistic solution. What grade should we give to it? Zero. The Italian

Futurism flunked” (ibid., 17).41

States of Consciousness: How Structuralism Shaped Andrade’s Analysis

While Andrade maintained that the lack of nationalism in music was problematic, he

recognized that its causal factor was the state of consciousness in the country, highlighting the

inevitability that musicians would fall on the same trend. He said: “If we say that the social

evolution of Brazilian music processed through successive states of consciousness, then this first

state of consciousness was internationalism” (128). Such a claim is linked with the histoire de

mentalité, a sociological approach to history most likely brought to Brazil by French

intellectuals; an English equivalent is “history of worldviews.” Similar to worldviews, histoire

de mentalité approaches the social-relational value systems. This idea is represented in industrial

internationalism, as mentioned in section I of Andrade’s text. It implies a feeling of inferiority of

Brazilians towards the colonizer and European nations, caused by the lack of refined artistic

education in the country. The state of consciousness mentioned in the essay has to do with the

imitation of European trends, particularly virtuosic music, and the dislike of things national.

40 “Um amigo meu e eu, por brincadeira, escrevíamos cartas de ridículo louvor a Marinetti, e lhe enviávamos livros com dedicatórias bombásticas...quando veio a São Paulofazendo as conferências fui visitar o homem, curioso. Achei-o bastante insignificante, repisando idéias fixas, que já sabia de cor.”

41 “Futurismo...até agora não achou uma saída humanamente artística. Que nota a gente pode dar para ele? Zero. O Futurismo italiano tomou bomba.”

Analyzing the readings that Mário de Andrade had done to learn and understand more

about ethnography has led one of Andrade’s main biographers, Telê Lopez, to conclude that

Mário de Andrade was in search of a theoretical explanation for his fieldwork observations while

collecting folk material. Andrade’s primary intention in collecting folk songs, dances, and

traditions had been to use them as source materials for his own literary works. Only later did he

see the need to find the theoretical means to understand them on more scientific, ethnographic

grounds. As such, his ethnographic studies came as a necessity to fill the gaps that he found in

his ongoing work. In the development of Andrade’s research, the anthropological concept of

mentality (mentalité) implied in his mention of states of consciousness points to a new phase

having to do with who is creating music, and no longer with his older interest on simply what

was in the music created, the materials it used, and particularly its folklore.42

Lopez has observed that Andrade read these authors only after 1928, because in 1927 he

does not make connections between mentalities in his “Macunaíma” (1972, 97). In those years,

Andrade was not the only modernist in search of understanding these concepts and applying

them to the Brazilian reality. His fellow Oswald de Andrade, to cite one example, mentioned

“Pre-Logic Mentality” in his “Manifesto Antropológico.”

As it has been said, Andrade was charging the milieu for the musicians’ lack of national

interest, revealing his fatalist approach and judging the artists’ behaviors to be inert towards their

environment. Lopez’s just-mentioned analysis, where he traced Andrade’s readings, concludes

that Andrade was constructing his thoughts from a fusion of ideas by James George Frazer and

Lévy-Bruhl. These two authors wrote on primitive people’s obedience to the land due to their

42 According to Lopez, Andrade became more deeply interested in folklore in 1925, when he was also reading works that would provide him the basis for studying folklore. Lopez makes an interesting observation that the authors Andrade read then were Brazilian collectors of folkloric material who did not analyze it within any ethnographic basis (Lopez 1972, 78).

underdeveloped socio-economic conditions. From Frazer, Andrade took theories of survival

written in his analyses of ancient man (in Totemism and Exogamy, 1910), whereas the main idea

of French anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl that influenced Mário de Andrade was the concept of

primitivism. Lopez found in the marginalia to this author’s Les fonctions mentales dans les

societés inférieures a claim by Andrade linking the primitive people described by Lévy-Bruhl to

his contemporary Brazilians in terms of nationalism int the arts. The similarity between

Andrade’s assertion of an all-accepting state of consciousness of Brazilian artists and Lévy-

Bruhl’s writing shows that Andrade’s mind was set on finding grounds to explain the reality of

Brazilian society when reading that author: “…the primitive mentality is exactly like ours, only

in an inferior stage” (in Lopez 1977, 98).43

Andrade’s devotion to Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas was, however, conditional. Andrade took issue with him for affirming that the pre-logic mentality of the primitive evolved to the logic mentality of the civilized Man, gradually and slowly. For Andrade, Lévy-Bruhl was describing a process of mutation, not of evolution. Andrade also believed that there were many aspects of the primitive mentality that are still present in the civilized mentality, which did not agree with

Lévy-Bruhl’s theories (Andrade).44

One third author who joins the list of Andrade’s readings, now in the surroundings of

1932, is Edward B. Tylor, who had charted different people’s religious development, concluding

that modern people are able to have more rational and scientific beliefs than primitive peoples,

who were essentially guided by their souls (anima), through revelations received in dreams. This

author also compares ancient man with modern man, concluding that the latter is able to think

43 “A mentalidade primitiva é exatamente a nossa, num estádio apenas inferior.”

44 Mário de Andrade – marginalia notes on non-specified date to the chapter “Passage à des types supérieures de mentalité,” 455, of Lévy-Bruhl Les fonctions mentales dans les societés inférieures.

more scientifically. This latter statement impressed Andrade. (Of course, by today’s standards,

the word “primitive” and other allusions to stages of human evolution are obsolete.)

By agreeing or disagreeing, accepting or refusing ideas that these authors offered, it

seems that Andrade was orienting himself through a framework that he had already established

for himself. The concept of a primitive state of consciousness that he brought up in “Social

Evolution of Music in Brazil” was not new for him, and it is perhaps one of the early principles

of nationalism as argued by the modernists. However, he searched other authors for

reaffirmation of his thoughts.

Andrade’s knowledge of ethnography became “more organized,” as Lopez puts it, around

the year of 1935, by the influence of Lévi-Strauss and Dina Dreyfus, with whom Andrade

became close friends in the years they lived in Brazil. They were in São Paulo along with other

French intellectuals, all attracted to Brazil when Universidade de São Paulo’s College of

Sociology was being established. The university had been founded in 1934, partially as result of

an effort among different segments of the intellectual elite that was eminently gathered by Jornal

Estado de São Paulo and which included Mário de Andrade. Years later, in testimony about the

organization of the University, Julio de Mesquita Filho, the chief editor of that newspaper,

explained these intellectuals’ preference for French intellectuals in the human sciences chairs45:

We were irreducibly liberals. So indubitably liberals that we judged ourselves in the obligation of doing everything in a way that the spirit in which the organization of the University was inspired would keep itself exacerbated liberal. …This positioning of ours forced us to avoid assigning the chairs of the Faculty of Philosophy to be in the hands of the Italian credo adepts, overall those [chairs] that were more apt to be influential in the moral education of our youth. … We

45 “The List of the earlier French instructors at the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters of the University of São Paulo: Émile Coornaet, Roberto Gariic, from Sorbonne; Pierre Deffontaines, from the Catholi Institute de Lille; Paul Arbousse-Bastide, from University of Besaçon; Éttiene Borne and Michel Berveiller, From the University of Paris. Then, Jean Maugue, Pierre MOnbeig, Fernand Braudel, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Hourcade and Edgard Otto Gotsch” (Campos 2004, 426).

gave to France, leader of the liberal democracy, those chairs that depended directly on the spiritual education of future students: philosophy, sociology, politics, economic politics, human geography, classic studies, and French idiom and literature (Mesquita Filho, 192).46

In addition, Mesquita Filho refered elsewhere in the text of this quotation to one specific

matter that the modernists repudiated about Italy: fascism. This information, which is not

gathered from Andrade’s writings, adds to our understanding of his aversion towards Italian

things discussed earlier. The other important aspect observed here is the deliberately liberal mentality of the intellectuals and their parallels with the French liberal democracy.

Mário de Andrade worked for the Jornal managed by Mesquita Filho and, of the

Frenchmen brought to teach at the Universidade de São Paulo, Claude Lévi-Strauss, who joined the university’s faculty in 1935, was the closest to him. As a professor, he was part of the group of French intellectuals who brought ideas of universalism and humanism, both in vogue in

France at the time. While teaching at the university, Lévi-Strauss was also conducting expeditions to indigenous villages, already putting into practice linguistic theories as a basis for his ethnographic studies. He was applying what ended up being the beginnings of his concepts of commonalities between indigenous peoples and Western civilization.

Andrade took a sociology class with Lévi-Strauss in 1938 but even before that, he had developed a strong friendship with ethnologist Diná Dreyfus, who was also in Brazil in the company of the sociologist. In 1935 he worked with Dreyfus and Lévy-Strauss in the Mission of

Folkloric Researches of the Departamento de Cultura. One of the main results from working

46 “Éramos irredutivelmente liberais. Tão liberais, que nos julgávamos na obrigação de tudo fazer para que o espírito em que se inspirasse a organização da Universidade se mantivesse exacerbadamente liberal...Essa nossa posiçao nos obrigava a evitar que as cátedras da Faculdade de Filosofia pudessem cair nas maos de adeptos do credo italiano, sobretudo aquelas que mais aptas se mastravam a influir na formaçao moral de nossa juventude...Conservávamos para a França, líder da liberal democracia, aquelas de que dependia diretamente a formaçao espiritual dos futuros alunos: Filosofia, Sociologia, Política, Economia Política, Geografia Humana, Letras Clássicas e Língua e Literatura Francesa.”

with the Lévi-Strauss couple, Lopez has argued, was Andrade’s conviction that the work with

folklore had to become a scientific practice. In 1937, Andrade hired the couple to teach a course

on ethnology at the Departamento de Cultura de São Paulo, where Andrade was chief executive

since the July 4, 1936.

It is important to trace the origins and applications of Andrade’s readings on the study of folklore, not only because they reveal Andrade’s intellectual sources, but mainly to see how he transformed and applied the theories. By using many readings simultaneously, and after his field work had been done, Andrade constructed his own theory/theories that were foremost shaped by his practical findings; from his readings, he selected ideas that supported the thoughts he had

already conceived. As he looked for a scientific meaning to what he had collected, which was

ultimately motivated by his closeness to Dreyfus and Lévy-Strauss, he was also trying to form a

scientific explanation for his nationalist/modernist proposals. This also reveals Andrade’s ways

of thinking, which seemed to be always adapting theoretical precepts to his practical experiences,

hardly ever taking a theory from back to back to apply it blindly – therefore following his own advice to reflect critically on the materials that were offered to him.

Furthermore, the issue of mentalities can be seen as serving Andrade’s nationalist agenda.

When Andrade described the mindset of Brazilians as having an internationalist “state of consciousness,” he created a stronger argument towards a conscious communal effort elaborating a well-defined form of proper Brazilian art. Andrade approached the study of mentalities in an interested and very personal way. He first theorized on the results of his fieldwork, as has been noted. When writing “Social Evolution of Music in Brazil” his interest was turned toward the construction of a Brazilian national identity in music: Brazilians should evolve towards having

one same mindset and creating unity of thought throughout the country. This idea links us once again back to the notion of collectivism.

CHAPTER 3

MÁRIO DE ANDRADE’S NOTIONS OF NATIONALISM

Andrade’s notion of nationalism is an ever present issue in the essay, although sometimes

in indirect ways. In section IV, nationalism is at the forefront of the discussion, making it interesting to explore Andrade’s reasoning behind his proposal for achieving a national idiom in music. The answers will come partly from this section and partly from his other writings.

First, we need to understand how music would (or should) be nationalized in Mário de

Andrade’s view. An absolute canon of his nationalistic aesthetic is the principle of utility or functional art, which he mentioned several times and proves to have been a differential for him to classify composers in this section, as soon will be discussed. Elsewhere, he stated that “all

Brazilian art of today should organize itself directly from the principle of utilitarianism; it is vain, dilettante, pedant, idealist art that does not follow it.”47 Andrade returned to say that in

music, such “principle of utilitarianism” is achieved when composers choose to represent the

environment in which they live (1977, 111).

In “Social Evolution of Music in Brazil,” Andrade reiterated the matter by placing the

composer in opposition to the aesthetically free artist. “Facing the work to be built, the

composer is still not a free being, is still not an ‘aesthetic’ being, consciously forgetful of his

duties and obligations” (136).

From the two principles discussed above, utilitarian art and the composers’ communal

work (which is to say collective work, as it has been discussed in other precepts), we may

47 “Toda arte brasileira de hoje deveria se organizar diretamente do principio de utilitarismo; é arte va, diletante, pedante, idealista a arte que não a segue.”

47 summarize Andrade’s thoughts in the following equations, where “national” is equivalent to

“collective”:

Free art + self-expression = Antinational art Utilitarian + communal = National art

Another major precept in Andrade’s theory is that music should evoke the time period of its composition. Now, if the elements that represent its days are specific to its time and different elements will represent different times, we can establish that the placement of value towards elements will also change through time in Andrade’s proposition. In this sense, the principles of nationalistic art just mentioned will eventually lose their importance and new ones will take their place. The following passages are from Andrade’s essay: “It is certain that the nationalist phase will not be the last one in the social evolution of our music” (136). And more: “music is now in the nationalist phase by the acquisition of a self consciousness: some day it will have to elevate itself to the phase that I will call cultural, freely aesthetic, always bearing in mind that there cannot be a culture that does not reflect the profound realities of the land where it is realized.

Then, our music will be no longer nationalist, but simply national…” (136). Interestingly from this passage we also learn that the ultimate goal, for Andrade, is to make national, not nationalist music. Nationalism, for him, should only be the next necessary stage of music in Brazil.

Also, from this passage, we add to the value of up-to-date art, the importance of art to represent its place of origin. To elaborate on this, we remember that Andrade condemned the

Brazilian art that imitated European models because it revealed a lack of nationalist interest from the artists. He however blamed this on the state of consciousness, the passivity of the musicians of the time. Andrade also touched on the matter of primitive art produced in the Americas in the very beginning of the essay, when he posed that the American nations did not evolve in the same

48 way as Asian and European civilizations, which developed each stage of their evolution in their own natural pace (although his perception does not necessarily reflect the reality). Andrade also stated in his essay that in the twentieth-century the American nations had to skip stages to meet the other nations. In this process, the artists’ strategy was to imitate European models, which he qualified as internationalist music. From Andrade’s rejection of internationalism through such imitation, we can refer to the modernist idea of independent (or autonomous) Brazilian art (one of the motivations for the Week of Modern Art, as discussed in chapter 1). For the modernists, the problematic issue that comes with negating such independence was that it placed the national creations in a position of inferiority in relation to the work from other nations.

The placement of value on up-to-date and independent art and what it represents to the country in Andrade’s view can be established in the equations:

Imitation of models = inferiority Up-to-date art + independent art (autonomous) = place of dignity (“if we want to be functionally truthful and not become ‘mumbavas’ and court jesters” for the European nations” (Andrade 1977, 130)).48

Andrade proposed that for musicians in Brazil to reach independent and up-to-date artistic life and art production, they should work through a systematic process to which all should adhere.

To these aspects, we must add Andrade’s nationalistic principles discussed earlier: the use of popular sources; avoidance of unilateralism provided by provincialisms; and the contextualization of material sources within a context that it belongs to, as opposed to the use of virtuosic passages for their own sake, for instance, or for their exotic qualities.

48 “Se quisermos ser funcionalmente verdadeiros, e não nos tornarmos mumbavas inertes e bobos da corte.”

Heitor Villa-Lobos

In many aspects, Mário de Andrade’s aesthetic of nationalism in music reflects and at the

same time is a reflection of Villa-Lobos’s music and thoughts on music. Mário de Andrade

viewed Villa-Lobos as a “genius personality” (Andrade 1977, 136),49 and in fact modeled many

of his thoughts on music after the composer’s. This can be gathered from a number of Andrade’s

quotations and discussions from different sources, but mainly Ensaio sobre a música brasileira

and O Banquete, which I will discuss below. In addition to showing the ways in which

Andrade’s and Villa-Lobos’s ideas on nationalism in music took shape, these texts are telling

examples of Andrade’s “protection” of Villa-Lobos’s music in his intellectual works, as it has

been argued in chapter 1.

The correspondence exchange between Villa-Lobos and Mário de Andrade displays their

common interest: “We alarmed, we alarmed…,” an allusion to the name of the modernist

periodical Klaxon – alarm in French. The same correspondence is addressed by Villa-Lobos “to

the elevated spirit of Mário de Andrade.” He also thanked Andrade for having sent him the

“powerful document” on modernism that was Andrade’s book (most likely Paulicéia

Desvairada). From the gift, we learn from the correspondence about Andrade’s role of

mentoring the group of modernists.50

The influence of Mário de Andrade over Villa-Lobos has to be gathered from a

combination of factors (such as the correspondence just cited), since the composer never

admitted any influences or suggestions other than being inspired by Brazilian landscapes. Villa-

49 “Personalidade genial.”

50 Villa-Lobos in a letter to Mário de Andrade, dated of December 14, 1922. The letter is in the archives of IEB/USP.

Lobos often declared statements such as “I was born inspired.” Furthermore, the composer defined himself a self-taught and intuitive composer. It is known, however, that he had informal

music lessons from his father and from composer Francisco Braga (Nasser 2008, 4). He

formally studied harmony at the Instituto Nacional de Música in 1907, even if for a short period of time.

Andrade was always aware of Villa-Lobos’s “colorful” personality and acknowledged his

advocated natural, intuitive inspiration: “his work has become an incomparable rich recipient of facts, constâncias, and musical originalities of Brazilian music...things that he absolutely ignores” (Andrade in Travassos 2000, 49). At the same time, the author saw such lack of

conventional discipline interacting with the figure of the “typical” Brazilian man.51 Such

intuitiveness was, however, accompanied by a certain lack of discipline behind the composer’s work, as may have been suggested at the end of the above mentioned quote. This troubled

Andrade from time to time and he pointed that Villa-Lobos’s intuitive work routine sometimes

resulted in “too many repetitions, easy solutions, and effects in his music.” Andrade also saw a

contradiction between his notion of nationalism and the composer’s personality for his

“excessive individualist feature” (Andrade 1972a, 63).

Villa-Lobos was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1887. His exact birth date remains somewhat

uncertain, which for Appleby, adds to the “myth” created behind his “legendary” persona. The

composer of over one thousand compositions nourished a certain mystique around himself

throughout his life by telling tales and anecdotes that he supposedly experienced. His father,

Raul Villa-Lobos, was an amateur cellist and worked at the Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro

51 Pursuing this further, scholars have matched the posture of Villa-Lobos toward music and the nationalist project of Mário de Andrade to the boisterous and disruptive personality of Andrade’s literary character Macunaíma (Nasser 2008, 54). The personality of Andrade, in contrast to Villa-Lobos’s, has been described by his friends as “disciplined in his work schemes,” his life, was “structured and ordered,” and he lived quietly with his aunts (Bopp 1966, 67).

as Brazilian history scholar. These two factors played an important role in the music of Villa-

Lobos, namely his similar interest for Brazilian matters and the prominence of cello-like passages in his writing (Villa-Lobos played the cello in addition to the guitar). Villa-Lobos also showed particular interest in creating different timber and exploring various textures from instruments and ensembles, similarly to what Parisian composers were doing in the beginning of the twentieth-century.

Growing up in the city of Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the twentieth-century was also of undeniable influence in Villa-Lobos’s music. He started to hang about the city’s night life while still a teenager, encountering chorões and other improvisatory ensembles that played polkas, waltzes, maxixes, and serestas around the streets, bars and coffeehouses. From this time, he developed strong bonding with important Brazilian musical figures such as Ernesto Nazareth. In his early twenties, he traveled around the country collecting folk material. He was particularly impressed with the music from the Northeast region.

In 1922, Graça Aranha invited Villa-Lobos to take part in the Week of Modern Art in São

Paulo as the only Brazilian composer. In 1923, Villa-Lobos went to Paris with the sponsorship of friends persuaded by Arthur Rubinstein. Upon his arrival, he supposedly declared: “I have not come here to learn; I came to show what I have made.”52 In the years that followed until 1926,

Villa-Lobos’s music was marked by exploring sonorities and timbers from the piano while still

writing with Brazilian motives. Rudepoema and Prole do Bebê 2 belong to these years. Villa-

Lobos was back in Paris later from 1927 to 1930, this time with the help of the government.

When asked about the musical activities of Villa-Lobos in 1939, Andrade mentioned the composer’s most recent work at the time, the Bachianas brasileiras, suggesting the composer’s

compromise with national interests. Andrade said: “the great composer found similarity between

52 “Eu não vim aqui para aprender; vim para mostrar o que eu fiz.”

our popular music and that of Bach. Hence the spirit of these compositions” (Andrade 1983,

70).53 Mário de Andrade was most likely reflecting on Villa-Lobos’s declaration on the music of

Bach as “a universal source of folklore,” as written in the preface to Bachianas N.1. Villa-Lobos composed nine Bachianas, for different instruments or ensembles from 1930 to 1945. In tune with Andrade’s declaration, Azevedo summarized the style of the compositions as a “flowing and singing polyphony in the style of Bach allied to the rhythms and melodic curves of national timber” (ibid., 271).54 We can therefore conclude that Mário de Andrade and Azevedo were in

accordance with Villa-Lobos’s view that the music of Bach fitted well within Brazilian music.

Villa-Lobos composed a series of sixteen pieces entitled Chôros after the urban popular genre that developed from the conjunction of lundú and modinha. Chôros 8 and 10 utilize typical Brazilian instruments such as the puita (drum), xocalho (shaker), reco-reco (guiro).

Chôros 8 also presents the interesting use of paper leaves weaving the piano strings. Mário de

Andrade, commenting on the melodic quality of these pieces, reaffirmed his appreciation for the

composer’s use of Brazilian materials: “the admirable Chôros by Villa-Lobos, for instrumental

chamber ensembles (Chôros N. 2, ed. C. Artur Napoleão; Chôros N. 4, ed Max Esching), are all truly mosaics of constâncias55 and Brazilian melodic elements” (Andrade 1928, 49). In return to

Andrade’s regard for the Chôros, Villa-Lobos dedicated Choro No 2 to him.

Villa-Lobos was for Mário de Andrade the exemplary composer in terms of how form

should be approached in nationalistic music, as we read from his writing from 1928: “Villa-

Lobos printed an individualist facet to the Chôros, Serestas, Cirandas, not using the popular

forms ‘properly,’ neither developing them” (ibid., 63). The “proper” manner of using popular

53 “O grande compositor achou semelhança entra a nossa música popular e a de Bach.”

54 “Fluente e cantante polifonia do estido de Bach se alia a ritmos e curvas melódicas de timbre nacional.” 55 Please refer to p. 27.

forms in Andrade’s argument most likely refers to the traditional forms in European art music,

while Villa-Lobos’s individualism refers to the composer’s positioning against imposed traditions that had led composers in Brazil away from national interests. It has to be pointed out

that it is a different individualism from that which Andrade saw in composers Levy and

Nepomuceno, discussed later in chapter 5.

Of major curiosity and relevance to this discussion is Villa-Lobos’s work in music

education, which shows a strong rapport with Andrade’s ideas on nationalism in music. After

returning to Brazil from his second stay in Paris to live in São Paulo, Villa-Lobos was hired by the government to be the head of the Superintendência de Educação Musical e Artística. As part

of his work at the Superintedência, he developed a method of music education for public schools called Canto Orfeônico (Orpheonic Singing), with songs that were later compiled in Guia

Prático. It comprises of a series of folk and popular melodies that were to be performed as

group singing at schools, directed by a conductor who would indicate the pitches in hand gestures. Villa-Lobos declared that the goal of his project was to bring artistic independence to

Brazil. It started to be used sporadically in São Paulo schools in 1931. Its teaching slowly

expanded to other states and in 1946 became mandatory in all Brazilian schools. It interestingly

survived through different political systems that took place in the years thereafter, serving

opposing governments as a tool to encourage nationalism.

Villa-Lobos emphasized that the idea of collective singing in his Canto Orfeonico would

be an instrument of nationalism by educating the young generation in the collective interests of

the country. He paralleled the teaching of his Canto Orfeônico with the music taught by the

Jesuits in sixteenth-century Brazil, arguing that the work of the Jesuits had been used for

“collective discipline and religious indoctrination” (Vassberg 1975, 166). The composer stated

ideas associating collectivity and nationalism, in similar fashion to Andrade, in discourses such

as the following:

“The socializing power of collective singing teaches the individual to forfeit at the necessary moment the egoistic idea of excessive individuality, integrating him into the community…The canto orfeônico integrates the individual into the social heritage of the Patria…It is not necessary to exaggerate here the value of this educational tool in this eminently nationalistic aspect” (Villa-Lobos 1940, 10, in Vassberg 1975, 166).

This has a direct association with Andrade’s ideas in his discussion of the Jesuits’ religare, as discussed earlier. Andrade talked about Jesuits that, led by Fathers José de Anchieta and Manoel da Nóbrega, used music primarily to indoctrinate the indigenous peoples. In

Andrade’s view, they ultimately brought together all the different peoples living in Brazil at the time through singing.56

Andrade and Villa-Lobos both analyzed the music of the Jesuits as having fulfilled a

certain national role. The adoption of Jesuit music in the making of Brazilian nationalism also

denotes Mário de Andrade’s notion of “primitivism.” Ultimately, it confirms Andrade’s

intellectual influence over Villa-Lobos.

To conclude, the connections between Villa-Lobos’s and Mário de Andrade’s shared

ideas and the correspondence discussed above attempted to show the mutual influence and

respect between these two leading figures in Brazilian nationalism, at the same time possibly

serving to clarify many aspects of the music nationalism they pursued.

56 Please refer to chapter 2 for further discussion.

Miscegenation in Mário de Andrade’s the Nationalism

In Andrade’s notion of nationalism, he rejected regionalisms (provincialisms), understood as each people making music in isolation, to embrace the miscegenation of all traditions found in the country. To begin to understand the issues behind such a notion, it is first important to note that the regionalisms that the modernists rejected differed conceptually from those of the Regionalist movement underpinned by sociologist Gilberto Freyre in Recife, northeast of Brazil, in 1933. Freyre’s aim was to challenge the cultural centers concentrated in

Rio and São Paulo to display the regional characteristics of Recife, whereas the modernists’ goal was to include regional cultural manifestations in one national language.

Andrade’s theory of miscegenation in music appropriates the theory that the Brazilian

“race” was formed by the miscegenation of the Indigenous peoples, Afrodescendents, and

Europeans. Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius was the first to write that such blending formed the basis for Brazilian history and society. Martius proposed this idea in his Como se deve escrever a História do Brasil (How the History of Brazil shall be written) written in the early nineteenth-century and published in 1845.

Other contemporary authors from the Imperial days, such as Francisco de Adolfo Verlago and Januário da Cunha Barbosa, did not deny the miscegenation, but believed that the Portuguese were the primary founders of Brazilian society. For these two authors, blending would lead to a more white and “civilized” people by the expansion of the white man and his customs in

Brazilian lands. In the arts of those days this thought was widely accepted. We call attention to the text of O Guaraní, and composer Carlos Gomes, who wrote an opera based on that novel.

This theory still prevailed in the minds of some twentieth-century intellectuals, such as Sílvio

Romero, who differed from them in focusing his work on the foundation of nationalism in

Brazil, but was together with them in concluding that the primary founders and organizers of

Brazilian society were the Portuguese (Romero 1904, 140).57

Mário de Andrade was closer to the proposals of Martius, negating Verlago and Barbosa,

since in his theory of nationalism all ethnicities that formed the Brazilian people should

contribute culturally to the formation of a national idiom in the arts.

From the several aspects imbued with the notion of “race” and art miscegenation, another

point worth noticing is that the inclusion of Afrodescendents in the formation of the nation was a

notion relatively new in Brazil. Even though the presence of Afrodescendents in the country dates back almost as early as the Portuguese, the intellectual leaders of the Colonial and Imperial years chose to silence their presence. Still in 1870, when intellectual and political debates started to recognize their presence, it was with a feeling of awkwardness and shame. The same writings that recognized the Brazilian mestizaje, tried to scientifically prove their inferiority to the white races (Schneider 2005, 202; I retain the term “race” as used in the citation).

It is important to recognize and emphasize here that Mário de Andrade was among the first generation of intellectuals to fully embrace the theory of miscegenation of peoples and their cultures as the basis for the Brazilian nation, for this was a fairly new concept of his time.

Applying the theory of miscegenation to the practical matters of music means that composers should not make a unilateral use of materials, but instead reflect on the unity created by the mixture of cultures and traditions in their music. It is by observing such elements brought from each people that the nationalist composers would find the appropriate source materials for their compositions.

57 Silvio Romero. “O elemento portugues no Brasil.” Discursos. Porto: Lello & Irmao Editores, 1904. Cited in Schneider, 140.

Conclusion

The study of the intellectual context behind Andrade’s ideas has revealed that his notions of nationalism are all interrelated in one or more ways. His conception of collectivism and primitivism are contained in each other. In the essay, Andrade illustrated the role of collectivism in music through the work of the Jesuits (religare, liturgy) and Father José Maurício’s compositions in the colonial days. At the same time, the absence of these two notions in the concept of virtuosity, in Italianisms, and the international state of consciousness, are to their detriment. The latter opposes independent and functional art, and does not allow the adoption of truly Brazilian materials, originated in the miscegenation of cultures, to come into play.

I conclude by suggesting that Andrade’s notions of nationalism themselves work to fulfill the sociologic functions for which he advocated: in his concepts, Andrade pursued collectivism, including Afro-Brazilian art as an equal part of Brazilian society, and attempted to identify the agents that would help or hinder Brazilian nationalism. Andrade was able to theorize a

nationalism that would lead toward a united and autonomous country, in a rather pragmatic

manner.

CHAPTER 4

INTRODUCING THE ESSAY

Essay Section I

With a hint of the pessimistic tone that permeates the essay, Mário de Andrade compared

Brazil to the more ancient cultures of Europe and Asia. Unlike music in Brazil, he argued, in these places music had been able to develop away from concerns of national and social self- affirmation. Andrade wrote: “Brazilian music had to force its advance in order to identify itself in the musical movement of the world or to give itself a more functional meaning” (112). For him, this all had happened because of the “technical and economic conditions of the environment” (112) in the country. As a consequence, artists had to create their art as individuals, by opposing collectivity and by importing European techniques. About his pessimistic angle, it can be said, and I will later emphasize, that it constitutes part of Andrade’s rhetoric to set up an argument that advocates the modernist view of nationalism.

Parnassian poetry, expressed in Brazilian’s literature during the Império (nineteenth- century), was “a phenomenon,” which for Andrade “violently came to disturb the evolution of the national language and our lyrical psychology” (113).

“Pianolatria” in “Cafelândia”

Mário de Andrade used the piano as a means of explaining São Paulo bourgeois habits and desires during the early part of the twentieth-century. He seemed to believe that the paulista bourgeois turned the instrument into a tool to manipulate society in order to maintain their elite

status; a kind of symbiosis between the elite, who dictated the taste for music, and musicians,

who followed their demands and produced what the marketplace asked for. Andrade continually

raised this issue in different writings to suggest that a highly classical-trained virtuoso playing

European music deformed the concept of collectivity and exercised no function in the

nationalization of music. Further discussion about the elite and their taste for virtuosic music is

left for the next section of Andrade’s essay, but here we learn some specifics on the piano scene

of São Paulo and analyze the ways in which he connected it with a lack of nationalism.

Andrade sketched his description of the musical scene in São Paulo by saying that “the

extraordinary expansion that the piano had among the bourgeois of the Império was perfectly

logical and even imperative” (113). He concluded that “the piano was the instrument par excellence of courtship music, with divine marriage and blessing, and as necessary to the family

as the nuptial bed and the dining table” (113).

The culture surrounding the Conservatório Dramático e Musical de São Paulo had embodied this preference for piano music. He remarked that the piano school in “Cafelândia”

(neologism for “coffee land”58), as Andrade calls the state of São Paulo here, experienced the development of “pianolatria” (neologism for “idolatry for the piano”59). About the

Conservatório, he argued that it had been, “justified and inspired by ‘pianolatria’,” and that “it

graduated tens and tens of pianists every year, abusively propagating “pianolatria” all around the

State” (115). Later in his text, he added that it was “born from financial interests, aiming to please the paulista ‘pianolatria’”(116).

One first criticism implied in Andrade’s text is reflected in the two neologisms that he created. “Cafelândia” can be explained by the fact that coffee had become a source for riches in

58 Please see footnote 126.

59 Please see footnote 130.

the state of São Paulo in the second half of the nineteenth-century, forming the social upper

class. He associates the social elite with the taste for virtuosic music.

His second neologism, “pianolatria,” aims criticism towards what he saw as an exaltation

of virtuosic piano music that he saw as a trend resulting from an industrial internationalism,

brought by the Italian immigrants to São Paulo in particular.

In the essay at hand, one of the founders of the Conservatório Dramático e Musical de

São Paulo, Italian pianist Luigi Chiafarelli (1856-1923),60 won Andrade’s praise for his teaching,

which bloomed into “the magnificent flowering with which the piano school of “Cafelândia”61

won several marathons in America.” (114). Andrade at the same time qualified Chiafarelli’s

piano school as a “social excrescence,” partly due to its quick decay, partly to its provincial

goals, that basically served the interests of the paulista public. Earlier in his text, he had

remarked that the talent of Antonieta Rudge and Guiomar Novaes” were not due to Chiafarelli’s

teaching: “Certainly it was not Chiaffarelli who produced the intrinsic ingenuity of Guiomar

Novaes and Antonieta Rudge” (114).

Andrade also considered the presence of Chiafarelli at the Conservatório, a “natural

importation to the Italianized society of São Paulo.” Continuing his description Andrade

complained that the Conservatório “recruited a piano teacher from Europe (Agostinho Cantú) when what were needed were teachers of voice, violin and other strings…” (115). Cantú was

also Italian and moved to São Paulo in 1908. He married Chiafarelli’s daughter and followed

Chiafarelli’s teaching examples (Azevedo 1956, 294). Here, it is also interesting to note that his

60 Please see footnote 123.

61 “Coffee land,” as Andrade refers to the state of São Paulo for its leading coffee production. Coffee became one of the main Brazilian exports in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.

criticism towards the dominance of piano music has a tone of criticism towards the dominant

Italian influence in São Paulo.

Also, as noted briefly above, the piano gained strength during the Império, problematically, in that it took the place that should belong to other instruments in the musical scene: In Andrade’s words, “…challenging the musical virtuosity of the venues, that during the

Império was trusted to singers, flautists, and violinists, the piano jumps onto the stage and goes on to produce the first geniuses of our musical virtuosity” (114). Still explaining this embodiment of “pianolatria” by the Conservatório, Andrade adds that it happened voluntarily and for financial reasons.

A paradigm shift promoted by economic aspects, which he did not discuss here, came involuntarily to determine different directions for the Conservatório. Mario de Andrade talked about this in an illustrative manner: “…one can apply exactly the popular saying ‘shot at what he saw, killed what he did not see’ to the Conservatório de São Paulo” (116).

Andrade listed a series of the above mentioned “missed targets,” introducing them by saying: “The Conservatório itself, however unconsciously, without anyone’s intent, and even against its voluntarily “pianolatric” orientation, had to readapt itself to the technical and economic demands of the state” and “the more significant result of the Conservatório was not its pianists, but different creations” (115). The first of such “different creations” he talked about is the musical work of five names connected to the Conservatório, but dissociated from the paulista

“pianolatria”: Samuel Arcanjo do Santos, Savino de Benedictis, João da Cunha Caldeira Junior,

Nestor Ribeiro, and Oneyda Alvarenga, as a group, were authors of didactic works, wrote compositions, and developed research on musicology and ethnomusicology (for further discussion, please refer to the Appendix).

Continuing to refer to Andrade’s use of the expression “shot at what he saw, killed what

he did not see,” we find that the second “aimed target” that he refered to was “a notable

international publishing house in São Paulo” (115). Andrade noted that the Italians of the

Conservatório established this publishing company, and that the target was to fulfill the interests

of an Italianized audience. What they “shot,” however, was the publishing of what he considered

a more useful music literature. In his words, the publishing house, “endowed by Italian funds,

certain that the editions would sell in the Italianizing environment of the Conservatório, had as

consequence the publication of illustrious Italian and others didactic works in our language”

(115).

Another case of “misdirected target” in Andrade’s text is “a pianist who abandoned the piano for composition, composer and conductor Francisco Mignone” (116). From Italian heritage, Mignone received his musical training first from his father, a professional flautist, and in 1915, when he was 16 years old, from Cantú at the Conservatório. He became a concert pianist, often performing in São Paulo, both as soloist and accompanist. Andrade also criticized

Mignone’s first compositions, but when this essay was written (1939), Andrade had become close friends with Mignone and collaborated with him in some projects (please refer to further discussion in the Appendix).

After this, Mario de Andrade enumerated a series of aspects that he judged to be the

height of the Conservatório’s achievements. From these, it is interesting to note how Andrade

approached positively the disciples of his nationalism. First, he wrote that “the most interesting”

(116), was that “even the works of musicology written outside the walls of the Conservatório”

had pedagogic purposes, such as “the very important books by Furio Franceschini and Sá

Pereira” (116). These two names were in one or more ways connected to Mario de Andrade and

63 the modernist/nationalist movement. Andrade appointed Furio Franceschini (1880 – 1976) to be teacher of culture and musical analysis for the Departamento de Cultura de São Paulo. The second name that he brought up was pianist, music teacher, composer and music critic, Antonio

Sá Pereira (1888 – 1966). Sá Pereira founded Revista Ariel to publish articles on music written by modernists, including Mario de Andrade.

Continuing on with Andrade’s series of positive achievements at the Conservatório, we read: “Furthermore, the Conservatório became an important center of national composition, not only because of the composers it produced…but also for still being in charge of calling to its bosom a numerous group of Brazilian or “Brazilianized” composers from whom it suffices to cite a few main names, such as Camargo Guarnieri, Artur Pereira, and the mineiro62 Frutuoso

Viana, who transplanted himself to São Paulo” ( 116). These three names were also engaged with Andrade’s nationalist ideas.

Mozart Camargo Guarnieri (1907 – 1993) is today one of the most performed Brazilian composers throughout the country, but had hardly been published or performed outside of São

Paulo at the time that Andrade wrote his essay. This only happened in the 1960’s. Like

Mignone, Camargo Guarnieri was from an Italian family and was raised in a small rural town in

São Paulo state, surrounded by the folklore of the area. His connection with Mário de Andrade started when he moved to São Paulo and became his pupil at the Conservatório. Sá Pereira was also Guarnieri’s teacher at that institution. Guarnieri was deeply inspired to write music in the nationalist style as modeled by Andrade in his early compositions. This is seen, for instance, in the written language of Guarnieri’s music: his nearly 200 songs all use Brazilian poetry and the dynamic markings in all the genres are in Portuguese (please refer to further discussion on

Camargo Guarnieri in the Appendix).

62 Mineiro means someone or something natural of the state of Minas Gerais.

Artur Pereira (1894-1946), paulista composer, taught harmony, piano and composition classes at the Conservatório. The small number of compositions that he wrote is in the nationalist language, including Seis peças monótonas sobre do folclore brasileiro, Dança brasileira, Cantiga de ninar. Andrade elaborated somewhat on his thoughts about the composer in O Banquete, where he said that Pereira was rarely performed in São Paulo for the lack of refinement among the paulista public, who preferred “noisier” music. He also described Pereira with “a poetic temperament, infinitely delicate, airy, diaphanous, of a gentle luminosity of sun through the fog. But the milieu of São Paulo clips his the wings! It is clear that it is not technique that he lacks” (1977, 148).63

Frutuoso Viana (1896 – 1976) was primarily a concert pianist and as a composer wrote

pieces for the instrument alone and a few for voice and piano. His “transplantation” (116), to use

Andrade’s term, to São Paulo happened in 1930 when he started to teach at the Conservatório,

where he stayed until 1938. There, he was attracted to nationalism directly from his personal

contact with Mario de Andrade. (Viana’s music is further discussed in the Appendix.)

If these musicians with nationalist yearnings found much favor in Andrade’s essay, the

author still continued his text by summing up the negative aspects of the paulista “pianolatria”

influences in the Conservatório in such a way as to emphasize them. Andrade’s argument started

by establishing that the Conservatório was founded because of financial interests and with the

aim to please the paulista “pianolatria,” as briefly noted above. The completion of his statement

reads that this paulista “pianolatria” “had the king in its belly, a king whose head was Chiffarelli

and whose twenty glorious fingers were Antonieta Rudge64 and Guiomar Novaes”65 (116). The

63 “Arthur Pereira é um temperamento poético, infinitamente delicado, aéreo, diáfano, duma luminosidade mansa de sol através da neblina. Mas o ambiente de São Paulo lhe corta as asas! Não é técnica que lhe falta, se percebe.”

64 Please see footnote 125.

65 awkward translation “king in its belly” a Brazilian popular saying, is an equivalent to “putting on airs.” The use of this saying connotes a criticism towards the upper social class of São Paulo that sought to imitate European mannerisms. In this case, it was represented in the taste for virtuosic piano music. As noted earlier, it can be argued that Andrade expressed his frustration toward such culture of imitation because he saw himself as part of a generation that had not untied itself from the colonizer’s ideas.

To conclude his discussion, Andrade explained that the social function of “pianolatria” was proven null for its rapid decline and its shift of directions: “born from a virtuosic excrescence without more functional and profound justification, which did not even provide the paulista compositions with piano pieces that characterized São Paulo, the Conservatório de São

Paulo was forced by the social conditions of the environment to become a center of musicology and composition.” He implied that it was the frivovlous nature of the performances that undermined the place of performance within the Conservatório.

Mário de Andrade and the Conservatório

Officially inaugurated in 1909, the Conservatório constituted a very important part of

Mário de Andrade’s musical career. He started his studies at that institution where he later taught piano, aesthetics, and history of music. A fruit of the latter was Compêndio de História da Música, 1929.

In a speech he delivered at the graduation of the Conservatório’s 1937 class, he had expressed concerns about the music education system in Brazil, similar to those discussed above.

65 Please see footnote 124.

He complained about the Conservatório students’ lack of interest in a holistic approach to music:

“I have not had one single student answer that he came to learn music!” Instead, he accused them

of learning music “for the hope of a public applause” (1965, 237).66 He also blamed their

parents and their musical taste. Finally, Andrade pleaded with the government for subsidies

towards the education of musicians in Brazil, criticizing the authorities for their lack of support for music.

It is important to note that Mário de Andrade was constantly concerned with the Brazilian system of music education in his writings. In his Essay on Brazilian Music, he had written,“the evil that does not allow Brazilian music to be national is in the schools, not in its disciples”

(1928, 78).

Essay Section II – God First

Andrade presented the phases in which he saw the evolution of Brazilian art: “God first, followed by love, and finally nationality” (112). Section II of his essay deals with religious music, referring to the first phase he proposed.

Jesuit Villages (Aldeiamentos cristãos)

To historically place Brazil in Andrade’s narrative at this point, one needs to explore religious matters related to the Jesuits in the country. The Portuguese arrived in Brazil in 1500, and the first Jesuits, in 1549 (Bahia). These Jesuits were associated with the Companhia de Jesus

66 “Não tive até hoje um só aluno que me respondesse ter vindo estudar música!”... “pela esperança dum aplauso público.”

and travelled in the entourage of Tomé de Souza, the first general governor of Brazil. The

priests from the Companhia were assigned to converting and educating populations that

Christianity had not yet reached.

Andrade addressed this, saying that in Brazil, the Jesuits were in charge of “consoling

two kinds of slaves,” the Black and the Native Brazilian (118). One interesting issue that at first

sight might seem contradictory to Andrade’s statement is his classification of the Natives as slaves, since the Jesuits were strongly opposed to the enslavement of Natives. History tells us that the Jesuits constantly pleaded to the Board of Conscience in Lisbon for indigenous freedom.

Their pleas resulted in a law prohibiting any Natives to be taken as a slave, except during wars.

The fact is, even though the Jesuits theoretically were avid protectors of the Natives’ freedom,

they forced them to live in Jesuit village confines. In practice, the conditions and treatment that

they endured hardly differed from slavery, confirming Andrade’s classification.

African slavery, on the other hand, was largely accepted by Jesuits. The numerous correspondences the Jesuits sent to Portugal serve us well to inform of their constant request for more Africans to work for them. One example is the letter sent by the leading Jesuit father

Manuel da Nóbrega in 1557, where he communicated to his officials in Lisbon about the death of

slaves previously endowed to him by the king. Nóbrega also details the need for more Black

slaves in order to support his religious work (Davis 1966, 192).

The Jesuit strategy to fulfill their evangelizing task in Brazil was to organize churches

and teach Catholic traditions. From such traditions, Andrade mentioned in his text that catechism, processions, and Holy-Weeks were all accompanied by music. Then, an incomplete

clause that visually stands alone follows his list: “Theater adequate for slaves” (119). I suggest

that this fragment should be read as a continuation of the list that precedes it, and should

therefore be interpreted as one more Catholic tradition taught by the Jesuits to reinforce their authority. This use of a fragment, not uncommon in Andrade’s writing, may have been used here as a means to discriminate this last item from the others for emphasis.

It seems fairly certain that the theater that Andrade referred to in this passage was the religious auto, a cross between theater and opera, which had been brought to Brazil by the

Portuguese settlers even before the Jesuits arrived. In its original version, the auto consisted of

singing and reciting Biblical texts in Latin. In order to use it as a teaching tool to evangelize the

slaves, the Jesuits adapted the genre into a more “adequate” version that would be intelligible to

Natives, Africans, and Portuguese colonists: they replaced Latin texts with Portuguese, Spanish,

and Tupi67 and also added dances to the plays. Serafim Leite,68 the most authoritative historian

of the Companhia de Jesus in Brazil, has listed 21 different autos that were presented throughout

Brazil. Fernão Cardim, describing a Pastoral auto from 1583, has said that the piece “had dances

from the Portuguese coat of arms at the sound of viola (guitar), pandeiro (tamborim), tamboril

(type of snare drum) and flute, presented along with dialogues, and the singing of some cantigas

pastoris [pastoral hymns]” (in Azevedo 1956, 15).69

The Church in Rome responded to these innovations by condemning the changes. Father

Manuel da Nóbrega, already mentioned, was then put in charge of composing an “appropriate” auto to be performed in Brazil for subsequent imitation. Instructions included that there should be no feminine role in the pieces, except to represent the virgins of Martirologic, whose part

67 Tupi is an ethnic and linguistic group who were the first people found by the Portuguese in Brazil. They mainly lived in the coastal region of the country.

68 Father Serafim Leite (1890-1969) wrote History of the Companhia de Jesus in 10 volumes with more than 5000 pages that uncovers the history of the Jesuits in Brazil from 1549 to 1759. He worked on his book from 1932 to 1950. Lately, the fact that his writings relied uniquely on Catholic accounts, always with praises for the Jesuits, has raised skepticism among historians.

69 “Havia danças de escudo à portuguesa, fazendo muitos trocados e dançando ao som da viola, pandeiro e tamboril e frauta, e juntamente representavam um breve diálogo, cantando algumas cantigas pastorais.”

should be played by young men. The instructions go on to say that the virgins should be dressed

like nymphs, not like women, and their clothes should be no shorter than one hand from the floor

(ibid., 14).

Evidence that Mário de Andrade is referring to the autos when he speaks of the “theater

adequate for slaves” is his mention of secular theater in his following discussion. He starts the

next sentence with an adverbial whereas, indicating a turn and therefore suggesting a

continuation of what came before. The new sentence, quoted in the following excerpt, then

rivals the preceding idea, thus putting theater for slaves and secular theater in opposition to

suggest that the first one is sacred:

…whereas secular theater, the most collectivist art after music, even more capable than the latter to supply some sort of social awareness to a collectivity, could not exist here other than sporadically, and many times with insultingly “aristocrat- izing” manifestations as the absurd cuiabana70 realization of Porpora’s opera, Enzio in Roma, in 1790 (119).

The “absurd realization” mentioned by Mário de Andrade about such performance is most likely the fact that men performed all the feminine roles of the opera, following the

instructions prescribed for the Jesuit autos. The role of Onória, for instance, was played by

Joaquim José dos Santos Néri (Azevedo 1956, 20).

Andrade elaborated on matters of secular theater: “Our greatest dramatist, Judeu,

Brazilian born, could not have lived here. He could only grow up in Portugal, to then die…”

(119) Judeu (“Jew”) was the nickname of Antonio José da Silva (1705 – 1739), a Brazilian

composer of opera-buffa whose works were performed primarily in Portugal.71

70 Please see footnote 145. 71 The list of opera-buffas composed by Judeu includes: Vida do Grande Dom Quixote de la Mancha e do gordo Sancho Pança (1733); Esopaida (1734); Os encantos de Medéia (1735); Anfitrião (1736); Labirinto de Creta (1736); Guerras do Alecrim e manjerona (1737); As variedades de Proteu (1737); and Precipício de Faetonte (1738). Judeu was eventually killed by the Inquisition in Portugal.

One fundamentally important aspect of Judeu’s operas is that he quoted melodies from

songs that were well known to the people.72 This sort of appropriation of a popular

manifestation into an erudite creation exemplifies one of the pillars of music nationalization in

Brazil as argued by Mário de Andrade. Andrade discussed the appropriation of popular forms

into erudite music in Ensaio sobre a música brasileira: “It is with the intelligent observation of

and benefiting from the popular that the artistic music will develop” (1928, 64).73 This

connection explains Mário de Andrade’s admiration for Judeu, whom he calls “the greatest

Brazilian dramatist” (119).

The remaining issues in Andrade’s introductory paragraph have in common the theme of

Amerindian-Afro-Catholic religious syncretism. The lack of specifics here makes a clear

recognition of some ideas difficult. The following statement presents the pinnacle of puzzling

features: “The Brazilian result of this panem et circenses, with little bread and much circus, was

a different church for each day of the year in the city of Salvador” (119).

A plausible hypothesis is that Andrade refers here to the Brazilian Catholic calendar,

which assigned liturgical celebrations to Catholic saints and today also for Afro-Brazilian

spiritual entities. The city he mentioned, Salvador, state of Bahia, northeast of Brazil is of note

because of its high Afrodescendent concentration, which Andrade pursued in further research.

He wrote a book, Música de Feitiçaria no Brasil (Witchcraft Music in Brazil), which revealed

ways he thought about religion, especially in the Northeast and North of Brazil. In those studies,

he mainly pointed out the Afro-Brazilian and Amerindian practices, and he also conceptualized

them as tied together through Catholic practices.

72 This information was already in print when Mário de Andrade wrote his text, in História da Literatura Brasileira, published in São Paulo by Companhia Editora Nacional in 1930, written by Artur Mota.

73 “Pois é com a observação inteligente do populario e aproveitamento dele que a música artistica se desenvolverá.”

About the city of Salvador, one of Andrade’s interesting studies was on the Candomblé

de Caboclo. Candomblé is a ritual that arose in Brazil as a synthesis of African religions, but

Caboclo, he said, “means specifically ‘indigenous’ and the dance of the Caboclinhos74 is a

national creation, inspired in Amerindian rites” (1963a, 63). Moreover, the gods venerated in

this ritual are Cabocla, Guarany, Caboclinho, and Maromba, all of whom come from

Amerindians groups.

Noticing that African traditions had transcended in the Northeast region to blend with

other traditions, Andrade once asked his friend Gastão Vieira, a medical doctor, to watch a

pagelança75 ceremony in Belém (in the North). Vieira went and collected the songs of Oxósse,

Iemanjá, and Ogum, which, Andrade pointed out, are all African gods (ibid., 27). He also noted

that there were sessions of praise to Santa Bárbara during the ritual, and that her image was elevated in the altar the entire time. The Amerindian-Afro-Euro Catholic syncretism is hence blunt: Pagelança was an Amerindian ceremony traced back to the Amazon region (ibid., 26); the songs in the ceremony all venerated African entities, which in some cases took on

Amerindian aspects. For instance, “Iemanjá is one of the goddesses of the Bahian candomblé” and at the same time Andrade affirmed, “we all know that the myth of the aquatic serpent with supernatural forces exists in the Amerindian religion, and it is particularly strong in the Amazon”

(ibid., 26); finally, the strong presence of the image of Santa Barbara and praises directed to her mark Catholic elements in the ritual.

The songs performed in this environment were responsorial, with four-verse stanzas

(quadra). Interestingly, as pointed out by Telê Porto Lopez, such form parallels the didactic questions and answers that the Jesuits taught in the early Sunday schools. Lopez, summarizing

74 Please see footnote 183.

75 The word pagelança comes from the Tupi word pagé, meaning healer.

Andrade’s thought on religious practices, has explained that Andrade believed the Jesuits used the call and response format as a way of teaching collective thinking. Following Lévy-Bruhl,

Andrade believed that the rationality of dualisms established through opposites, paralleled the

call and response singing, and this dualistic thinking was characteristic of the “primitive”

mentality of the Brazilian people (Lopez 1972, 177).

Additionally, this exemplifies an important notion of Mário de Andrade’s Brazilian

nationalism: revisiting the mentalities of “primitive” peoples in order to construct a national

idiom. He believed that the cultural expressions of the “primitive” peoples were genuine and

uncorrupted and therefore truly represented the people of the Brazilian land (this point was

discussed in chapter 3, in the discussion on Villa-Lobos’s music). Andrade believed that Brazil

was in its primitive state of nationalism, that is, starting at base zero. Brazilians should

“uncorrupt” themselves from the imported influences in order to find the country’s identity.

Thus Andrade continued his discussion on syncretism: “The Colony was kept a colony of

a country with no militia, particularly under the tutelage of incense and mystic drumming” (119).

Though the connection is not explicit, he conceivably referred here to the time when the

Portuguese court left Portugal to be established in Rio de Janeiro. Portuguese Regent Prince D.

João VI, his mother, Queen Maria, known as Maria Louca, and his wife, Carlota Joaquina, came to port in Rio in 1808, escorted by British ships, as they fled Napoleon’s troops. The capital,

Lisbon, was left under the rule of French General Andoche Junot, which elucidates the lack of militia in Portugal as indicated by Andrade.

Based on the overall theme of this passage, that is the miscegenation of white Europeans,

Native Indians, and enslaved Africans in Brazil, “the incense and the mystic drumming” figuratively may allude to the incense used in the Jesuit Catholic Mass, and drums traditions

from Amerindians and enslaved Africans, not consecutively, but referring to both

simultaneously. This passage, however, is difficult to pinpoint.

The transition to the next topic, namely two mestizo personages from Brazil’s colonial

period, requires the mention that upon his arrival in Rio, Regent Prince Dom João VI signed a

decree76 allowing Brazilian ports to be open for free trade with all the “friendly” nations,

whereas before only Portuguese ships were allowed. The city of Rio de Janeiro rapidly developed into a political, economic, and artistic center. Dom João VI also decided that the court should have a royal chapel. Hence it came about one of the three cultural manifestations

that Andrade alluded to in his text, composer Father José Máurício Nunes Garcia (1767 – 1830).

Dom João VI hired Father José Maurício, 77 a mulatto composer, son of freed slaves to be the

court’s chapel meister. Scholars from Andrade’s days speculated that the education of Father

José Maurício had come from the Jesuits of the Santa Cruz farm, as Andrade stated in his text.

Today, however, it is known that Father José Maurício’s parents, his aunt and a friend’s family

business man educated Father José Maurício in the general subjects. It is also known that at the

age of 25 Father José Maurício was ordained a priest and, many argue, with the intent of

becoming chapel-meister.78 About his musical learning, it is known that he studied with mestizo

Salvador José, who taught many musicians of his generation; he sang in a church choir.

In his unusual manner, Mário de Andrade characterized these years to be a time of catharsis and he said that the music of Father José Maurício was responsible for bringing musical

76The decree was titled “Carta de Abertura dos Portos do Brasil às Nações Amigas.” Viscont of Cairu, José Maria Lisboa, advocated for such a measure, arguing that this was a way to propel capitalism in the colony (Mello 2007, 19).

77 He is commonly referred to in Brazil as Father José Maurício. It is interesting to note that this is how the first patronage for a musician came to being in Brazil. Father José Maurício composed a variety of sacred pieces and some secular works. His repertoire includes Masses, Offices, Requiems, songs for Holy Week, antiphons, as well as orchestral and solo instrumental works. In 1821 he also wrote a piano forte teaching method.

78 Father José Mauricio’s priesthood vocation is questioned because he had six children with Severiana Rosa.

sounds to “the consoling naves,” referring to the central part of Catholic churches as hubs: Father

Maurício was to bring sounds to the consoling naves of this purgatorial world” (119).

The composer directed all musical activities at the court from 1808 until 1811 and the

music he composed during that time is, for Mário de Andrade, a means of understanding the

humble ability of the court musicians. The following passage is from section I:

…through its relative ease, through its humble polyphony, through the sweet solo- like divagations of his ensemble pieces, which were almost always harmonized vertically, his music proves in a decisive manner that even the most capable Colonial chapel, paid with the “fat” money of the king, had a mediocre proficiency (118).

The mentioning of Father José Maurício in Andrade’s text symbolized miscegenation and

illustrated the importance of the collective in music, since Father José Maurício composed his

music based on the capability the musicians with whom he was working.

Along the same lines of societal syncretism, although not directly connected to the

Portuguese court and away from Rio de Janeiro, sculptor and architect Aleijadinho was another

name alluded to in the text. Son of a Portuguese architect and his slave Isabel, Aleijadinho was

once defined by Mário de Andrade as an “alchemy of Indian blood with the African sap, and

with the verve of the Portuguese” (Andrade 1984).79 Aleijadinho’s parents were Portuguese

Manuel Francisco de Costa Lisboa, and African-Brazilian slave Isabel. He was born in the town

known today as Ouro Preto, state of Minas Gerais, a wealthy mining region of Brazil.

His art, Andrade wrote in the essay, “kept the incense safe from any high winds” (119).80

Because Aleijadinho was at the service of the Catholic Church, the incense mentioned here is a

probable reference to the frankincense that is burned during the Catholic Mass, especially the

79 “Alquimia do sangue indígena,com a seiva africana e com a verve do português.”

80 Please refer to further discussion in chapter 2.

High Mass. Metaphorically, keeping the incense safe from high winds meant presenving the

integrity of an essence, the essence of mixed Brazilian people.

To the short mention of the artist that Andrade makes here it should be added that he

studied Aleijadinho’s work intensively. Andrade made several trips to Minas Gerais to visit the

Barroco mineiro art sites, including a 1924 journey with a group of modernists.81 In his trips, he

developed such an appreciation for Aleijadinho that he considered the conceptual frame behind

his works to be the pathway to an autonomous Brazilian art (for more discussion, please refer to

chapter 2).82

Jesuits, Religion, and Liturgical Forms

After the introductory paragraph that involved issues of primitivism and syncretism, just

discussed, Andrade moved on to develop the subject of the music of the Jesuits. Andrade’s

description of the religious services emphasized that the Jesuits welcomed indigenous

manifestations along with traditional Catholic traditions, provoking the religare of the different peoples (please refer to chapter 2). In terms of music, Andrade noted that organum and

Gregorian chants, brought by the Portuguese, were sung with the accommodation of indigenous

songs and words. Amerindian dances and rituals also enriched the services. In addition,

Andrade described a priest who would use the accent of a native Indian to preach. Music

historian Luiz Heitor Correa de Azevedo has gathered more details on the early history of music

in Brazil which may help us construct a more complete notion of the subject. Azevedo recounts

81 Please refer to footnote 36.

82It was also from this trip that the modernists decided that the roots of Brazilian modernism/nationalism would be in the countryside (Mello 2007, 82).

that when the Jesuits arrived in Brazil, in 1549, they soon realized that music was an easy way to

introduce themselves to Native peoples. In a document from 1552 sent to Portugal, a Jesuit

reports that their means to approach a newly discovered tribe was to send ahead of their group an

Indian child to play or sing music. That tribe then would be open and friendly to them. This

author added, “with songs and dances, to the sound of instruments, therefore, the savage flock

started to be gained for Christ” (1956, 11).83

Jesuit Music and the Expansion of Merchant Centers

Andrade praised the early music of the Jesuits for providing social equalization of classes through the acceptance of all different indigenous and Black manifestations. He also made a point that later in the seventeenth-century, when merchant centers started to develop in Brazil,84 the traditions brought from Europe prevailed and the social binding created by music ceased to exist. Music was then European without being national or “Brasilica,” because it was Catholic, not social: cateretês gave way to the imported rococo, instruments, rhythm, melodies, and texts

(124).

Furthermore, music was now shaped by the “detestable aspects of virtuosity” (124), useful only for some. Andrade explained his point of view with a metaphor that is still religion- related, of two different gods that guided the old and the new religious music. In his metaphor, the former god united and equalized all different social groups; the new god who replaced him favored the differentiation of social classes. This new god is slavocratic (at this point in history,

83 “Com cantos e danças, ao som de instrumentos, pois, foi sendo conquistador para Cristo o rebanho selvagem.” 84 “Sugar cane plantations and sugar plants had spread all over the Brazilian coast, from São Vicente to Paraíba at the turn of the sixteenth to seventeenth-century” (Mello 2007, 18).

Africans and their descendents were the slaves), supports the latifundio regime,85 and “decorates himself with baroque ornaments” (123).

The timeframe in question refers to the same period discussed earlier in Andrade’s introductory paragraph, where he used the music of mulatto composer Father José Maurício as an example of social syncretism and proof of the collective work necessary to make music.

Here, referring to the same music, he looks at its social placement. Because music is presented in performances, as opposed to being played or sung in daily life, Andrade considered it ornamental, dissociated from any collective social function, only representing the interests of the elite. Andrade wrote: “…with the establishment of various merchant centers… music, however

85 The roots of latifundios in Brazil can be traced back to the earliest known documents of land concession in the country, from 1534.The Portuguese Crown had taken possession shortly before and distributed the land to 12 Portuguese noblemen donatários (donees) in a system called Capitanias Hereditárias (Hereditary Captaincies). In the system, the donatários did not own the land, but were given the right to develop it, as well as to colonize and protect it from foreign invasions. Brazil was divided into 15 unequal enormous lots, divided at latitudes from the coastline to the median of Tordesilhas. The donatários, many of whom never set foot in Brazil, had administrative and judicial powers over their assigned Capitania but were still subjected to the laws of King João III. One of the laws that constitute a key aspect to link the Hereditary Captaincies to latifundios is the law of Sesmarias, which gave each donatário the right to redistribute land to be cultivated. The sesmeiros, or beneficiaries, would have to utilize the land within five years, or would otherwise be obliged to return it to the donatário. Only the Pernambuco and São Vicente Captaincies prospered. With the majority of the Captaincies failing, by 1759 the Portuguese Crown had taken all the land back. However, the system left its marks on Brazil’s political and social structures of today: it established the territory of most coastal states and originated a structure of regional power and social inequalities. Large portions of land continued to be distributed by the Crown in the system of Sesmarias to Portuguese noblemen, whose financial situation could support its development. These few privileged sesmeiros had the right to use the land purely for export agriculture with crops determined by the Crown. The sesmeiros practiced monoculture farming, growing large singular crops of sugar cane, cotton, or coffee, all dependent on slave labor. The system lived through Brazilian independence, in 1822. The new Brazilian Empire as well as the sesmeiros maintained the same interests of export agriculture, monoculture and slave labor. This system started to be threatened by (1) difficulties of maintaining slavery due to internal battles for freedom and external pressure for abolition in the nineteenth century and (2) a chaos caused by the lack of judicial order in real estate. Brazilian Emperor D. Pedro II in 1850 legislated through the Lei de Terras (Land Law) the ownership of the land. The stipulations put forth by the Empire included that the sesmeiros would become owners at a price set by the Empire. The ease with which the land ownership transitioned to sesmeiros proved a connection between them and the Empire. This way the land was secured to these noblemen, formerly sesmeiros, and now, latifundistas. Brazil became independent from Portugal in 1822. The practice of such independence, for Andrade, was however null. For him, the country was still under colonialist rules. His view once again resonates with historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s. His writings on the subject will help my examination to further comprehend the issue as seen by the modernists. Holanda’s text explains that the mentality that controlled social, economic, political and cultural issues continued to be that of the farmers, however now with a different profile. Among the differences that he explains are the facts that slavery started to be threatened and that these famers were now mainly cultivating coffee. This rural mentality implicated a blind exaltation of things European and according to Mário de Andrade’s text, impelled an adoption of European trends in the realm of music in the same manner.

always religious, little by little moves from necessary to unnecessary, no longer coming from

bottom up, becoming an element of ornamentation at religious festivities” (123). This represented the break with the collective music of the Jesuits and the beginning of individualisms in music.86

Andrade finished this text in such a way as to almost seem self-consoling, but also

revealing a fatalist view:

I am not criticizing, and even less condemning, which would be of no use, this aim of purely autocratic and popularly “de-fiber-ing” virtuosity that took over the music of the Colony and persevered until the Império. It was fate. It was a fatality just as much in human evolution as it was in the social evolution of the country (124).

86 Please refer to further discussion in chapter 2.

CHAPTER 5

FROM LOVE TOWARDS NATIONALISM

Essay Section III: Love

For Mário de Andrade, Brazil’s independence on September 7, 1822 ushered in a new

chapter in Brazilian music, constituting what he called the internationalist phase. At the same

time, referring back to the outline he proposed in the previous section, he entitled this phase

“love,” as a way to refer to the melodrama and salon music of the time. His narrative is full of

setbacks, in synchrony with modernist Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, who saw the country still

under the influences of the colonizer, and searching for theoretical answers from influencing

figures of modernism, such as Max Weber and Lévi-Strauss.

Music during the Brazilian Império: Love and Internationalism

Mário de Andrade started out this section by dealing with the issue of Brazil continuing colonial status in relation not only to Portugal, but also to the European nations as a whole through an unchanging colonial mindset: “Hark! Independence, politically logical but socially only an aspiration” (124). Socially, Andrade described what he considered an unnaturally formed aristocracy: “The Império had been established, importing emperors and an entire system of nobility distribution that was just a superfetation, almost nothing based on the aristocracy of regional tradition, strength and riches which are naturally formed in any country under any regime” (124). Conversely, with the possession of a continuing domination, Andrade argued,

“the settler still had the justification of underscoring the state of submission in which he wanted

to keep his possession of this Atlantic” (128).

The social “malfunction” of the Monarchy in Brazil was a subject that permeated

Andrade’s thoughts in the year of 1939, when he wrote the essay herein examined. In that same

year, he annotated on the side of a page of História de dois golpes de estado, by Otávio

Tarquinio de Souza that “the metropolis was no longer another country, but…the throne – of the aristocratic people,”87 in other words, affirming that Brazil was a mere land extension of Portugal

(Andrade, 193988). The fact that the son of the Portuguese king became the emperor of Brazil

after its independence partially explains his logic. More can be learned from Andrade’s notes

ahead in the same marginalia: “The throne …was a warranty for conserving the aristocratic minority (plantation owners, clergy) and its supporting forces (latifundio, slavery) against the

liberalism that is naturally atheist and small-land-owner of the nascent bourgeoisie.”89 These are

allusions to the conditions posed by Portugal towards granting independence to Brazil, which

included the preservation of the slavery regime as well as control over the latifundios, allowing

only the Portuguese to own properties (Mello 2007, 19).

The system allowed the elite to be distinguished from other social strata. Once again,

Andrade’s concern was not only descriptive here, but yielding the need for change. The

initiative to break the strong structure through giving more importance to the opposite social

classes would have to come from some sort of “competitive social order.”90 The major challenge

87 “A metrópolis não era mais outro país, mas...o trono – a gens aristocrática.”

88 Andrade, marginalia notes for: Octávio Tarquinio de Souza, “História de dois golpes de estado,” Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1939, half-title page).

89 Ibid. “O trono era uma garantia de conservação contra o liberalismo naturalmente ateu e pequeno-proprietário da burguesia nascente.”

90 Feeling the same unease, Andrade’s fellow modernist, historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, described a situation

81 for the modernists to find a path away from colonial status was the weight that the colonial institutions carried over to the Império. Export was still the main economic interest, disallowing social changes.

During the Imperial days, new farm owners, now planting coffee, were residing in the cities where they continued to monopolize politics and had incontestable power in deciding the economic and political fate of the cities and, as a consequence, of the entire country. Land owners and their inheritors pursued the study of liberal arts and left the technical and other professional duties to their servile underlings. In this picture, where a wealthy elite constituted the society’s thinkers, their traditional ideas were put into practice. Holanda talked about their thoughts not being speculative or serving knowledge and action, but simply working as an instrument of ornamentation, flowered by florid speeches and an “ostentatious erudition.” This is the key to establishing a link with Mário de Andrade’s thought about the arts in Brazil.

Andrade indirectly conveys in his text that the construction of an artistic life within such institutional and sociological parameters reflects a taste equally ostentatious and florid, without characteristics of the progress for which the modernists argued. The minds that were controlling

that exemplifies Brazil’s subordination to European nations. After being pressured by the British government, Brazil approved a law to end slave traffic. This was in England’s interest because some of its colonies were also producers of sugar cane and cotton. No longer with slave labor, but with paid workers, their products were more expensive than those offered to the market by Brazilian producers, making the competition in the international commerce unfair. On September 4, 1850 the Emperor Dom Pedro II signed the “Lei Eusébio de Queiroz,” prohibiting the slave trade and ordering that if slaves were to be caught on a ship, they should be sent back to their original place or simply to a point outside of the Império which was more convenient to the government. Such disregard for the slaves’ lives shows that the measure had economic matters in mind, not real humane awareness. If it was unavoidable to bow to the foreign nations’ power, solutions to overcome possible losses that this would bring were at hand, for internally they still had control. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda associates the law with the founding of the Banco do Brasil in 1851, created to give credit to the farmers who needed it after the losses they had sustained with the end of the slave trade. Credit was given to farmers, who increased their debts in order to maintain their life style and the social prestige linked with it. An eventual instability hit the new and old rich. From 1850 to 1888 one sees the battle of the menaced rural elite to maintain their status. More than ever before, this elite tied itself to an openly regressive mentality, facing the need to hold on to their old conventions if they were to secure their status of social eminence. According to Holanda, it was such mentality that made abolition come so late in Brazil; transformations could not be expected in a country fighting to keep its traditions.

the social and political scene were also manipulating the hands of musical creation. The lack of

initiative of those who would have the power to shift away from this regressive and anti-national

mentality, at least in music, had become a personal affair for Mário de Andrade.

One problem at this point in history was that musicians were fulfilling exactly what the

elite demanded, and the music making remained the same way. Most singers, instrumentalists

and works were brought from abroad, continuing the tradition seen in the late phase of the

Colony. Works by Brazilian opera composers only presented qualities of European styles.

Andrade wrote that composers from this period “imported, they accepted, they admired, not the

European music, because there is no music that is peculiarly European, but all different European musics” (128). The Italian bel canto dominated the musical idiom. Opera did not include any of the Brazilian popular dramatic dances,91 such as the reisados,92 pastoris,93 congos,94 and

cheganças.95 According to Mário de Andrade and later to Oneyda Alvarenga, these were

frequently performed among the popular strata during the Second Império (1840-1889) and

could well have been depicted in the operas (Alvarenga 1950, 29).

Brazil’s most prominent composer of this period was Antonio Carlos Gomes (1836-

1896), whose music was for Mário de Andrade the product of this society that valued European

models over the national.

91 The term dramatic dance for the genre was coined by Mário de Andrade to define dances that had one or more parts dramatized and were based on a determined subject matter. The people themselves did not have a term to encompass all of them in one genre.

92 Please see footnote 164.

93 Please see footnote 165.

94 Please see footnote 166.

95 Please see footnote 167

Secular Music

Before discussing the matter of international music, Andrade observes that during the

Império religious music gave way to profane music, inspired by international trends, clarifying

that “secular music started to prevail with two manifestations particularly characteristic of sexual

sensuality: salon modinha,96 as lovers’ laments, and the melodrama, as escape valve for

passions” (125).

Modinha is a love song genre that existed both in Portugal and Brazil in the nineteenth-

century. Elsewhere, Andrade affirmed that it is impossible to find its origin and he described it as “almost an uninterrupted sigh of love...a firework of tears…functioning only as entertainment” (Andrade 1964, v).97

The association of modinha and melodrama with sensuality and sexuality might sound a striking, if not an odd, affirmation. Fortunately, Andrade elaborates further on these matters in O

Banquete. There he explains that one aspect of the modinha that causes the music to be sensual is the rhythmic element of syncopation. For him, syncopation is related to sensuality because it departs from what Andrade considers the natural rhythm of the human being; it is an abnormality; it collaborates with sin and it is anti-moral, a deviation from the virtues of good moral, representing a sensual joy (Andrade 1977, 135). Thus, syncopation becomes a metaphor for secular and sensual, and it is this presence in the musical genre of the modinha that moves music away from the sacred.

96 Please see footnote 163.

97 “Quase um suspiro ininterrupto de amor...um rojão de lágrimas...com a única função de nos entreter.”

Curiously, as Mário de Andrade articulated his negative impression of the modinha in this text, he dedicated himself to investigate it in depth, becoming the first scholar to do so in

Modinhas Imperiais (1930).98 In his findings he determined that the genre evolved through the

nineteenth-century following the distinct political phases of Brazilian history. The first phase

coincided with Brazil’s First Império (1822-1831), when the modinha was essentially erudite.

Andrade has observed that the modinha is so similar to the bel canto melodies from Italian operas, to the point that an “infinite number of Italian arias were transformed into modinhas”

(Andrade 1963, vii).99 The characteristics of the genre in this phase involve duple meter, a

melodic line full of ornamentations, wide leaps, chordal arpeggiation, and wavy arabesque-like

contour, always with piano accompaniment. The formal scheme could vary, but often in aria da

capo form (A-B-A). The following excerpts that exemplify this phase are taken from the

beginning and ending of Candido Inacio da Silva’s Busco a campina serena. Here the use of

syncopation is still discrete, noticed only in the accentuation of the second notes of the triplet

figurations of the melody close to the end. The melody presents several grace notes and

ornamentations, similar to the Italian bel canto style.

98 Mário de Andrade published Modinhas Imperiais in 1930 through Casa Chiriato in São Paulo. This study explores the history and the characteristics of the modinhas, and includes musical scores of a number of pieces.

99 “Um número infinito de arias italianas se transformaram em modinhas.”

Figure 1: Excerpt from Candido Inacio da Silva’s “Busco a campina serena” (Alvarenga 1950, 287, 289)

The second phase of the modinha coincided with Brazil’s Second Império (1840-1889).

Aristocrats no longer played the genre in the salon dances as popular musicians played it on the streets, preferably in the triple meter of the waltzes, although the duple meter from the Scottish dances was also found. The melodic line kept similar characteristics, but the accompanying instrument was now the acoustic guitar, which Mário de Andrade considered a characteristically national instrument. The form also gained a more national quality: A-B-A-C-A, or individual verses followed by a refrain, which Andrade found to be a constant element in national waltzes.

Given Andrade’s description of modinha as lacking functionality and exceeding foreign influences, however, it is clear that the genre was a somewhat conflicted subject for him (or at least there was a side of it that Andrade chose not to bring up here). In the already mentioned

study, Modinhas Imperiais, he revealed the consideration that the modinha had acquired

Brazilian qualities by the Second Império, in spite of its international roots. For him, the

phenomenon of the nationalization of the modinha had occurred because colonial and imperial

modinheiros100 were not simply imitating international trends. They were instead selecting from

European melodic components those that “agreed with the nascent national sensitivity” (Andrade

1963, vii).101 This national sensitivity came from the sensible fitting of the melody with the

Portuguese spoken in Brazil, which he defined as “delicate, subtle and mysterious” (ibid.).102 In

comparison, he says that the “Portuguese modinhas presented an incisive line which appears to

us harsh, creating violence against our gentle pronounced language… Modinhas by Brazilian

composers,” he concluded, “were perceptibly by people from Brazil” (ibid.).103

As it has been said, the modinha had a close bond with the melodrama through the borrowing of melodies. However, unlike the modinha, the secularity through sensuality that

Andrade finds in the melodrama comes from its hedonistic qualities, namely the exclusivist ideal

of achieving pleasure through the experience of music. This idea of art for art’s sake not only

moves music away from the sacred but also from any functionality. This type of music will no

longer provoke the religare, but will instead seek to provide personal experiences of

“unnecessary pleasure” (Andrade 1977, 128),104 implying heedless over-indulgence.

100 Portuguese word for composers of modinhas.

101 “Concordavam com a sensibilidade nacional nascent.”

102 “Delicado, suave e misterioso.”

103 “Modinhas portuguesas apresentavam uma linha incisiva que nos parece dura, violentando nossa linguagem pronunciada gentil...Modinhas de compositores brasileiros eram percebidamente de gente do Brasil.”

104 “Prazer desnecessário.”

Francisco Manuel da Silva: The Foundation of the Conservatório

The music scene of the Império had Francisco Manuel da Silva (1795 – 1865), José Amat

(circa 1810 – 1875), and Carlos Gomes as intensively active figures. Andrade’s description of

the period includes efforts by Silva and Amat at bureaucratizing music institutions, and “naïve”

efforts by composer Gomes at nationalizing Brazilian music.

Francisco Manuel da Silva, a composer,105 conductor, player of several instruments,

music teacher, and developer of various musical organizations, founded the Instituto Nacional de

Música. To talk about the Instituto’s foundation, Andrade changed the negative tone that had

been permeating his writing about the music of the Impérios, to praise Silva: “This is when the

major musical figure that Brazil has produced thus far emerges, the one who came to give more

solid basis to this entire castle founded on the sliding sand of the coast with his fecund genius,

Francisco Manuel da Silva” (127). Azevedo appointed Silva as “an organizer, a discipliner of

Brazilian musical life” (51).106 Silva founded the Sociedade Beneficente Musical in 1833 and

through the influence he achieved in this organization he proposed that government sponsor the

teaching of music. In 1841, the Assembleia Legislativa do Império voted that the money of two

lotteries per year should go toward a music teaching establishment. The government did not

thoroughly put the new amendment into practice and it took seven years until there were enough

funds to advance the project. The Instituto Nacional de Música was then formed. In any case,

Mário de Andrade applauded Francisco Manuel da Silva for obtaining official funding from the

government in order to create a music school. This parallels Andrade’s work at the

105 Silva wrote the Brazilian national anthem as well as popular songs and instrumental pieces in the style of lundu, modinha and Brazilian waltz. He also wrote several music didactic books, including Compêndio de Música Prática (Compendium of Practical Music), in 1832, and Compêndio de Princípios Elementares de Música (Compendium on Elementary Principles of Music), in1845. The latter was used at the Instituto Nacional de Música.

106 “Um organizador, um disciplinador da vida musical brasileira.”

Departamento de Cultura de São Paulo, and also represents a step toward the nationalization of

music. Andrade wrote:

Charged with an ingenious practical vision that led him to act against any hindrance, he is the creator that establishes our musical technique definitively. He violates the dominance of the epidemic individualistic initiative in which our musical teaching had dispersed itself until that time, concentrating the technical education of the Brazilian musician in the permanent hands of the government (127).

Next, Andrade mentioned Spanish opera impresario José Amat as a metaphor for foreign artists working in Brazil. José Amat fled to Brazil in 1848 between the first and second Carlista

Revolutions. José Amat organized the Imperial Academia de Música e Ópera Nacional, also with government funds.

Before moving to Brazil, Amat was an amateur musician in Spain. In Brazil, he started to play guitar and sing modinhas at the salons to make his living. He married a Brazilian singer from an influential family of Rio de Janeiro.

Inspired by the success of nationalist zarzuelas in Spain, Amat helped to found the

Imperial Academia de Música e Ópera Nacional in 1857, with subvention of the Government of

Dom Pedro II. The institution, which lasted until 1864, had the primordial aim of performing operas in Portuguese. José Amat was named director of the Academia, which existed for fourteen months and performed 62 times, including in their repertoire zarzuelas, opera-buffa, and

Italian operas. The only national characters of the Academia seemed to have been the cast of the operas, which eventually counted with some local artists. This notably shows that Amat let himself stray from his initial proposal of founding an opera house that would exalt national music, artists and themes, a fact that may have led Mário de Andrade to bring his name up with disapproval in his essay. José Amat resigned his position as director of the Academia after the government declined his appeal to designate his name on the land title of the new opera house to

be built for the Academia with public funds. After Amat left, the Academia was restructured and

housed several works by Brazilian composers, including A Noite no Castelo, by Carlos Gomes, in 1861.

Nevertheless, Amat and the Opera Nacional are still considered to have been responsible for the formation and motivation of composition of operas in Brazil. Like Silva, Amat searched for government help to put forth his projects in music. Amat died in Recife, Northeast of Brazil.

Antonio Carlos Gomes

Antonio Carlos Gomes, the most prominent student of the Instituto is also the exact example of an internationalist composer for Mário de Andrade. Born in 1836 in Campinas, the outskirts of São Paulo, Carlos Gomes first learned music from his father, Manuel José Gomes.

An amateur musician, Manuel José taught music at the engenhos around Campinas and directed a marching band that performed mainly in church festivities in his hometown, but also toured to other places. Carlos Gomes played diverse instruments in the marching band and it was during one of its concerts in the city of São Paulo that he first met other musicians involved with opera as well as heard the genre for the first time. Biographers of the composer say that it was against his father’s will that he soon left Campinas for Rio de Janeiro.

Still in his youth, Carlos Gomes wrote “Quem Sabe?,” one of the best known Brazilian modinhas. In this song, as in most of his modinhas, the composer was already delineating his future as opera an composer. The melody of the song extrapolates the simplicity of the popular modinhas for its extended tessitura and a legato line that shows strong affinities with bel canto.

A short discussion about his opera Il Guarany, written in 1870, can serve us well to

understand the genre in Brazil during the Império. In 1864, Gomes sent a letter to Francisco

Manuel da Silva from Italy telling him about the new opera he was working on with the title Il

Guarany. Carlos Gomes dedicated Il Guarany to Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II. In March 19,

1870, Il Guarany was premiered at Teatro Alla Scala in Milan with great success. Giuseppe

Verdi and Dom Pedro were in the audience. Later that year, it was also performed in Brazil.

Italian authors Antonio Scalvini and Carlo D’Ormeville, wrote the libretto of the opera, based on the Indianista novel O Guarany, by Brazilian author José de Alencar.

Il Guarany is the story of a couple destined to form the Brazilian nation according to the

Brazilian Indianist writers of the early nineteenth-century. The plot takes place in 1560, somewhere next to the city of Rio de Janeiro. The main part of the book that forms the libretto of the opera is the romance between the Guarany Indian, Pery, and the daughter of Portuguese adventurer Dom Mariz, Ceci. Mário de Andrade had mixed feelings about the musical content of the opera. For him the piece championed a good compositional technique, but fell into the internationalism of Italian models (discussed further below). He wrote that at this point the

Brazilian composer Gomes had learned “the singing in Italian, the musical Italianism, the importation, the non-relationship to functional art” (128).

Andrade considered that Carlos Gomes did make an effort to reflect a social reality in his opera Il Guarany, as in Il Schiavo and Moema. This was a naïve effort, however, because it reflected a romantic Indianism.

In order to understand Indianism, I will turn to the opera’s libretto. The text of Il

Guarany is a good example of Indianism, showing an attempt to depict the native Indian as the originator of the country, but with the “white” characteristics that the elite wished to convey. In the plot, the Portuguese adventurers killed a member of the Aymoré tribe by accident while exploring the land in the name of civilization. The Aymorés then wanted revenge, which would

91 come with the killing of Ceci. Pery, the native Indian with supernatural powers, fluent speaker of Italian, and an assured Catholic, joins the Portuguese adventurers to heroically save Ceci, a sweet girl who only aspires for true love. In the end everyone dies, except for Pery and Ceci.

The nation is then nobly rebuilt from these two characters with perfect qualities: the Brazilian

“genealogy” is made from a Portuguese and a civilized Native Indian, to produce a mestizo.107

One other aspect to be pointed out is that in the opera plot the native populations that did not follow the call of Catholicism are seen as savages, and were rejected in the making of the nation. The opera does not question any of the meanings behind Indianist literature and, as it has been noted, it has an Italian musical idiom and does not use musical elements that express the native peoples of Brazil. This explains Andrade’s labeling the piece romantic Indianism.

107 Maria Alice Volpe has discussed the opera examining issues of Indianista literature. She compared the text of the original novel “O Guarany” to the libretto of the opera. Curiously, she starts out her essay by alluding to Mário de Andrade’s “Social Evolution of Music.” Two primordial matters to know about Indianism are that (1) it frames an image of the formation of Brazilian identity, essentially dealing with the encounter of the native population and the Portuguese people, and (2) it has a close relation to myth: fiction, history and myth, all overlap to form an identity with a “noble past.” The work “O Guarany” considers several myths: native savagery, the myth of the “good” Indian, and national origins from the mythical couple Pery and Celília, the locale, and time. Volpe interestingly shows aspects of the original novel that were omitted or reframed in the libretto of the opera. For her, these should not be interpreted as adaptations simply made for a better fit into operatic conventions. They rather follow an ideological agenda that aims to construct an image of Brazilian identity in the arts as idealized by Europeans. “The opera impaired the novel’s mythical potential by withdrawing much of the multi-perspective characterization that constructed the protagonists’ mythical dimension and some of the motifs and occurrences that fulfilled the mythical narrative.” To mention some of them: the Aymoré Indians are dehumanized in the opera, gaining aspects of savagery through lack of speech. Their characters are represented only with instrumental music and ritual dances (Act III, ballet scenes “Introduzione,” “Ballabidi” e “Azione Mimica,” “Passo Selvaggio,” “Passo dele freccie,” and “Grand Marcia-baccanale indiano”). Consequently, these Indians are portrayed as a barrier for the development of the new land; in the novel, they burn the castle of D. Mariz and right after, a deluge leaves only Pery and Ceci as survivors. In the opera, on the other hand, Dom Mariz himself sets fire to his castle and the deluge is suppressed. According to Volpe, these two changes turn the mythical beginning into an incidental event controlled by the Portuguese colonizer; Gomes’ opera omits the figure of Isabel, a half Indian, half Portuguese, dark skinned woman who was sensually “dangerous.” This way, the issue of miscegenation is avoided; in the original novel, Ceci decorates her room with the gifts that Pery brings to her, transforming her European bedroom into a “tropical microcosm.” Such appropriation of Brazilian native elements into Ceci’s world is left out in the opera; finally, the opera emphasizes Pery’s conversion to Catholicism and his “tamed nature” that adopted European models. One should not argue that Andrade thought about Indianism in the same terms as Volpe, since he left no apparent evidence of that. However, Volpe’s findings are worth noting because they help legitimize Andrade’s earlier suggestion that the ruling elite had their hands on the artistic production of the time.

Deliberately or not, Andrade’s mention of Indianism inherits the modernist discussion on

the miscegenation of Indigenous, European and African “races” to constitute the Brazilian

nation. Whereas Indianism blatantly suppresses the Afrodescendents, the modernist concept

integrates them as an equal part of Brazil’s formation. This subject has been further discussed in

chapter 2, but now, it needs to be observed that Indianism collaborates with the ruling class

interest in purporting Brazil as a white nation.

All in all, Andrade considered the fact that Carlos Gomes deviated from nationalism to

fall into internationalism a product of the composer’s milieu. Andrade recognized a “naïve

effort” in Carlos Gomes’s use of romantic Indianism as an attempt to reflect matters of the nation

in Il Guarany. The final impression that comes out of Andrade’s text is that, had Carlos Gomes lived in a different time, he might have used different resources. Also, at the end of his text,

Andrade praised the Gomes’ opera O Escravo (The Slave) for observing in it a conscious act of echoing the historical facts. For him, the dedication of the work to Princess Isabel, who had signed the Abolition of slavery law, in 1888, showed the composer’s engagement with this social cause. The piece therefore fulfilled a social function. Andrade repeated this statement in O

Banquete, adding that O Escravo’s music was “at the service of something more than simple aesthetic dilettantism” (1977, 124).108

In the diverse writings of Mário de Andrade about Carlos Gomes we find texts that go

from a certain level of rejection to more acceptance of the composer’s work. His rejection was

mostly related to the European influence that dominated the composer’s idiom, as being a

reflection of Gomes’s conformism. In these lines, historian Jorge Coli has suggested that in

Andrade’s O Banquete Carlos Gomes represents the “apologue of the artist who betrays his true

108 “...a serviço de alguma coisa a mais que um simples diletantismo estético.”

artistic ideals for success” (Coli 1977, 29).109 In the same text, Coli has also remembered that

Andrade wrote an article on Gomes’s opera Fosca in which he considered the work to aim

beyond Italianisms, but that its unpopularity had made the composer write his following work,

Salvador Rosa, back in the Italian musical idiom. Summarizing Andrade’s feelings towards the

latter opera, Coli wrote: “the composer had sold his soul to the devil” (ibid.).110

Nevertheless, in O Banquete, written in 1944, Andrade praised Carlos Gomes for being

more nationalist than other contemporary composers.

Essay Section IV - Nationalism

Inter-Nationalism

The final phase of Andrade’s narrative has its beginning in 1889, when the Imperial regime ended and Brazil became a Republic. Music at this time represented for him a continuum of the internationalism of the previous years: “At the birth of the Republic, our erudite music was in this situation: it was internationalist in its cultivated forms and inspiration, and still very far from the nation in spite of the efforts of Francisco Manuel and Carlos Gomes” (130).

In political terms, on the other hand, he interpreted the transplantation of democracy in

the country to be the actual independence of Brazil from Portugal: “The Republic came to give a

stronger American and democratic sense to Brazil” (130).

Reminiscent of the disappointment he expressed in his description of music after

independence was proclaimed in 1822, however, he declared: “It was therefore predictable that

109 “Apólogo do artista que trai seu ideal da verdadeira Arte pelo sucesso.”

110 “O compositor vendera sua alma ao diabo.”

this would have a profound repercussion on the social development of our music and its aesthetic

orientation. But it was not exactly this way” (130). Music composition, for him, started to go

beyond virtuosity, but was still internationalist; a greater compositional technique was provided

to composers by the teachers at the Conservatório, although still writing in European musical

language.

The composers from this context that Andrade chose to mention, included Henrique

Oswald (1852-1931), Leopoldo Miguez (1850 – 1902), Glauco Velasquez (1884 - 1914), Gomes

de Araújo (1846-1943), Francisco Braga, Barroso Neto (the last two, in their earlier phase).

Henrique Oswald used some national themes in his compositions. For Andrade, however, Oswald’s polyphonic treatment of popular melodies lost national qualities for he did not employ any popular processes. Andrade explained in his Ensaio sobre a música brasileira

(1928) that composers who used popular melodies with disregard to national scales – meaning

Indigenous, African or Portuguese – in the accompaniment, lost national character in their final product. Andrade exemplified the end of his discussion with Oswald’s piece Serrana (ed.

Milão), which he considered “splendid,” but that had nevertheless lost its national character

(1928, 53). Leopoldo Miguez’s search for musical material in his compositions was unrelated to

Brazilian sources. He was an avid follower of Wagnerian trends, writing highly chromatic passages and using Wagner’s compositional device of leitmotif in some pieces (e.g., Parisina)

Glauco Velasquez, like Miguez, adopted Wagnerian harmonies in his compositions. João

Gomes de Araújo wrote mainly Italian style sacred music.

Francisco Braga and Barroso Neto are discussed below.

Pre-Nationalism

Mário de Andrade included composers Alexandre Levy (1864 – 1892) and Alberto

Nepomuceno (1864 – 1920) in the “the traditional trunk of the Brazilian musical nationality genealogic tree” (134), for their effort to nationalize music “through popular subject area” (134).

However, Andrade considered their nationalism “still deficient” because Levy and Nepomuceno were not able to adapt these melodies into a fully nationalist musical context. Andrade wrote that these Brazilian composers continued to follow suggestions from European composers, in particular Grieg and the Russian composers. These suggestions included the use of folk and traditional melodies, an idea in vogue in Europe at the time, with Wagnerian harmonies. In a sense, the motivation behind their use of Brazilian materials came also from abroad and they could not reach the real sense of nationalism.

Music historian Azevedo, who has followed the lead of Andrade and grouped Alexandre

Levy with Alberto Nepomuceno in the same “pre-nationalist” trend, introduced these composers as part of a transitory period of music in Brazil, marking the end of the musicians’ “servitude to

Europe” and the beginning of their liberation from it (Azevedo 1956: 174).

As a young composer, Levy had already many pieces published in Brazil and in Europe, including Variaçoes sobre um tema brasileiro (Variations on a Brazilian Theme), for piano, which figures the folk melody of Vem cá, Bitu. In Azevedo’s analysis, however, the folk melody is treated à la Mendelssohn and à la Schumann in the piece, an indication of why Andrade did not see Levy’s nationalism fully accomplished. Levy went back to muse at Brazilian sources for his compositions only after composing Trois Morceaux (1889), for piano, and several orchestral pieces free of any national inspiration, such as Chant du Départ (also from 1889). His pieces from the 1890’s are full of examples of national inspiration. To cite a few: Tango brasileiro, for

piano, Symphonic Poem Comala, and Suíte brasileira (1. “Prelúdio”; 2. “Dança rústica – Canção

triste”; 3. “À Beira do regado”; 4. “Samba”), the latter two for orchestra.

The European musical models that nevertheless served Levy as an inspiration became definitely evident when he composed Schumannianas, a series of piano pieces to “pay tribute to

his true spiritual ancestor,” according to Azevedo (Azevedo 1956: 161).

Alexandre Levy died at the young age of 27. It becomes then inevitable to wonder which

directions his music could have taken had he lived longer. A comparison with composer

Nepomuceno, as made by Andrade and Azevedo, also becomes natural. Both composers shared

the same year of birth, although Nepomuceno outlived Levy by twenty-eight years, and had

European musical training.

Composer Alberto Nepomuceno started to innovate on the genre of song in Brazil in

1895. He wrote pieces with texts in Portuguese, by Brazilian poets. The list of such works

includes Coraçao Triste (“Sad Heart”), Opus 18, with text by Machado de Assis, and Ao

Amanhecer (“At the Dawn”), Opus 34, with text by Ana Batista.

In 1897, Nepomuceno wrote what became his most popular orchestral work, Série

Brasileira (“Brazilian Series”). An interesting aspect of the piece is Nepomuceno’s use of

Brazilian folk percussion instruments in the orchestra. The folk melody of “Sapo Jururu” is used

in the first movement, “Alvorada na serra” (“Dawn on the mountain”).111 The rhythm of maxixe

is paramount in the second movement, “Intermédio” (“Intermezzo”). “Sesta na rede” (“Siesta in

the Hammock”), the third movement, has the major mode with lowered seventh in descending

passages, a constância of Brazilian Northeastern music. This aspect stands out as an example of

Nepomuceno’s knowledge and application of musical folk sources. The last movement,

111 The melody of Sapo Jururu became widely used by other Brazilian composers, such as Villa-Lobos and Lorenzo Fernandez.

“Batuque” (“Drumming”), is built on Afro-Brazilian rhythms that increasingly gain more vibrancy towards the end, amounting to a fiery finish. “Batuque” often stands alone as an independent piece at concerts.

The most meaningful sense and the real change provided by Levy’s and Nepomuceno’s nationalism was their conscious effort to include Brazilian traditions over the individualism of virtuosity that had prevailed in the earlier phases. These earlier phases, Andrade said, “were more or less unconsciously moved by inhuman and fatal forces of life, while today’s, even though necessary for being an evolving step of culture, have their necessity driven and twisted by will, rationale, and human decisions” (135). In music, this is represented in part by virtuosity.

As it has been earlier noted, his logic is that in virtuosity there is individualism because there is exhibitionism. Also discussed earlier was the main part of such individualism, explained by the way each composer worked inside a pre-established set of traditions grounded on the musical taste of a controlling elite. These composers were, however, each following their own compositional style (and what is more, influenced by European trends!). In this sense, Andrade considered their music still individualist.

Second Republic: the Birth of a New Nationalism

The second stage of the nationalist phase came in 1930. A coup d’État put Getúlio

Vargas in the government of the country and launched the Second Republic. Andrade did not credit the birth of nationalism in Brazil to the advent of the Second Republic; instead, he credited it to the events of the Great War that involved the imperialistic nations to which Brazil financially subordinated itself. This new sense of patriotism “contributed decisively to the affirmation of our new nationalistic musical state of consciousness, no longer as an individual

98 experience, as it was with Alexandre Levy and Alberto Nepomuceno, but as a collective tendency” (134).

Andrade believed that patriotism had brought along with it a fuller sense of collectivism by means of joining countrymen into a battle of Man against traditions and culturally acquired habits to impel the country to acquire awareness of itself. It is not surprising then that Andrade considered these days to be the most exciting phase of all Brazilian music thus far, as he declared in his text.

Composer Heitor Villa-Lobos initiated this phase of nationalism in music. It was important for Mário de Andrade to note that Villa-Lobos had experienced the Week of Modern

Art in 1922 and lived through the times of the Great War.

A few years after the war had ended, and not without having lived the brutal experience of the Semana de Arte Moderna in São Paulo, Villa-Lobos consciously and systematically abandoned his French internationalism to become the starter and greatest figure of the nationalist phase we are in (135).

This quote is particularly informative for the present discussion because it marked a watershed moment in the the history of Brazilian music. It also remarkably revealed that

Andrade claimed Villa-Lobos to be the initiator of this musical nationalism. Earlier, it has been noted that Andrade viewed Villa-Lobos’s music as internationalized until the 1930’s, when the composer became “folklorized” (please refer to further discussion in chapter 1). That is to say that the beginning of Brazilian nationalism coincided with a change of directions in Villa-

Lobos’s music. It has also been discussed that Mário de Andrade and Villa-Lobos shared many of their concepts about nationalism in music, which further suggests a mutual influence between

Andrade and Villa-Lobos (please refer to further discussion in chapter 3). It is now worth adding that Andrade continued to entrust Brazilian nationalism to Villa-Lobos’s later in his life. In

1944, Mário de Andrade affirmed that the only composer writing music for the social service was Villa-Lobos (Andrade 1977, 124).

Composers of the same generation who entered nationalism were Luciano Gallet (1893-

1931), who wrote Estudos de Folclore (“Folklore Studies”), a pioneering investigation on

Brazilian folk music, and Lourenzo Fernandez (1900 – 1973), who composed directly under

Andrade’s rules of composition. His Trio brasileiro, for instance, displays several folk themes and a melody built on Brazilian constâncias, and formal schemes that serve to emphasize the folk melodies. Fernandez’s Suites incorporate Brazilian dramatic dances.

Later composers included Francisco Braga (1868 – 1945), writing music with national themes, and Joaquim Antonio Barroso Neto (1881 – 1941), transfering styles of street popular musics to his piano writing. Also, composers Francisco Mignone (1897 – 1986), who particularly gave a social function to his music by choosing general themes that dealt with the common Brazilian man and situations of daily life in Brazil, and Camargo Guarnieri, who introduced a novelty for nationalist music: tempos were written in Portuguese, which Azevedo has considered a reaction against the “ambient Italianism” (1956, 335).112 Andrade’s list ends with composers Frutuoso Viana (1896 – 1976), who applied Andrade’s teachings rather literally by using many melodies provided by Andrade in his Ensaio sobre a música brasileira in his compositions, and Radamés Gnatalli (1906 – 1988), through his search of musics from different parts of Brazil.

Another aspect in common among all these composers is their connection, at some point of their lives, with the Instituto Nacional de Música, where Andrade taught between 1938 and

1940.

112 “Italianismo ambiente.”

100

The Music Scene in the Brazil during Mário de Andrade’s Days

Andrade wrote a series of complaints about the situation of music and musicians in

Brazil. For him, composers with good compositional technique were still too few, but to the other composers’ defense, he goes back and once again blamed it on the economic issues of the country: “But the general lack of technique of the Brazilian composer is mainly impelled by our economic situation” (138). He lists five issues, some of which lead to further discussion:

First, he briefly discusses the financial superiority of Argentina, which he argues as a positive fact because it opened up opportunities for Brazilian performers to establish themselves in the music scene of the country, since international performers were choosing to perform in

Argentina instead. This happened at the same time that Brazil had numerous state capitals that demanded good quality music.

Second, Andrade looks at the economic issues connected with the commerce of coffee in

São Paulo, which he had mentioned in essay section I, when talking about “pianolatria” in the

“Cafelandia” (which had started in the Imperial days, but continued through the First Republic

(1889 and 1930), today also called Old Republic). As this issue requires longer clarifications, I will start by referring back to what Andrade had explained in essay section I. The First Republic was marked by the political domain of the agrarian elites from Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro and

São Paulo, and the basis for the country’s riches was the exportation of coffee. In essay section

I, Andrade said that during this period, the Conservatório Dramático e Musical de São Paulo had been created to support piano playing, but the economic changes of the country turned it into a school for research of folklore and composition.

101

At this point of the essay, he wrote about the years of the Second Republic, which started in 1930 and ended in 1945, saying: “Next, with the decay of coffee and the depreciation of the national currency, the situation of our music became intolerable” (139). In this passage,

Andrade shows himself mainly concerned about the scarcity of performance mediums due to the forms in which the government dealt with a financial crisis.

To clarify this period, we will note that in the decade of 1920 the coffee industry had grown greatly, reaching 70% of the country’s exports, and bringing great industrial development to the state of São Paulo. The 1929 stock market crash in New York had economic repercussion in Brazil and a consequent economic distress. Coffee planters, who dominated politics at the time, were consequently the most affected. The president Washington Luis was overthrown in

1930. It started a period that later came to be called the “dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas,” and which was supported by Mário de Andrade in its beginning, but which disappointed him at the end of that same decade. For this reason, the fact that Andrade’s text was written in 1939 is rather informative. Mário de Andrade seems to be careful not to mention names or specific political events here, when the dictatorship was at its highest repression. The government had created the Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda (Department of Press and Marketing), which was then responsible for the propaganda of Getúlio Vargas and the censorship of the arts.

Perhaps to protect his text, Andrade only alludes to the political events by the date that he mentions that indicated the facts of the time, as well as his mention of a coup in the Uruguayan

Government (this will be discussed shortly). His discretion can also be seen in the fact that he recognizes a certain effort from their part and blames the financial situation of the country:

“Government acts, scarcely energetic and lucid, could not by any means improve our technical conditions.” (139). Whereas in O Banquete, Andrade, behind the mask of the book’s plot, is

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emphatic at blaming the government for the poor state of music in Brazil, saying that the

government workers “do not have even the least sort of cultural conviction…” (Andrade 1977,

143).113 It is worth mentioning that Andrade also wrote O Banquete after 1937, when Getúlio

Vargas’s new form of government had started to bring the first economic struggles to the budget

of the Departamento de Cultura, which Andrade directed at the time. He reported his financial

struggles to his friend Azevedo in a letter of that year, saying “and I have been fighting in defense of budget, Holy God…” (ibid.).114 In the following month of November, another letter

informs us of his distress at the Departamento, as Andrade appreciates Azevedo for his support:

“I just came to know in this first workday hour that yesterday you spoke good words of support

and praise for the musical work at the Departamento de Cultura, via Hora do Brasil. You cannot

imagine how this touches us deeply at this time when everything here is uncertainty and unrest”

(in Azevedo 1980, 103).115 As these words inform us about Andrade’s instability at the

Departamento, from where he lost his position the following year, they partially explain the

context of music in São Paulo those days.

Continuing on Andrade’s text, we read: “Before 1929, São Paulo, almost rich, was able to

maintain three orchestras and two string quartets” (139). His text resumed with the discussion of

the aforementioned Uruguayan coup as a sort of parenthetical comment, wherein he offered a

solution to the problem that he will expose by suggesting that tax money should be used to

support music: “An imprudent coup of the Uruguayan government could in little time create an

orchestra that could already be called of first order, by means of taxing, if I am not mistaken, the

113 “Não tem a menor convicção cultural.”

114 “E ando brigando em defesa de orçamentos, santo Deus...”

115 “Acabo de saber nesta primeira hora de expediente que ontem você disse boas palavras de apoio e elogio à obra musical do Departamento de Cultura, pela Hora do Brasil. Você não imagina como isso nos toca fundo neste momento em que tudo aqui é incerteza e inquietação.”

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radio channels.” In O Banquete, we find one more example of Andrade commenting on Brazil

as compared to Uruguay: “Brazil, neither in Rio nor in São Paulo, maintains one orchestra that is

‘large,’ in the sense of having technical capability to play any symphonic work. This is not only

regrettable: it is shameful, an absurd fault, which places Brazilian music in a condition much

inferior than that of Uruguay” (Andrade 1977, 142).116 It is plausible to assume that Andrade’s

insistence on comparing the two countries is because of the political similarities between them at

that time. Brazil went through a coup d’État as well. Andrade’s feelings with regards to the

Uruguayan situation may have caused him to cautiously capitalize his disdain for the Brazilian

situation, as a means to show his further disappointment towards the Brazilian government which

he supported earlier on, as discussed earlier.

Thirdly, Andrade talked about the reform at the Instituto National de Música, which

happened in 1931 (this is the former Conservatório Nacional de Música, the same one founded by Francisco Manuel). Andrade was rather negative and dismissed the efforts of the reform

saying that “The result, if not disastrous, was null” (140). He explained that its failure started

from a sudden demand for a higher level of musical knowledge from the applicants to the school,

and a failure to recruit better teachers for the Instituto. He argued here that it would have been

necessary to have teachers from abroad, whom he defined as “men traditionalized in more

experimented civilizations, where the primary truth has at least been established that says that to

honestly realize a job it is necessary to learn it well” (141). At the end of Andrade’s Ensaio

116 “Brasil, nem no Rio, nem em São Paulo, mantém uma orquestra que seja “grande”, no sentido de possuir capacidade técnica para executar qualquer obra sinfônica. Isso não é apenas lastimável: é uma vergonha, uma falha absurda, que coloca a música brasileira em situaçao muito inferior à do Uruguay.”

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sobre a música brasileira, there is another example of Andrade complaining about this issue by

saying that in Brazil, music “teaching is horribly oriented throughout” (Andrade 1928, 73).117

The fourth criticism by Mário de Andrade is that Brazilian composers lacked opportunities to experiment with their own music because they did not have the chance to listen to their own works being performed. This problem is in part caused by the previous issue, namely the lack of orchestras and ensembles. It is at the same time connected to issue number five, which refers to the few orchestras, ensembles, and choirs that existed in Brazil being conducted by foreigner directors. He said that these directors were “all dressed as Guaraní, but indifferent to local issues, ignorant of it, incapable of comprehending and integrating themselves to it” (142). Andrade was therefore blaming them for their lack of interest in his campaign to nationalize music in Brazil, and he went beyond that, saying, “the only intent of these directors is to conserve at any cost their achieved position, slavishly obeying the taste of the internationalized capitals’ audience, such as in São Paulo and Rio” (142). These groups did not perform the compositions of the young composers, referring back to issue number four, or if they did it was occasionally and because of the imposition of government regulations.

At the same time that Andrade viewed foreign musicians as taking the place that should belong to Brazilians interested in nationalism, Andrade articulated that the exposure to music making in other countries could be beneficial for the Brazilian musician for it would put it in prospective. In addition, he once again called for governmental intervention by underwriting music projects as well as maintaining orchestras, choirs, and ensembles, to help fix the hardships endured by his contemporary musicians.

In this last portion of the essay, Andrade analyzed the contemporary situation of music and musicians in Brazil, including music ensembles, composers, and schools, as just discussed.

117 “Ensino, péssimamente orientado por toda parte.”

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It is curious to note that such rhetoric is somewhat typical of Andrade’s writings on social issues of music. Parallelisms of “Social Evolution of Music in Brazil” with O Banquete and Ensaio sobre a música brasileira, were constantly brought up in quotations to allow the reader to

understand more on each matter he raised here, while it helped prove that these studies were also

intended as a vehicle to expose the modernists’ ideals on nationalism in music. These texts

coincide not only in describing the situation of the time, but also in often displaying solutions for

the problems exposed. Such rhetoric adds a psychological facet to Andrade’s texts in which he

strives to persuade his readers.

Conclusion

In the preceding analytical account of “Social Evolution of Music in Brazil” I have

attempted to work in detail aspects of Brazilian music and history alluded and/or suggested by

Andrade’s text. I end by suggesting that presenting the evolution of music in Brazil from its early history until the present time of his writing and culminating with the problematic economic

situation of composers, served Andrade well in imparting his nationalist agenda.

The music in early Brazil presented what Andrade considered a “primitive” aspect,

because it had been untouched by civilization. It had the function of uniting different peoples living in Brazil, and provoking collectivism. When their music was “corrupted” to serve

Catholicism and the country experienced a clearer separation of classes, Andrade argued that

“there was no longer music in the colony” because the collective function was lost. This

“corruption” involved the colonizer no longer accepting the different peoples’ cultural manifestations and the separation occurred between well skilled musicians and untrained ones.

Next, at the end of the Colony and during the Imperial years, this corruption was aggravated by

106 the importation of European models in music. Andrade blamed the economic conditions of the country for this.

During Andrade’s lifetime, a few composers engaged his music nationalism. Andrade affirmed that Villa-Lobos initiated Brazilian nationalism in music, even if relatively long after the Week of Modern Art. It is also critical to note that Andrade and his teachings influenced many musicians of his generation.

However, the collective had not been reached. Andrade’s contemporary musicians would have to make a conscious effort to arrive at a national music idiom in order to achieve independence in the arts and to achieve collectivism. The solution that Andrade indirectly suggested was the official government subsidy for music teaching, as well as the adoption of a uniform set of nationalist compositional rules that involved bringing the manifestations of the people to erudite music. I argue that it is in this sense that Andrade wrote the essay as a means to prescribe musical nationalism in Brazil.

In conclusion, Andrade's essay played a major social function in Brazilian music and arts.

His search for a truly Brazilian nationalism in music was an inclusive project. He meant to include all members of Brazilian society in the creation of Brazilian music, including those he labeled “primitive,” in resonance with the Primitivist art movement, which valorized the arts of indigenous and African peoples (if from a distance). His work opened the door for inclusion and others then took it up over time. Although the Brazilian classical music scene has not changed appreciably, what has become more inclusive is the popular music scene and the various non-formal music-making projects that are being established throughout Brazil. This is due in part to the important work of Brazilian social philosopher Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), who exploded the topic and indirectly furthered the momentum that

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Andrade established early on for music. One can argue that change has not occurred in the

Brazilian classical music establishment because the economic system has continued, until very

recently, to be the same, although even here one finds unique projects that remove themselves from the established ways of proceding. It was remarkable that Andrade voiced his challenges to the classical music establishment when he did, his seems to have been the only formal critique in

all of Latin America until very recently. Finally, my work does not seek to rationalize or

promote nationalism per se, but rather to explicate an intellectual struggle for inclusion in the

face of overwhelming societal inequities and injustices. I have sought to bring to light the social

and political dynamics that so preoccupied Andrade by tracing his intellectual tracks.

Ultimately, Andrade's emphasis on the collective as central to music making, and his insights

into music's ability to unite disparate members of society, is no less important now than it was in

his time. Andrade played no small role in leading people to listen.

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CHAPTER 6

EVOLUÇÃO SOCIAL DA MÚSICA NO BRASIL

Notes on the Translation

To read Mário de Andrade, one should learn about the flow and tone of the authentic

“Brazilian” idiom for which he searched: a freer use of grammar that mixes colloquial and formal elements, oral and written language, as well as an expansion of the lexicon that includes idioms and slang from diverse regions of Brazil and welcomes “mistakes.” As such

“Brazilianity” is an ever-present part of his writing, the style of the original text exercises an important function and carries in itself a meaning. The translation seeks to impart the linguistic experience of his colorful and rich writing in Portuguese to the English-language reader. If this brings an extra challenge for the reader, it also brings him or her closer to the mindset of the author. At the same time, the flow and readability of the text were a constant concern. For that sake, concessions were occasionally taken.

Below, some of the matters the translation engages:

a. Neologisms. In the two specific cases of “pianolatria” and “Cafelândia,” they will remain as in the original. In other cases, the translation will find the strategy used by Andrade, in this case using parts of two distinct words and combining them to form his new term. The word will be indicated within quotation marks and a more complete explanation of the meaning will be given in footnotes, when necessary.

b. Making up words that derive from different or same grammar functions:

“aristocratizante” which will be translated as “aristocrat-zing.”

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c. Use of synesthesia: Example: “delicious classic writer,” to translate “clássico delicioso.” The translation of the synesthesia word is literal.

d. Connotative or suggestive words: Andrade developed a system of meanings for certain words in this Essay, which may be easier to decipher in the Portuguese text than it would with a literal translation. In such cases, the meaning of the word was taken under consideration, and a more usual word or set of words were chosen.

e. Chain of phrases enumerating several characteristics of the subject in question, more typical of oral speech. Adaptations of punctuation and the subject of presented again when needed. The changes were considered having in mind to fit a more usual English structure, while still seeking to maintain the tone that Andrade intended.

f. Chain of words with no necessary correlation nor following grammatical rules: Mário de Andrade explains this device in the preface to Paulicéia Desvairada, a text presented in the

Week of Modern Art. He explains that the chain is actually to form a poetic harmony, or a polyphonic writing:

…If instead of using only verses which are horizontally melodic, such as: Mnesarete, the divine, the pale Phryne Appears before the austere and stern assembly of the supreme Areopagus we have words that follow each other without any immediate connection among themselves, these words, for the very reason that they do not follow intellectually and grammatically, overlie one another for the gratification of our sense, and no longer form melodies by rather harmonies. I shall explain more fully. Harmony: combination of sounds. Example: “Ravishments…Struggles…Arrows…Songs…Populate!” These words have no connection. They do not form a series. Each one is a phrase, an elliptical period, reduced to the telegraphic minimum. If I pronounce “Ravishments,” since it does not belong to a phrase (melody), the word calls our attention to its detachment and it continues to vibrate, waiting for a phrase which will give it meaning, a phrase which DOES NOT FOLLOW. “Struggles” gives no conclusion whatever to “Ravishments”; and und, under the same conditions, as we are not made to forget the first word, it continues to vibrate along the other word. The other voices do the same. Thus: instead of melody (grammatical

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phrase) we have an arpeggiated chord, harmony – the harmonic verse. But, if instead of using only disconnected words, I use now of words (notes) alone but of phrase (melodies). Hence: poetic polyphony. Thus in Hallucinated City are [sic] employed melodic verse: “São Paulo is a stage for Russian ballets”; harmonic verse: “Pack of dogs…Stock Market…Gambling…”; poetic polyphony (one and sometimes two and even more consecutive verses): “The gears palsy…The mist snows…”118

g. Punctuation: Andrade’s writing style calls for alteration of punctuation in several circumstances of the translation. The Portuguese language in general is characterized by longer sentences than English. To facilitate the reader in following the text’s line of thought, long

sentences will be divided when such change has no impact on the meaning of the original text.

Example: “It moves from bottom up; the popular masses in the clans are believers for themselves, believers by nature, by a necessary mystic spirit that is characteristic of the incipient

mentalities: In the belief of travelers and ethnographers, a spirit that is mystic even in certain

tribes where a clear and conceptual notion of what Divinity is does not exist; always venerating,

if not the Demons, their Ancestors.”

h. Idioms and popular proverbs: The first step is to analyze the context in which they are

used in order to decide if an existing equivalent in English would apply. For circumstances

where they neither apply nor have a direct equivalent in English, the translation is literal and the

moral behind them will be explained in footnotes.

i. Names of institutions are kept in the original language, Portuguese, when similar to

English. In other cases, the translation will be provided and the original name in Portuguese will

appear in parenthesis.

j. Word(s) may be added to the translation in order to clarify or conform the original text

to a clearer sentence structure in the English version.

118 Mário de Andrade, Hallucinated City. Translated by Jack E. Tomlins, 1968, p. 12.

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In addition, many terms are explained in footnotes.

General Conventions:

Neologisms are indicated within quotes.

Quotation marks from the author that change the meaning of the word are kept and explained in footnotes.

Quotation marks from the author that indicate foreign words or expressions are taken away. If they remain foreign in English, they are italicized. Example: Portuguese text:

“religare”; English text: religare.

Words that Andrade used in Portuguese and are kept in Portuguese in the translation are also italicized.

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SOCIAL EVOLUTION OF MUSIC IN BRAZIL

Brazilian music, like the music of all the Americas, has a unique dramatic context that should be understood in order to comprehend the music itself. It did not have the ease that older

European schools and the musics of the great Asian civilizations had of an unconscious development, in a manner of speaking, or at least one that had more freedom from concerns as to its national and social affirmation. Brazilian music presents evolving manifestations that are identical to the music of European countries and through which it can be understood and explained; at the same time, in several cases Brazilian music had to force its advance in order to identify itself in the musical movement of the world or to give itself a more functional meaning.

From the beginning, and always from the social point of view, Brazilian music had a logical development that is elementary for being so ostensive and easy to perceive. God first, followed by love, and finally nationality. One would look in vain for such logic in the development of the other arts, but this can be very well explained: in the other arts, painting and poetry, sculpture and prose, and even more rarely in architecture, the individualistic element depends greatly on the technical and economic conditions of the environment.

There is no doubt that technique in terms of practical and aesthetic material elements of the realization of a work of art (oil, electric light, marble, bronze, printing, verse metrification ,

etc.), depends a great deal on the social conditions of the environment. But the artist, well

informed by the natural need for cultivating his art, can import these practical environments by

an exclusively personal initiative and make them his own, even if apparently against the

collective. This often happens in borrowed civilizations, that were developed more or less

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artificially and by force, as is the case of the American civilizations. Since very early, Brazilian

writers wrote and printed books, and without having publishing firms in Brazil they searched for

them wherever they existed. Parnassianism then, with a technique of verse for its own sake and

cultivation of the purity of the language, was a phenomenon among us, typical of this

importation of personal initiative, certainly not inexplicable, but contradictory and aberrant. It is

a fact: by the systematization of French rhythms (the alexandrine,119 the octosyllabic verses) and

the fine manners of the Portuguese speaker educated in Lisbon, Parnassianism came to violently

disturb the evolution of the national language and of our lyrical psychology, which the

Romantics of the time were creating. Those Romantics were a phenomenon as logical here as

they were in Europe, both descendants of the bourgeois revolution for Independence.

Parnassianism was explicable but destructive excrescence, legitimate fruit of a naïve culture,

more or less false, provoked by the artificiality of our imported American civilizations.

Effectively, when our literary intellect regained the conscience of itself and of Brazil, no writer

legitimately committed to contemporary Brazil could provoke a serene expansion of

Parnassianism; rather, we revisited the Romantics and the Naturalists120 as guides.

Let us observe now one of our most curious musical cases. The extraordinary expansion that the piano had among the bourgeoisie of the Império121 was perfectly logical and even imperative. The piano, a complete instrument, soloist and accompanist of the human voice at the

119 Dodecasyllabic form of verse; a line of verse comprised of 12 syllables.

120 Naturalist literature branched out of Realism and it is based on the observation of reality, individuals and their environs. In Brazil, the first Naturalist author was Aluísio Azevedo with O Mulato, from 1881.

121 Império means empire. The word Império will remain in Portuguese throughout this translation for the implied phenomenon that is particular to Brazil. The Portuguese Regent Prince Dom Pedro I declared the independence of Brazil in 1822 and claimed himself the emperor of Brazil. His decision was supported by the colonial aristocracy on the condition that their social and economic realities would not be altered. This way, the independence did not represent any social rupture with the colonial hierarchies. The full title of Dom Pedro was Constitutional Emperor of Brazil (Imperador Constitucional do Brasil), and the government system of the Império took place from 1822 to 1889.

114 same time, served to secularize our music exactly as its brothers, the clavichords, had worked to secularize European music. It was the instrument par excellence of courtship music122, with divine marriage and blessing, and as necessary to the family as the nuptial bed and the dining table. Although, in contradiction to the musical virtuosity that was entrusted to singers, flautists, and violinists, during the Império, the piano jumps onto the stage and goes on to produce the first geniuses of our musical virtuosity.

Certainly it was not Chiaffarelli123 who produced the intrinsic ingenuity of Guiomar

Novaes124 and Antonieta Rudge.125 However, the natural importation of this great professor to the Italianized society of São Paulo produced the magnificent flowering with which the piano school of “Cafelândia”126 won several marathons127 in America.128 But that this pianistic blooming in São Paulo was just a social excrescence, however logical in our civilization and in the splendor of the coffee era, is proved not only by its fast decadence, but also by its trivial

122 The literal translation would read “socialized love music” (música do amor socializado). To arrive at my final decision as presented in the text (courtship music), I took under consideration the pastoral trope of love and courtship that guides this section of the Essay. From there, I chose a more usual expression, with the concern of not sacrificing the rhythm of Andrade’s narrative.

123 Luigi Chiafarelli (1856-1923) was an Italian pianist. He was born in Bologna and moved to Brazil in 1880, where he lived the remainder of his life.

124 Guiomar Novaes (1895-1979) was one of the earliest Brazilian pianists with an international career. She studied with Chiafarelli and Rudge in Brazil and later at the Paris Conservatoire.

125 Antonieta Rudge (1885-1974), born in São Paulo, had an international career as concert pianist.

126 “Coffee land,” as Andrade refers to the state of São Paulo for its leading coffee production. Coffee became one of the main Brazilian exports in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.

127 Andrade is probably implying that piano competitions are like marathons, to criticize the virtuso conests, referring to the placement of Brazilian pianists in relation to other countries in South America. Later in his text, he will compare Brazil to Uruguay and Argentina.

128 Andrade is referring to all the Americas.

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function, by the almost insignificant national and even provincial (regional) function of this

paulista129 “pianolatria.”130

Undeniably glorious in its past, justified and inspired by the “pianolatria,” gilded initially

by the name of its piano teachers (Chiaffarelli, Feliz de Otero, José Wancolle), the

Conservatório131 de São Paulo recruited a piano teacher from Europe (Agostinho Cantú) – when

what was needed was teachers of voice, violin and other strings. And what is more, it graduated

tens and tens of pianists every year, abusively propagating the “pianolatria” all around the State;

unconsciously and without anyone’s intent, and even against its voluntarily “pianolatric”

orientation, the Conservatório had to readapt itself to the technical and economic demands of the state and acquire a cultural function much more pedagogical, deeper and more varied than the industrial internationalism of the pianistic virtuosity. For this reason, the more significant result of the Conservatório was not its pianists, but different creations. It was the abundant musical literature gathered by Samuel Arcanjo dos Santos, Savino de Benedictis, Caldeira Filho, Nestor

Ribeiro, and particularly the first truly scientific studies on musical folklore by Oneyda

Alvarenga and her companions of the Discoteca Pública132: all of whom graduated from the

Conservatório. Another significant result was the establishment of a notable international

publishing house in São Paulo, endowed by Italian funds, certain that the editions would sell in

the Italianizing environment of the Conservatório, and had as a consequence the publication of

illustrious Italian and other didactic works in our language. Its most characteristic and elevated

outcome, however, was not a pianist dedicated to virtuosity, but a pianist who abandoned the

129 Someone or something from the state of São Paulo.

130 Play on the words piano and idolatry, so meaning “idolization of the piano.”

131 Conservatório Dramático e Musical de São Paulo.

132 The Discoteca Pública is a public music archive. Today it bears the name Discoteca Oneyda Alvarenga.

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piano for composition, the composer and conductor Francisco Mignone. And what is the most

interesting, even the works of musicology written outside the walls of the Conservatório aim

directly toward the pedagogical establishment, as is the case of the very important books by

Furio Franceschini and Sá Pereira. Furthermore, the Conservatório, protecting itself with its

youthful strength that had started to escape its domain, and protecting the national composition

economically and with its authority, became an important center of national composition, not

only because of the composers it presented, but also for still being in charge of calling to its

bosom an abundant group of Brazilian or “Brazilianized” composers from whom it suffices to

cite a few main names, such as Camargo Guarnieri, Artur Pereira, and the mineiro133 Frutuoso

Viana, who transplanted himself to São Paulo.

Thus, one can apply exactly the popular saying “shot at what he saw, killed what he did

not see” to the Conservatório de São Paulo. Born from financial interests, aiming to please the

paulista “pianolatria” that had “the king in its belly,”134 a king whose head was Chiaffarelli,

whose twenty glorious fingers were Antonieta Rudge and Guiomar Novaes; born from a virtuosic excrescence without more functional and profound justification, which did not even

provide the paulista compositions with piano pieces that characterized São Paulo, the

Conservatório de São Paulo was forced by the social conditions of the environment to become a center of musicology and composition.

Music, being the most collectivist of all arts, demanding a collectivity to be realized, either of interpreters or of listeners, is more and immediately subjected to the conditions of collectivity. Individual technique matters less than collective technique. It is perfectly understandable that such a delicious classic writer in Portuguese prose from the seventeenth-

133 A mineiro means someone or something natural of the state of Minas Gerais.

134 A popular expression equivalent to “putting on airs.”

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century as Friar Vicente do Salvador,135 or such a genius sculptor as Antonio Francisco

Lisboa,136 in the eighteenth-century should arise in Brazil. On the other hand, the emulation of

Palestrina or Bach during colonial times would have been completely impossible. Even if they

had arisen, their music would absolutely not exist. Because the Colony137 could never have

performed it. We did not even have chapel choirs that could deal with the technical difficulties of the florid polyphony, nor ears capable of understanding such music to edify themselves with similar musical complications. Either this “Palestrina of the coconut trees” would have to search for other lands to realize his art, or he would have to shrink his creative imagination into the small confection of the Jesuit organ songs or the monotonous adaptation of Catholic words to the unavoidably natural shuffle of our Tapuias.138

The technical development of collectivity performs an absolutely determining function in

the emergence of the musical individual; if historically, collective performance explains the

musical individual to us, it also provides us with important data to understand it. In this way,

masses and motets by Father José Maurício Nunes Garcia are an unquestionable proof of what

the musical technique of the Colony was. 139 We know from our travelers and authors that highly

“perfect”140 music used to be made in this ancient Brazil. French masters of “solfamization”

were brought by plantation owners; Jesuits were teaching music to the slaves of Santa Cruz à la

135 Seventeenth-century historian.

136 A mineiro sculptor and architect mostly known as Aleijadinho.

137 Colony is capitalized in Andrade’s text.

138 The word comes from the Tupi Guaraní language, and it means “enemy,” “barbarian.” Tapuias lived further inland, while Tupi Guaranis lived in the coastal regions.

139 Music historian Heitor Azevedo has described the music of Father José Maurício as fitting the specific conditions of the chapels for which he composed, and that there were rarely any complete orchestras to play Father José Maurício’s music (Azevedo 1956: 33). 140 Quotation marks from Andrade. Ahead, he also adds quotation marks to “technical perfection.”

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European; European operas were greatly sung in Rio de Janeiro of Dom João VI,141 creating an

impression on Neukomm142 and Saint-Hilaire.143 Sometimes, confused, we are led to consider as

equal the “technical perfection” that our music of the time had attained, to what we comprehend

to be “technical perfection” of Europe at the time. It is all the same technical perfection. But

Father José Maurício’s music presents a contradiction to this; and through its relative ease,

through its humble polyphony, through the sweet solo-like divagations of his ensembles, which

were almost always harmonized vertically, his music proves in a decisive manner that even the

most capable Colonial chapel, paid with the “fat” money of the king, had a mediocre proficiency.

It was still monody that always dominated within the choir itself, only culminating with a

sentimental virtuosity from the sopranos brought from abroad. The orchestral ensemble was

feeble, only a tentative version of what, one century before, the orchestras in Mannheim and

Vienna had achieved.

In its general development, Brazilian music proceeds, therefore, obediently as any other

civilization’s musical evolution: first God, then love, then nationality. The Colony was never

able to free itself from religion in music. Portugal had to console two kinds of slaves in Brazil:

the black and the Native Brazilian. Incense and mystic drumming prevailed with violence;

Jesuits, surely more libertarians and propellers of the true religion here, served Catholicism less

141 Dom João IV was king of Portugal when the Portuguese court resided in Rio de Janeiro, from 1808 to 1820. During that time, musicians from Europe were relocated to Brazil. Dom is a term of honor for men, not usually written out but abbreviated with D.

142 Austrian composer Sigismund Neukomm worked for the court from 1816 to 1821, teaching D. Pedro I. He composed the first known piano piece borrowing a Brazilian popular song tune, in 1819, for the Ascension Day of D. João VI.

143 His full name is Auguste de Saint-Hilaire. He was a French chronicle author from the nineteenth-century, who collected documents around Brazil to write chronicles, gathered in Flora Brasiliae meridionalis.

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and colonization more, with their Catechism, processions, Holy Weeks, churches, and all that

“music-dom.”144 Theater adequate for slaves. Whereas the secular theater, the most collectivist

art after music, even more capable than the latter to supply any sort of social awareness to a

collective, could not exist here other than sporadically, and many times in insultingly “aristocrat- izing” manifestations as the absurd cuiabana145 realization of Porpora’s opera, Enzio in Roma, in

1790. 146 Our greatest dramatist, Judeu,147 Brazilian born, could not have lived here. He could

only grow in Portugal, to then die…Here, his art would have been stillborn. The Colony

remained a country with no militia, particularly under the tutelage of incense and mystic

drumming. In Brazil the result of this panem et circenses, with little bread and much circus, was

a different church for each day of the year in the city of Salvador; Aleijadinho kept the incense

safe from any high winds and Father Maurício brought sounds to the consoling naves of this

purgatorial world.148 First, the religious technique: organ, choirs and castrati in fermata. And,

already fruit of the land, one first great religious musician, Father José Maurício.

The first music of the Jesuits was necessary and social, considering that religion is

necessary and social. The belief in God, the hope of the Divinity, from the spiritual and from the

ethnographic point of view is not a superstition initially imposed by the society’s dominant

144 Andrade’s term is “musicaria.” It may also be interpreted as “endless music.”

145 From Cuiabá, capital city of the state of Mato Grosso.

146 Porpora was a leading Italian voice teacher from the eighteenth-century and composer of more than sixty operas between 1708 and 1747, in the elegant, lyrical Neapolitan style. He taught singing in Venice and Naples; among his pupils were poet and librettist Pietro Metastasio, composer Johann Adolph Hasse, and celebrated castrati Antonio Uberti (known as “Porporino”), Farinelli, and Caffarelli. The connection of the composer with Brazil probably comes from the years when he was a maestro di cappela at the household of the Portuguese Ambassador in Rome.

147 “Judeu” is the nickname of Antonio José da Silva (1705-1739), who was killed during the inquisition. He was a Brazilian composer who had his Opera-buffa performed in Portugal. In his operas he used popular songs that were well known to the popular masses (Azevedo, 1956: 21).

148 The naves, or central aisles of Catholic churches, where music soothed the suffering of a punitive existence. “Purgatorial world” may also refer to the transitory years of D. João in Brazil.

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strata. It moves from the bottom up; the popular masses in the clans are believers for

themselves, believers by nature, by a necessary mystic spirit that is characteristic of the incipient

mentalities149: in the beliefs of travelers and ethnographers, a spirit that is mystic even in certain

tribes where a clear and conceptual notion of what Divinity is does not exist; always venerating,

if not the Demons, their Ancestors. This common belief in an Ancestor or in a Demon, or in any

other form in which the primitive150 mentality imagines the supernatural forces, becomes a

“religion”151 in the social sense of “religare,” because it functions as a defensive and protective

fusing element of the collective. Music, rather singing, is the most liturgical element, the most

unforeseeable, one could say the sine qua non of the mystic encounter with a dematerialized god.

This is because singing is a vital fluid that exits through the mouth from that immaterial part of

ourselves that dwells in our bodies. It is exactly the more adequate element, for being identical,

to communicate with an immaterial fluid of the ancestors and of the spirits, a fluid already free

from the body and that moves, meandering (banzando) in the air, dwelling where it pleases or

serenely hovering over the Earth without Evil, beyond the Andes.

Surely, I am not saying that the mentality of the Portuguese adventurers and of the priests

was this primitive one of the so-called savages. However, many circumstances “made it primitive,”152 either aged it or infantilized it, if you so prefer: the lack of technique, the contact

with the indigenous people, the distancing from the civilized forces that leaned towards atheism, and this enormous disease without remedy that is death. Because this music, or more

149 A more contemporary term is worldview.

150 Although the term primitive is not used anymore, it was commonly part of the discourse of the time. Bruno Nettl used the term widely, as in the title of his book Music in Primitive Culture (1956).

151 Quotation marks from the author, as in religare.

152 Quotation marks from the author.

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specifically, the mystic singing of the Jesuits, also functioned as an element of religion, that is

“religare,”153 a linking force, making unanimous (unanimizadora) defensive and protective of diverse social individuals who were gathering together with no law nor king in the immediate post-Cabral154 milieu: noble profane leaders, voluntary adventurers, deported criminals, priests

and savage slaves. The main contrast was naturally between the ambitions of the settler and the

instinctive freedom of the Indian, which at all times represented the menace of a total drowning

of colonization. The mystic music of the Jesuits necessarily came to act in the most logical

social sense as an element of religion, of catechization of the Indian and concomitantly of

general regimentation. Music magically enchanted and subdued the opposing forces, meaning

the Indians; it comforted almost therapeutically those infected by the American exile, meaning

the settlers; and fused, confused, harmonized everyone, into a group where the needs, meaning

the total lack of technique and riches, formed a true community without classes, composed by

socially leveled individuals.155

Because during this time the noble leaders were, because of the adventurous conditions, individuals of social importance only slightly differentiable from the other settlers, they were tacitly accepted as leaders in the primitive clans. They were recognized as more skilled, and in some sort of way, more apt – an almost spiritual distinction of authority, perfectly equaled to the physical distinction of the strongest. The representatives of the Portuguese king who came at the forefront of the first explorations were leaders in the same way as the Tuxauas and Morubixabas

Amerindians: eating, sleeping like the others and with the others, battling in the common

153 Translated literary from Andrade’s text. The author appears to use different words for religion, as the Latin religare and later reconnect because of his particular usage of the word, as explained in chapter 2 of my discussion.

154 Pedro Álvarez Cabral, Portuguese discoverer of Brazil, hence referring here to the time after the Portuguese arrival.

155 This last phrase should be read with a poetical and/or speech-like tone in mind. Andrade’s punctuation is unusual, but it is effective in displaying his vivid writing style.

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defense, the function of authority only appearing to them in the moments of religion (religare…)

of the group, in the ceremonies, in the wars, in the investments into the land, and in the dissensions of the settlers.

For all of this, the religious music of the Jesuits, popularly simple, was “liturgical”156 in

the more primitive and social sense of the concept of liturgy. It was something unforeseen, sina

qua non. It was in fact more liturgical from the social point of view than from the typical

Catholic point of view of the time, since music was by then not the most necessary part of the

divine office; the entirety of the office was sung by the choir and believers, and repeated by the

priest and his followers next to the altar.

While religious music was not a necessary part of Catholic liturgy, it was a liturgical

element of socialization for the first groups. So much that it soon became a perfect

representation of a community without classes. It became universal (à la European…) through

the employment of Portuguese Catholic singing - the first organum and Gregorian chants. It was

at the same time national and “Brazilic” through the absorption of the land and the natives to

whom it belonged, using Amerindian chants, words and dances, generalizing the cateretê,157 and

even the Amerindian processes of mystic ritual; there were priests who got to the point of

preaching by imitating the gesticulation of the liturgical vocal accents of the piagas.158 Their music was, therefore, to its maximum, a force that rose from bottom up, and lived from the social necessities of the primitive Colony.

156 Quotes from the author.

157 Cateretê is also known as catira. It is a dance of Amerindian origin, accompanied by singing and two instruments, It is said to have been utilized by Jesuit priests in sixteenth-century Brazil at Catholic festivities. The more recent version of the dance is described by two opposite lines, one with men, the other with women, or both by men. Two men playing guitar (viola) sing in thirds and direct the choreography. Dancers move their bodies without leaving their places. This and all subsequent definitions of genres are taken from Alvarenga’s Mºusica Popular Brasileira (1956).

158 Same as pajés: in an Indian tribe, its members with healing powers.

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It was only later, with the establishment of various centers (Bahia, Pernambuco) and the

increase of their stability resulting from the warfare organization of villages, small forts and

churches, fortified already with the idea of longevity; with the ritual and sumptuous striving of

the principle of authority of the leaders’ land recipients,159 provincials, living in their shy

palaces: only then music, however always religious, little by little moves from necessary to

unnecessary, no longer coming from bottom up, and it became an element of ornamentation at

religious festivities.

Now, beginning from some centers that were more strongly established in the second half of the first century160 (Bahia, Olinda), music starts to become a utilitarian and utilizable instrument of a different order. The true god of the primitive collective dies without a proper resurrection. Hark, suddenly, when more certain of its stability, the bell of resurrection was rung festively at the strong church, and it was realized that the god from below, the popular god who was providing the harvest, protecting from the wars, and mystically the group equal, was being replaced by another, just like the first god in appearance, but with different principles: a god singularly proslavery, who repudiated the slavery of the Indians but consented to that of the black; a hedonistic (gostoso) god, triumphal, full of baroque ornaments and frankly favorable to the latifundiarian161 regime. It was this god who continued having the same gum Arabic and

all/purpose glue function in the collective. Collectivity, by the way, that no longer dwells at a

vast and equalitarian earthly home, but at another…with multiple stores.

159 In the Portuguese text, donatários. In the time of the discovery, “donatário” was the one to whom a piece of land was granted for him or her to populate, explore and manage. Further discussion in chapter 1.

160 First century of the Portuguese arrival in Brazil, which is sixteenth-century.

161 Owner of a large portion of land, with landlord authority in the system of latifúndio (please refer to discussion on latifundio in footnote 85).

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Now this religious music is no longer visceral, it is epidermal. No longer popular, but erudite and noble. No longer ugly as life, but intends to be beautiful as art. It is indeed still

European for being Catholic, but it is no longer a National concomitant. It does not make use of cateretês, rather only of some imported sol-fas, and of the latest fashion rococo, from where come some exclusively European sounds, instruments, rhythms, melodies, lyrics, in the most dominating and insensitive oblivion of the land and of the first Brazilian that had been born.

Ever since, there has been no more proper music in the Colony. I mean: an element that even though immediately unnecessary and aesthetic, always functions to reconnect,162 corresponding to the collectivity in which it is being performed. What exists, the music that is made here, religious or not, assumes all the detestable aspects of virtuosity. It is an ornamentation totally unrelated to the spiritual progress of collectivity. Useful only for a few. A disturbing ritual that accompanies the leaders and warrants them, month by month, before the multitudes, the miracle of transfiguration.

I am not criticizing, and even less condemning, which would be of no use, this aim of pure autocratic and popularly de-fiber-ing (desfibrante) virtuosity that took over the music of the

Colony and will persevere until the Império. It was fate. It was a fatality just as much in human evolution as it was in the social evolution of the country.

III

Hark! Independence, politically logical but socially only an aspiration. The Império had been established, importing emperors and an entire system of nobility distribution that was just a superfectation (redundancy), almost nothing based on the aristocracy of regional tradition, strength and riches which are naturally formed in any country under any regime. This is the

162 Here, Andrade uses the Portuguese translation of the Latin word religare, meaning to reconnect, as translated.

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aristocracy we also had here. The phony independence and the new nobility, bourgeois par

excellence as they were, came, however, to contribute decisively to the predominance of

profanity and love song.

In fact, with the Império the mystic drumming was already not enough to calm the native, aware of his land and independence, with his interests turned to the possession of his purgatory.

Our Ars Nova befell. Profane music started to prevail with two manifestations particularly characteristic of sexual sensuality: salon modinha,163 as lovers’ laments, and the melodrama, as

escape valve for passions. The modinha was already an intrinsic manifestation of something national, with little regard to its lack of ethnic character and the influences that formed it. Even with the lack of ethnic character, it perfectly characterizes by force the aristocracy, which is an actual bourgeoisie through its concepts and costumes, the predominant class in the Império.

However a homely manifestation, semi-educated, neither popular nor erudite, the ballroom

modinha will never have a decisive functionality in our music. Only when it becomes popular

will it be able to provide the national melody with some original elements. But even then, always full of a washed, incompetent urbanism, along with the fado and the tango, its garden

will always open dangerously deceptive and less favorable to the vernacular of the singing than

to the auspicious vulgarity.

It is really in the melodrama that the erudite musical manifestation of the Império is

concentrated. The country that allowed itself the luxury of diverting large funds to support an

Imperial house, also gave itself the luxury of funding the richest and shiniest station for opera in

America at the time. This was the second historical phase of our music and the result of its

technical evolution. The choral soloist of the colonial religious polyphony, emerging as the

163 Modinha was a love song from the eighteenth-century performed in Brazil and in Portugal. In Brazil, the genre was largely performed in Brazil until the second half of the nineteenth-century.

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superius of the quartet (four-part writing) and culminating in the imported soprano, singing

operatic arias even at the celebration of the Divine Office, had as a natural consequence to be a

theater singer. Because Brazil does not seem propitious to create beautiful voices and it did not

have schools, due to the lack of singers they were imported. It was the “José Amats” who settled

here and others who came stayed for years, such as De La Grange. It was established among the

theater orchestras in such a way that the dramatizations in prose often ended with a performance

of dances, putting into vogue at the Império the imported dances, the polka, the mazurka, the

waltz, that soon settled into families’ salons. The melodramatic casts were also established.

Opera, from which the main parts were imported - singer, as well as pieces and instrumentalists –

synchronized the smile with the lazy dictatorial figure of the Emperor and with the political

formula of the Império, spurious and solitary in our America. Our melodramatic theater that,

being theater, could have become efficient as the more pragmatist manifestation of the existing

arts, did not go beyond an Imperial and affluent excrescence. It was not based on our popular sung theater of the time, then in its most brilliant period with reisados,164 pastoris,165congos,166

cheganças.167 Rather, they were imported and solitary, like the Emperor himself.

This is when the major musical figure that Brazil has produced thus far emerges, the one

who came to give a more solid basis to this entire castle founded on the sliding sand of the coast

164 Reisado is a dramatic dance for Christmas celebrations. It is sung in its entirety, and for this reason it stands closer to popular lyric theater.

165 Pastoris are formed by dances, songs and a declamatory part, performed from Christmas through Folia de Reis by young women dressed in white, in front of the nativity. The melodies of the songs are not folkloric, but probably written by somewhat educated poets and musicians.

166 Congos and congados mix African traditions and costumes to Spanish and Portuguese dance elements. It consists of a Royal entourage with subject of warfare.

167 The two cheganças are chegança de marujos and chegança de Mouros. These dramatic dances are respectively for celebrating the Portuguese maritime enterprises and the battles between Iberian Christians and Muslims that took place on the seas.

127 with his fecund genius, Francisco Manuel da Silva. It is this great name that Brazilian music presents in its social vicissitudes. Charged with an ingenious practical vision that led him to act against any hindrance, he is the creator that establishes our musical technique definitively. He violates the dominance of the epidemic individualistic initiative in which our musical teaching had dispersed itself until that time, concentrating the technical education of the Brazilian musician in the permanent hands of the Government. It is the Conservatório. And more, he defines the melodramatic apogee of the monarchy, creating the Academia Imperial de Ópera.

The fortune was so faithful to him that it crowned all his fecundity, making him the author of the

Brazilian National anthem. Francisco Manuel da Silva exercises in our music the same role

Guido d’Arezzo did in theory and practice of European monody. He is a coordinator, a “system- izer,” an ingenious technician. The same way Guido d’Arezzo establishes theory facilitating musical practice, Francisco Manuel establishes theory, establishes the school, and facilitates and nationalizes the Imperial opera, giving it a permanent organization, and without contingencies.

The result of all this was Carlos Gomes. It is almost impossible for us to imagine the production of this campineiro168 without the intervention of the existence of Francisco Manuel.

Would the imperial melodrama by itself have justified him?. . . I do not believe so. In any case, it is the least probable hypothesis that Carlos Gomes would be who he was without Francisco

Manuel da Silva. Because the benefits, the scholastic technique and the search for nationalization that he concretized in his two big productions are the things that Carlos Gomes will represent. In the struggle for conquering himself, the two decisive moments on the musical establishment of Carlos Gomes are his fleeing Rio and the consequent entry to the Conservatório founded by Francisco Manuel; and his definitive dedication to the melodrama, with the success of “A Noite no Castelo” and “Joana de Flandres,” performed at the Academia Imperial de Ópera.

168 Campineiro is a person from Campinas, São Paulo.

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Also founded by Francisco Manuel. What Carlos Gomes learned from the Emperor and from his

opera, was the singing in Italian, the musical Italianism, the importation, the non-relationship to

the functional art. These are the reasons that led me today to say in typed writing something that

some years ago I had already said in confidence to a friend: the more I study Carlos Gomes, the

more I admire Francisco Manuel.

In art, Carlos Gomes is the secular synthesis of the entire first aesthetic phase of our

music, the phase that we call “Musical Internationalism.”169 What characterize this phase? If we

say that the social evolution of Brazilian music processed through successive states of

consciousness, then this first state of consciousness was internationalism. They imported, they accepted, they admired, not the European music, because there is no music that is peculiarly

European, but all different European musics. With this, the settler still had the justification of underscoring the state of submission in which he wanted to keep his possession of this Atlantic; it was always the exchange of trinkets, colorful laces and beads from the European industry that he exchanged here for Brazil-wood, sugar, and gold. It was with these little laces and beads that our composers adorned themselves to pose as great technicians and aspire for celebrity.170

It is because the internationalist state of consciousness conducts us to this. I know well that, even more blinded, many tardy composers who were lazy echoes of more comfortable times, camouflaged now the word “internationalist,”171 replacing it by another, and they come to

us talking-singing172 about “universalist” music, about “universal music.”173 This is a true

169 Quotes and capitalization from the author.

170 He is being tongue in cheek. The context suggests that Andrade is criticizing composers who write their music to please their public as opposed to giving their music a social function.

171Quotes from the author, as in the next two examples.

172 Andrade might be referring to the way recitatives are sung.

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accomplishment of sociological ignorance, for not even the urban proletariat, universalist by

economic and technical misfortune, has ever produced popular music that in any way could be

called universal. Truly ethnic universalism is a dream of a future too overly remote for us to argue about it now. A dream, by the way, that no experiment in human history can confirm. The

so-called universal music is a hypothetic Esperanto that does not exist. Although there is, I

cannot deny, an internationalist music, the tedious and fatigued fineness from the célèbre

comedy Transatlantiques.

What are the exact and confirmed effects of this internationalism, which could not yet be

universalism and may never be? It is that when the composer allows himself to be led by an

inspiration that is free from his nationality, he falls into another nationality that is not his own. I

mean: he imagines to be writing universal music, but actually is under the influence of Debussy-

Ravel, and hence is French-like; or he is under the influence of Puccini-Zandonai, and hence is

Italian-like; or he is under the influence of Wagner-Strauss, and sounds Aryan. In the best case,

he falls into a system of atonalism, and then, less then Austrian, he is a copyist of Schoenberg;

when he is dazzled by the excesses of percussion, obsessive rhythms, pluri-tonal polyphony, we

rather have a “Stravinskian.” Also, it is necessary to not forget about the mirific

“Characterlessness,”174 rare, it is true, but insolent in the composers’ skillful ostentation. I refer

to the Mendelssohns, to the Meyerbeers, to the Tschaikowskis, and other comforting snug quilts,

a kind of a crematory furnace of the dust of many races. There is no international, and even less,

173 Footnote from the author: It might seem that I contradict myself, denying the existence of “universal” music, after classifying the religious music of the Colony this way. There is no contradiction. At that instance I approached music from the social point of view. I verified, therefore, with a reticence (reticencioso) à la “European,” that music, in religion, as the dynamic element of reconciliation of the “socii,” [sic] if universal-ized (universalizava) us, was necessary and preliminarily accepted. It was not contemplation, it was action. In this sense, the music of the universal-ized religions is as universal as the locomotive and soccer. But now I deal, technically and no longer socially, with the constituent elements of music, as aesthetic creation, as work of art producer. In this sense, it is that I deny the existence of a “universal” music.

174 Quotes and capitalizations are from the author.

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universal music: there are instead, geniuses who universalize themselves for excessive fundamentalism - Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven - or women who internationalize themselves for being overly easy - “Traviata,” “Carmen,” “Butterfly.” However, even inside this internationality or within that universality, such musicians and such women never stopped being functionally national.

I would not want for myself the drama of these secular composers from the internationalist phase. They made great efforts, and what is worse, not compensating ones, to acquire a more legitimate and Brazilian social reality. They reflected this effort, naively belated, upon the Indianist Romanticism, and gave us “O Guaraní,” “O Escravo,” “Moema,” and other dreams and chimeras. In any case, Carlos Gomes, with his two Brazilic operas, assumed a respectable socio-national function, echoing, although romantically Indianist, the slavery abolition movement. And that this echo was conscious is proven by the dedicatory of O

Escravo.175

At the birth of the Republic, our erudite music was in this situation: it was internationalist

in its cultivated forms and inspiration, and still very far from the nation in spite of the efforts of

Francisco Manuel and Carlos Gomes. The Republic came to give a stronger American and

democratic sense to Brazil. We were no longer a monarchic excrescence in the American lands.

It was therefore predictable that this would have a profound repercussion on the social

development of our music and its aesthetic orientation. But it was not exactly this way.

The ingenious creation of Francisco Manuel had necessarily to produce bitter fruits

before sweet ones, in the semblance of certain trees that in their first fructification are only

175 O Escravo (The Slave) was dedicated to Princess Isabel, who signed Abolition into law in Brazil.

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promises of a generous future. As a result, the numerous national composers of the newly born

Republic emerge, derive from, or are gathered at the Instituto Nacional de Música. Composition

starts by becoming a constant form of our erudite manifestation, going beyond virtuosity;

however, this music is still systematically internationalized. Hence, the Institute of Francisco

Manuel came to develop and protect production, and led to a great step towards compositional

technique, but still could not free such production and technique from the general tutelage of

internationalist Europe. Composers that characterize this first period of the Republic are

typically internationalists. It is correct to say that the great Henrique Oswald, Leopoldo Miguez,

Glauco Velasques, Gomes de Araújo, Francisco Braga, Barroso Neto (these two in their first

phase) and other good representatives of this initial Republican phase already presented

sufficiently strong technique to feed our music’s first aspirations to walk on its own. The

Conservatório created by Francisco Manuel mainly led us to this. And this is not all. If the wars in the South had contributed to enkindle in the Brazilian bosom the more intimate conviction of a complete and united nation, on the other hand, a simulacrum of economic independence and relative abundance with the coffee bloom made the affirmations of a national personality propitious. Then, putting aside the fragile nationalism merely titular and textual of the two

Indianist operas by Carlos Gomes, it does not seem simply occasional that exactly in the newly

discovered Promised Land of São Paulo would arise the first musical nationalist, Alexandre

Levy. It does not seem by chance that, immediately after that, Alberto Nepomuceno176 would descend from the Northeast, the strongest conservative mine of our popular traditions, to locate himself in Rio, a city borrowed177 in order to be the capital of the country, and that was

176 Alexandre Levy, 1864 – 1892; Alberto Nepomuceno, 1864 – 1920.

177 Rio de Janerio was the city capital from 1763 until 1960, when it moved to Brasília. It is unclear why Andrade uses the word borrowed, which indicates that there was a transitory process.

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increasingly diverging itself with the satisfying allowances coming from the Promised Land. In

fact, it is from these two men, Alexandre Levy and Alberto Nepomuceno, that the first erudite

conformations of the new collective state of consciousness, the nationalist, would be formed in

the social evolution of our music.

This, however, was still forced by the definitive and impressive establishment of popular

music, our most intransigent national music. In fact, during the Colony, we did not have popular

music that could be called Brazilian. This voluntary expression of nationality did not interest the

Colony, and it would have been prejudicial to the compliance to which the land and its people

were subject. The scarce existing documentation tends to prove that the Afrodescendents made

their own Black music, the Portuguese, their “Portuga”178 music, the Indians, their Amerindian

music. Only at the end of the eighteenth-century, already at the imminence of independence, that

the people start to delineate themselves musically, and certain Brazilian forms and constâncias179

start to become traditional in the community, such as the lundú,180 the modinha, syncopation.

Soon after, and with a greater popular demand, our great dramatic dances (danças dramáticas)181 established themselves, such as the reisados, the two cheganças, the congos and congados,182 the

cabocolinhos183 and caiapós,184 and the bumba-meu-boi,185 some of these probably rhapsodically

178 Slang meaning Portuguese people.

179 Please see footnote 22.

180 Urban dance described as sensual, lundú is the first form of dance that developed from the African slaves to be accepted in Brazilian society. Musically, it is defined by its rhythmic syncopation and melodic minor seventh – two musical aspects that for Andrade define Brazilian music.

181 The term dramatic dance, danças dramáticas, in Portuguese, was coined by Mário de Andrade to designate Brazilian popular dances that have a portion dramatized, and are based on a given subject (e.g. cheganças are based on maritime stories).

182 Please see note 166.

183 Of Amerindian inspiration, cabocolinho, or caboclinhos, is a dramatic carnival dance that can be sung or instrumental. Subjects include war and hunting. The important aspect of a cabocolinho is the choreography.

133 set as a compendium (compendiados) and “arranged”186 to a text and music by entirely anonymous endearing poets (poetinhos) and urban musicians (musiquetes). Bumba-meu-boi, above all, was already very characteristically and freely national, resembling very little its remote overseas origins and celebrating the animal that would become the historical replacement of the Bandeirante,187 and the greatest explorer, socializer, and unifying instrument of our nation, the Bull (o Boi). Finally in the last days of the Império and the first days of the República, with the modinha already passed from the salon piano to the corner guitar, with maxixe,188 with samba, with the formation and establishment of the seresta189 ensembles of the choros190 and the evolution of the toada191 and of the rural dances, popular music grows and defines itself incredibly quickly, violently becoming the strongest creation and the most beautiful characterization of our race.

184 Caiapó was a dramatic dance of Amerindian origin for religious celebrations. It was accompanied by the beating of two pieces of wooden sticks marking the beat and one drumming instrument, with no singing. It was danced only by men.

185 Bumba-meu-boi is literally, the “Bull, my deity,” and refers to a dramatic dance also referred to as boi-bumbá and boi surubi. It consists of four distinct acts, with several characters, and culminates with the death and resurrection of the boi (bull) at the end. It is still performed in the Northeast during Christmas and in the Amazon during Saint John celebrations around June 24.

186 Quotes from the author.

187 Bandeirantes, meaning “flag bearers,” were explorers sent to Brazil by the Portuguese Crown to search for Native Indians for slave labor, as well as to look for precious gems. They were the first ones to find gold in the regions defined today as the states of Minas Gerais, Goiás, and Mato Grosso. They were also credited for expanding Brazilian territory beyond the constraints delineated by the Tordesilhas Treaty.

188 Maxixe was the first type of urban dance created in Brazil. It was formed from the blending and adaptation of several dances and musics: from the polka, the movement; from the habanera and lundú, the rhythm; and from Afro- Brazilian musics, the syncopation.

189 Seresta is a choro (please refer to the next footnote) with a vocal soloist.

190 Choro is an instrumental musical ensemble and a musical style. The ensemble counts with a soloist and accompanying instruments playing in counterpoint. Melodic lines are characterized by wide leaps and the rhythm resembles that of the maxixe.

191 Found throughout Brazil, the toada did not present generic characteristics, but had particularities from each region of the country. The only common aspect is that it is a song with short text, sung as verse and chorus. It is tonada in Spanish.

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It was from the internationalist phase of European teaching that Alexandre Levy and

Alberto Nepomuceno harvested the process of rapidly and consciously nationalizing the erudite music through popular music. Already by then, the Mighty Five in Russia had been able to nationalize and liberate Russian music, systematically drawing from popular musical manifestations of their astounding country. Spanish musicians, for their part, had already created

and nationally defined the Zarzuela, but it is right that Albeníz and Granados were just

contemporaries of our two composers. However, in compensation, the example from Germany

weighed enormously next to the Russian side; already then, beyond the definitive nationalization

of the lied with Schubert and Schumann, the systematically traditionalist and even voluntarily

nationalist music by Brahms, and especially by Wagner, almost aggressively, almost

“Hitleristically” affirmed the Germanic musical consciousness, always with the national lied as

its basis. This nationalization through popular subject area was what Alexandre Levy and

Alberto Nepomuceno attempted. In such a sense, even though still deficiently, they are not only

prophets of our brilliant and restless present, but they incorporate themselves to it, forming the

traditional trunk of the Brazilian musical nationality genealogic tree.

But if, as I said, the First Republic was not able to open a new phase of our music, it would be a flattering falsification, of which I am incapable, to attribute to the Segunda

República192 the merits of such an important evolution. No. It was the Great War, exaggerating the eager nationalism of the Imperialist nations, to which we are tributaries, that contributed decisively to the affirmation of our new music nationalist state of consciousness, no longer as an individual experience, as it was with Alexandre Levy and Alberto Nepomuceno, but as a

collective tendency. A few years after the war had ended, and not without having lived the

192 Segunda República (Second Republic) took place from 1930 to 1934, also called Governo Provisório.

135

brutal experience of the Semana de Arte Moderna193 in São Paulo, Villa-Lobos194 consciously

and systematically abandoned his French internationalism to become the starter and greatest

figure of the nationalist phase we are in. Soon, the generation’s partners joined him, such as the

short lived Luciano Gallet and Lourenço Fernandez. Two particular composers from the first

Republican period, Francisco Braga and Barroso Neto,195 engaged empathetically in the new movement. Following them, younger ones came in abundance, Francisco Mignone, Camargo

Guarnieri, Frutuoso Viana, Radamés Gnatalli,196 who I choose to mention, as thus far the more

accomplished ones. But they are a broad legion irregular in their value, very irregular in their

technique, very opinionated in the construction of their works; the one who really tries more

honestly to deepen the knowledge of the “profession”197 is rare.

From all the phases through which Brazilian music has passed in its evolution, the more

exciting one is, without a doubt, the contemporary. All the other phases were more or less

unconsciously moved by inhuman and fatal forces of life, while today’s, even though necessary

for being an evolving step of culture, have their necessity driven and twisted by will, rationale,

and human decisions. This adds a more dramatic interest derived from the struggle of man

against his own erudite traditions, acquired habits, and the uneasy efforts that he makes to keep

from drowning in the socio-economic conditions of the country, always in the generous hope of

transforming its nationalist inspiration and cultural manifestations into a more functional national

193 Week of Modern Art.

194 Heitor Villa-Lobos, 1887 – 1959; Luciano Gallet, 1893-1931; Oscar Lourenço Fernandez, 1897-1948.

195 Francisco Braga, 1890-1900; Barroso Neto, 1881 – 1941.

196 Francisco Mignone, 1897 – 1986; Mozart Camargo Guarnieri, 1907 – 1993; Frutuoso Viana, 1896 – 1976; Radamés Gnatalli, 1906, 1988).

197 In the original, “métier.” Quotes from the author, perhaps for an irony implicated in his use of the word.

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creation. This, in the profound sense, is the grave musical nationalist reality in which our erudite

music still flounders today.

It is certain that the nationalist phase will not be the last one in the social evolution of our

music. We are still crossing a rebellious period that is consciously experimental. Experimental

rather than authorial. The Brazilian composer of today198 is a sacrificed one, increasing the

exciting dramatic value of the period through which we traverse. Facing the work to be built, the

composer is still not a free being, is still not an “aesthetic”199 being, consciously forgetful of his

duties and obligations. He has a task to accomplish, a pre-established destiny to fulfill and, mandatorily rather than freely and spontaneously, he avails himself of elements that lead him to accomplish his pragmatic purpose. No. If it seems to me incontestable that Brazilian music traverses a brilliant adolescence, one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful one in

America; if it is verifiable that there is a Brazilian composer who places himself today among the most important figures of the universal contemporary music; if the healthy consciousness, the virility of thought that leads our main composers to this fecund, but sacrificial fight for the nationalization of our music, socially comforts us, it is not less certain that Brazilian music cannot indefinitely conserve itself in the period of pragmatism in which it is. If in the primeval it was universal, it dissolved in religion; if it was internationalist for a while because of the discovery of secularity, development of technique and agrarian riches ; if it is now in the nationalist phase by the acquisition of a self consciousness: some day it will have to elevate itself to the phase that I will call Cultural, freely aesthetic, always bearing in mind that there cannot be a culture that does not reflect the profound realities of the land where it is realized. Then our

198 Author’s note: It is clear that I refer exclusively to those who research about the thing national. The others, one cannot find a single one who can leave at least a small chromosome of talent to his kids.

199 Quotes from the author.

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music will be no longer nationalist, but simply national, in the same sense that a giant like

Monteverdi and a mollusk like Leoncavallo200 are national.

As for now, we are lacking the giant. Actually, the situation of the contemporary

Brazilian composer is very difficult. In general, and with the exception of only three or four

names, they are deficient in technique due to the economic state of the country.

There is no doubt that several of our musicians are profoundly dishonest in benefiting

from the hazy cultural anarchy in which we live, they feign to be composers, aware that in the

darkness of the night all cats are dull.201 Some of these composers even come to know only very superficially, certain introductory elements of composition that they could have learned on their own, even without the consent of the school and against the barriers of poverty. Incapable of treating a theme and convinced that polyphony consists of coupling a melody with another sounding line without the least musical meaning. And even in shorter pieces, one to two minutes of piano playing, one can easily realize that they exclusively rely on the singing of the

“uccellinis,”202 only adding to the cantiga203 some harmonies that they “dig from the piano,” as

the slang of the professionals would say, some sonorous mists sort of strange and refined, found by chance in the moving around of the ten fingers on the keys. Having uncovered the mist, they pulverize the small segment with it, from beginning to end, because at one aspect of technique these “Cabrais-by-chance” are brave: at the use and abuse of the harmonic pedal and in the ostinato bass, spring-board of salvation for all the vertical music angst.

200 Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857 – 1919).

201“De noite todos gatos sao pardos.” Saying that means that in the darkness, all things look the same.

202 Mário de Andrade is referring to Marco Uccellini (1603 or 1610 to 1680), the virtuoso Italian baroque composer and violinist, mainly known for one of the earliest uses of scordatura tuning.

203 “Song.”

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At any rate, by the same demands of specialization, not even from afar the case of our

musicians resembles the case of our literature, in which the younger generations seem destined to prove that one can be a writer without knowing how to write. The modernist movement, eminently critical by nature, appeared to be implicated in a great ulterior culture evolution, which, however, did not happen. The youngsters did not endure the impact. The lack of intellectual supervision of editors, newspapers and periodicals particularly, the companionship of the critics so protective as conformist in the country, allowed this sombrous state of things, of which the smallest fault is still the national superstition of talent. Today some of our most celebrated fiction writers enjoy the voluptuousness of their enormous talent, even though they are, being flattering, a little less than illiterate.

The situation of music is a little better, fortunately. After all, one can write a short novel without knowing what syllogism means or that Tiradentes was not buried in Vila Rica. But composing a trio or even any solo piece that lasts five minutes implies such technical problems that, in general, the composer resigns himself to the scarce, and not too embarrassing, one- minute character pieces. Really, only the bold-faced charlatans throw themselves into such

“Africas.”204 And music, maybe for not utilizing in its message the circumvolutions and mazes

of the consciousness that forgives it all, still conserves the coyness of the irrational ones. They

are rare in music, the bold-faced charlatans.

But the general lack of technique of the Brazilian composer is mainly impelled by our

economic situation. The financial hegemony of Buenos Aires in South America was useful at

some point, freeing us from the excessive competition of the imported international musician,

and along with this, allowing a greater stability in the economic situation of the national virtuosi.

It is possible that Brazilians are musically better gifted than Argentineans or Uruguayans.

204 Quotes are mine. Perhaps to be interpreted as challenges.

139

However, it is not counting on little improbable vanities that the strength of productivity of a

people is organized, and we are all tired of knowing that a “Teresa Carreño”205 can arise from

any unusual place. The possible superiority in number, value and even ingenious expressions of

the Brazilian virtuoso, particularly of the pianist, some of whom are able to achieve international

fame with ease, seems to me to be especially derived from our national conditions. The field

was vaster, our cities supported by public funds and demanding more numerous parties, in their

state Capitals ostentation. Furthermore, at the two large Brazilian cities, Rio, São Paulo, the

competition of the international virtuosi started to rarefy, only porting here to pass through, many

times in his way to Buenos Aires.

Next, with the decline of coffee and the depreciation of the national currency, the

situation of our music became intolerable. This, together with a small surge of the nationalist

phase, when the Brazilian composer most needed favorable circumstances of foreign competition

and examples, as well as means to produce and to be paid, in order to deepen their technique.

Government acts, scarcely energetic and lucid, could not by any means improve our technical

conditions. Before 1929, São Paulo, almost rich, was able to maintain three orchestras and two

string quartets. An imprudent coup of the Uruguayan government could in little time create an

orchestra that can already be called of first order, by means of taxing, if I am not mistaken, the radio channels. Uruguay called to its capital the best foreign conductor that has ever lived in

Brazil, Lamberto Baldi, the only one who was in fact interested in Brazilian composition.

Because of this, other Brazilian instrumentalists from São Paulo were called to Montevidéo; being better paid, in a better currency, enabled them to elevate their quality of life. “Symphony- ism” in São Paulo entered a lukewarm decline. Chamber music disappeared for some time.

205 My quotation marks. Pianist Teresa Carreño is being used as an example of a virtuosic pianist.

140

In Rio de Janeiro, the situation, if not worse, is nothing better than that of São Paulo in terms of technical enrichment possibilities for composers. The reform of the Instituto Nacional

de Música in 1931, it is fair to say, was “macaw inspired.”206 (I was among these incited

macaws). It was a creation nearly lunatic in its energy, in its severity, in demanding from the

music candidates immediate elevation of their culture status. It is a special aberration from all

our bad musical traditions and the conditions of the moment (a moment that still lasts…) in terms

of its socializing ideal of making the Brazilian musician an educated normality, a class strongly

gifted in technique – completely inattentive to the superstition of individual talent, which is the

only mystique of our uneducated country. The reform ignored the geniuses, in a country where

we are all geniuses. The result, if not disastrous, was null. The current Escola Nacional de

Música is almost in the same conditions of insufficient technical preparation for the Brazilian

musician that it was before 1931.

The reform did not only implicate changes in the state of the students’ general education,

but above all, underwent a radical transformation of the teaching staff. There was no energy to

realize this. With few exceptions, the teaching staff of the Escola Nacional de Música is a

hotbed of old or prematurely aged spectrums sleeping in monotony, only leaving their dullness

for dances of internal conflicts. Perhaps no other school in the world was turned useless as a

result of so much politics and personal pretense.

One can say that all reforms are good or not useless, providing, primarily, that the

teachers are good. And it is necessary to have the courage to recognize that with “auriverde”207

patriotic gestures one cannot fix anything. It is necessary to call on foreign teachers; it is

206 Carlos Camargo has suggested the translation: “The real meaning is that the reform of the INM was an aspiration of fools.” (Carlos Camargo in email correspondence, December 12, 2010).

207 Golden and green colors referring to the colors of the Brazilian flag.

141

necessary to ground their roots to this land through strict but generous contracts. It is necessary

to bring to the musical teaching staff men traditionalized in more experimented civilizations,

where the primary truth has at least been established that says that to honestly realize a job it is

necessary to learn it well. Instead, facing the inefficacy of the 1931 reform, they claim a new

reform! They intend to fix a hole by opening another one ahead.

However, the Brazilian composer’s deficient technique does not derive exclusively from

this. Maybe not even particularly from this, because whatever the school can offer, in the worst

case scenario, the artist could in great part supply with readings, individual work, advice from

good ones. The greatest disaster is the state of impossibility which the Brazilian composer

undergoes of experimenting himself. Besides listening very little to other composers’ music,

composers among us listen to themselves even less. The technical knowledge is too little to give

them technique. All compositional technique is formed from experimentation. It is almost useless for a composer, who always visually “felt”208 in his score the counterpoint of a flute in the low register, to learn from a book or hear from an experienced conductor that this cannot be heard in the ensemble. The advisee can follow, and even convince himself of the truth and modify his instrumental arrangement, but will never learn, in the sense that learning is a norm of conduct to be acquired. At the first opportunity, the composer will fall back, not in the same mistake, but in an identical mistake of symphonic disposition. Or will run away, fearful, of a handful of good foreseen effects. The great lesson, in this case, the lesson that stays marked in the flesh, is the composer hearing that…he did not hear the counterpoint. But how can the

Brazilian musician learn, if sometimes more than one year goes by with not a single symphonic or any other kind of ensemble music of his being played!

208 Quotes from the author.

142

The worst is that orchestra and string quartets or choirs are in the hands of a foreign or a little less than foreign directors, all dressed as Guaraní, but indifferent to local issues, ignorant of it, incapable of comprehending and integrating themselves to it. The only intent of these directors is to conserve at any cost their achieved position, slavishly obeying the taste of the

internationalized capitals’ audience, such as in São Paulo and Rio. Besides perhaps not even

having a predominant percentage of national listeners, a public in whom the misery is to be lazy,

inert, unlearned, only demanding the more traditionally easy works and the juggling jumps of

brilliancy and virtuosity. Tschaikowski. Tsssssssssschaikowski. In such a way that when a

conductor or a string quartet (I exclude here only the Borghert quartet) complies with performing

a short work by a national composer, will do it only to escape from legal action, intimately

repudiating the piece, and complaining about too few rehearsals under pretense. The works are

performed in such a rush and so poorly that the composer can never know for sure if he could not

hear his awkwardly written counterpoint because in fact it cannot be heard or if the piece was

badly understood and even worse executed. Hence he cannot improve the experience of his

technique.

In this sense, the lack of a real foreign competition is causing us now enormous

prejudice. We need the encounter with foreign orchestras, string quartets, choirs that expose the

contrast of the national deficiency and awake the brio of those who can improve our national

ensembles. We lack the competition from constant listening to foreign modern music of high

quality, which allows the Brazilian composer to experiment confrontations, to recognize his

differences, his defects, his best and his worst, the wrong and the right doings of his ways. We

lack national ensembles directed by authentic artists, playing comprehensively numerous

national musics, which will impute the authors’ faults and blames. But for this, the protection of

143

the Government is essential, because the country’s economic situation does not provoke a useful

foreign competition nor stimulate national forces. And it is still the Government that shall

underwrite the assented festivals of Brazilian music, the competitions, the congresses, the researches. As well as the foreign professors that might come and checkmate the didactic weakness or our teaching.

It will be defeatism to argue that all these provoke enormous expenses and that I

contradict myself demanding all these things at the same time that I appeal to the national

poverty to explain our technical deficiency. It does not fit here to study processes nor suggest

ways that allow the federal and state Governments, without new vast expenses, to permanently

maintain an orchestra of first order, a quintet, a choir, to function at the same time as a technical

experimentation field, a conducting school, and a source of high musical performances. And

with Loide,209 E.F.C.B.210 and other transportation organisms at hand, and small aid from the

state, the Government will even be able to make its ensembles travel around the capitals, during

school vacations and season breaks.

I am not a materialist and even less one of those who place the guilt of petty human

productivity on the wide back of economic factors. And if I recognize that the Brazilian

composer in general is very dishonest in the fragility of his technique, capitalizing on Brazilian

society’s cultural lack of traditionalism and supervision, and also the experimentalist adventures

of today’s music; if I recognize also that our technical deficiency is in great part conditioned by

the country’s financial situation, I have the conviction that it is possible to heal or diminish these

209 The Companhia de Navegação Loide Brasileiro (Company of Navegation Loide Brasileiro) was founded in 1890; its ships transported cargo and passengers along the Amazon River and from the coast of Brazil to the Mediterranean, Rio Prata, East Coast of North and Central America and North of Europe.

210 The Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil (Brazil Central Railroad), as it was renamed in 1889, was built in 1855, with the name Estrada de Ferro D. Pedro II.

144 prejudices to the minimum by forcing the march of things and balancing the weight of circumstances with prudent musical politics in terms of orientation, and being energetic in terms of actions. The Brazilian composer is there, my God!, full of talent and – what is more important

– admirable for his idealism and endurance. And, rather alone in the extent that is conferred to him, has been able to force such march of things by gathering the musical inheritance that is of the strongest in America. And I do not know what relentless and heroic faith has made him move his mountains.

145

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APPENDIX

PERSONAGES IN THE ESSAY

Andrade’s essay presents a series of names whose biographies represent still another way of telling a “story” parallel to his text. While some facts of the biographies could not be dissociated from “the story” told in chapters four and five, other facts about these personages, even if they could have enriched the text, could have disrupted the flow of that text and were therefore written separately. The biographies below are organized alphabetically from topics presented in the order of the essay.

Conservatório Dramático e Musical de São Paulo

In essay section I, Andrade discussed five names connected to the Conservatório but not with the “pianolatria” in São Paulo: Samuel Arcanjo do Santos, Savino de Benedictis, João da

Cunha Caldeira Junior, Nestor Ribeiro, and Oneyda Alvarenga. Andrade also mentioned musicologists connected with the modernist-nationalist movement, Furio Franceschini and

Antonio de Sá Pereira.

Alvarenga, Oneyda (1911 – 1984)

Alvarenga, to whom Andrade dedicated the present essay, was initially a pupil of his at

the Conservatório and later became one of his greatest collaborators. When Andrade launched

what he called a “Mission of Folklore Researches” (Missão de pesquisas folclóricas) in 1938,

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Alvarenga was working with him and so was Dina Dreyfus. Alvarenga also helped to organize

the Discoteca Pública mentioned in Andrade’s text, and directed it from 1935 to 1968.

Interestingly, this was one of the main recording libraries of the country and today bears the

name Discoteca Oneyda Alvarenga.211 It is also noteworthy that upon Andrade’s passing, she

was entrusted to compile and publish an important part of this work at Andrade’s request.212

Samuel Arcanjo do Santos (1882 – 1957).

Born in São Paulo, he was a composer,213 teacher and director of the Conservatório, for

which he remains mostly remembered today. In the years under his direction, he improved the

Conservatório’s library and recording collection, as well as organized music classes for children

and a music pedagogy course.

Benedictis, Savino de (1883 – 1951)

Italian born musician, who came to Brazil to live in São Paulo and teach at the

Conservatório. He wrote pedagogical works and the anthem for the centenary of Brazilian

independence.

Caldeira Filho, João da Cunha

211 The first services provided by the Discoteca included the archive of recorded folk materials as well as classical music written by paulista composers or those living in São Paulo. The library is located in the Centro Cultural Vergueiro, in São Paulo and was recently remodeled.

212 Centro Cultural Vergueiro’s page, accessed on October 13, 2010, http://www.centrocultural.sgov.br/saiba_mais/biblioteca_oneydaalvarenga.asp/.

213 Folhas que vento levará, Romance sem palavras, and Valsa No. 2 are considered his most important works.

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Music critic Caldeira Filho graduated from the Conservatório in 1926. He later

succeeded Mário de Andrade in his teaching position.

Franceschini, Furio (1880 – 1976)

Franceschini was born in Rome, Italy, and moved to São Paulo in 1907. He was a

conductor, organist, and composer who taught music analysis at the Conservatório between 1933

and 1939. Later, Andrade named him teacher of Culture and Music Analysis at the

Departamento Municipal de Cultura de São Paulo. The two books that he published that

Andrade considered very important were Breve Curso de Análise Musical (1931) and

Compêndio de Canto Gregoriano (1938).

Pereira, Antonio Sá (1888 – 1966)

Among Pereira’s teaching appointments, he taught at the Instituto Nacional de Música

(today, the Music School of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro). The important pedagogic literature on music he wrote, to which Andrade alludes, includes Ensino Moderno de

Piano: Aprendizagem Racionalizada (1933),214 and Psicotécnica do ensino elementar da música

(1937).

Associated with the Opera Scene in Colonial Brazil, from Essay Section I

Niccolò Porpora (1686 – 1768)

214 Antônio de Sá Pereira, “Ensino Moderno de Piano: Aprendizagem Racionalizada,” 2a. ed. São Paulo: Ricordi Brasileira, 1948.

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Leading Italian singing teacher and noted composer of the eighteenth-century, Porpora wrote more than 60 operas in the elegant, lyrical Neapolitan style between 1708 and 1747.

Porpora taught singing in Venice and Naples; among his pupils were the poet and librettist Pietro

Metastasio, the composer Johann Adolph Hasse, and the celebrated castrati Antonio Uberti

(known as “Porporino”), Farinelli, and Caffarelli. The composer’s connection with Brazil probably comes from the years when he was a maestro di cappela at the household of the

Portuguese Ambassador at Rome.

Internationalist Composers from Essay Section IV

Composers Oswald, Miguez, Araújo, Velasquez, Braga and Barroso Neto championed a good compositional technique, even though not yet nationalists.

Araújo, João Gomes de (1846-1943)

Mário de Andrade and the next composer mentioned by him, João Gomes de Araújo were

connected through the Conservatório Dramático e Musical de São Paulo, founded by Araújo

together with Pedro Augusto Gomes Cardim in 1906. Andrade started his musical studies and

years later became a teacher at the same institution.

What Azevedo has to say about him is that Gomes Araújo followed Italian models, after

being a composition student of Cezare Dominicetti in Milan, Italy, where he had moved in 1888.

He describes his style as dominantly passadista – therefore, we may point out, disconnected to

the quotidian matters claimed by Mário de Andrade in the formation of national music. The year

he moved to Italy, Araújo composed the opera Carmosina, in 3 Acts with libretto by

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Ghislanzoni. Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro II attended the premiere at the Teatro Dal Verme,

Milan, in 1888. The opera was performed in Brazil in 1891 (Azevedo 1956, 99).

Araújo wrote a total of four operas and six symphonies. He was primarily a composer of

sacred music, writing eleven masses throughout his life. It was frustrating to Mário de Andrade

that as one of the leading figures of music in Brazil was composing “Italian” music.

Miguez, Leopoldo (1850 – 1902)

Also Brazilian born, descendent on both sides of immigrants, Leopoldo Miguez started

his music training in Portugal, where he lived from the age of 2 to the age of 13. After that he

remained in Europe (first in Spain and later again in Portugal), moving back to Brazil when he was 21 years old, to first work at the music printing business and only later to dedicate himself to

music writing and performance as a conductor. He went back to Europe to receive instruction in

Paris and then Brussels. Azevedo describes that in Miguez’s learning there as an “absorption” of

the Wagnerian musical aesthetic, which he brought to Brazil upon his return in 1884. One piece

that exemplifies his style is the lyric drama I Salduni. His career had a twist with the Republic in

1889. He wrote the Anthem for the Proclamation of the Republic, which Azevedo interestingly

described as been chosen by the new leader of the Provisory Government of Brazil, Marshal

Deodoro da Fonseca, for having the characteristics of the old music style.

Azevedo qualifies Miguez as “incontestable leader of the Brazilian musical movement”

(1956: 110),215 for his contributions to the establishment of the Instituto Nacional de Música.

Together with Alfredo Bevilaqua and Rodrigo Barbosa, he formed the committee to reorganize

the Conservatório founded by Francisico Manuel, which after their changes was renamed as the

215 “Chefe incontestável do movimento musical brasileiro.”

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Instituto Nacional de Música. His work at that institution encompassed a varied array of

activities, including the restoration of pieces by José Maurício Nunes Garcia and a continuous

effort to bring varied teaching techniques and aesthetic orientations to the school. Fausto Borém

has also suggested that Miguez composed Impromptu for Solo Double Bass for the graduate

recital of the virtuoso student of the Instituto, Alfredo Aquino Monteiro in 1892 (2005, 3).

Historians have often dismissed Miguez as composer, declaring him to be an unsuccessful follower of Wagner, in the same fashion as Mário de Andrade and Azevedo. Vasco

Mariz in A História da Música no Brasil, for instance, says that the Brazilian composer cannot be compared to other disciples of Wagner such as Bruckner, Richard Strauss and Mahler. José

Maria Neves in Música Contemporanea Brasileira suggests that Miguez “could never free

himself from the influences of Liszt and Wagner” (Neves 1981, 18).216 Only recently have his

compositions been looked at with more interest. In 2005, a competition was organized to revive

the piece Impromptu to recreate the supposedly lost piano part.

Nonetheless, Miguez mastered the compositional technique. Looking at the already

mentioned Impromptu for double bass, written in 1898, one finds some well acclaimed technical

issues of the composition. In some ways, this is a unique piece in Miguez’s output because

Miguez abandons the Wagnerian chromaticism to write a more conservative tonality for the sake

of a clear line, which the instrument demands for its low register (Ramsier in Borém, 2004). The

piece was written in the Italian style of double bass pieces of the second half of the nineteenth-

century, cultivated in Brazil through the teachings of Ricardo Roveda, writing high Es and F#s to

be played as overtones. This might represent a concern of performance, but was often used in

the second half of the nineteenth-century through the influence of the double bass teacher of the

Instituto Nacional de Música. In this sense he represents virtuosity and internationalism through

216 “Não pode libertar-se da influência de Liszt e de Wagner.”

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Italianism. Miguez is also in tune with other composers for the instrument during his time. The

analysis of this piece helps to understand Miguez’s “wrongdoings” in relation to Andrade’s

prescription for nationalism, making it possible to realize its resemblance with the virtuosic

Italian compositions, for the work translates into Andrade’s non-acceptance of virtuosity and internationalism.

If the double bass concerto is an example of Miguez’s mastering the compositional technique while being an exception in his output in terms of style, his pieces for piano solo show more of his style. A closer look at his music will reveal his musical language. As an avid follower of the music writings of Wagner, Miguez often brought into his music many characteristics of that composer. The chromatic lines both in the inner and outer voices are an ever-present element in his music.

Chanson d’une jeune fille, O 24, No 2, for solo piano, was dedicated to his student

Mathilde da Costa Ferreira. This piece was part of the curriculum of the piano course at the

Instituto Nacional de Música and it is a strong representative work by the composer for displaying several of his idiomatic elements: chromaticisms, choral writing, and motivic development. The piece is in A A’ form. A’ differentiates from its previous section by means of a new texture. Whereas section A is written in a chorale-like texture, A’ gains accompaniment figurations, mainly devised by triplets in the left hand and a single melodic line, seldom ornamented, in the right hand. Furthermore, it is through composed, presenting a chromatic motivic line and counterpoint that represent a direct offense towards the nationalists’ orientation.

For Andrade, chromaticisms are of non-popular origin, and therefore should be avoided in the national idiom.

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Among his pieces for large ensembles, Miguez wrote a Symphonic Poem entitled

Parisina, after Lord Byron’s poem by the same name published in 1816. The same story has been told in operatic history by Gaetano Donizetti and Pietro Mascagni. Miguez’s retelling of the poem takes on the dramatic suggestions of the text as an equally dramatic piece of music. In

Lord Byron’s poem, a “nightingale’s high note” gently announces the fall the evening. Miguez’s

Symphonic Poem begins with the flutes playing a pianissimo trill that establishes the A as the founding sonority for the piece. The trill figuration will then weave through the other woodwind instruments to form a sonorous background for the thematic material that is first played by the oboe, then passes to the French horn. The thematic melody is characterized by a diatonic line solely structured on the A major chord which only moves to the dominant sonority in its last note. Interestingly, the introduction and later manifestations of this melody in Miguez’s piece parallels, with a certain degree of freedom, Parisina’s entrances in Byron’s poem, behaving in the fashion of the leitmotifs of Wagner’s operas or the idée fixes of Berlioz’s Symphonies.

Throughout the work, the themes are characterized by their sound immobility, for which Miguez compensates with an ever-growing orchestration that becomes denser in each section. The flow that he achieves in this way is eventually broken by sectional soli for the sake of depicting the poem. Miguez’s most explored compositional strategy in the piece is his use of insistent sonorities. This is displayed on two levels: themes are built around the pitch of A and, on a vaster scale the entire piece is built on the repetition and development of such themes.

This short and incomplete analysis of Parisina, combined with the comments on the other selected pieces, suffices to demonstrate Miguez’s detachment from Andrade’s nationalist ideas about music. Here, the composer wrote a programmatic piece in which he was concerned with the depiction of a poem that was first of all not written by a Brazilian author. Like in the others,

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and as a consequence, the music displays no intention of national concerns of any kind,

justifying Andrade’s inclusion of his name as typically internationalist.

Oswald, Henrique (1852-1931)

Henrique Oswald had a Swiss father and an Italian mother. French was the primary

language spoken in his household. His father owned a music store and his mother was a piano

teacher. Oswald started his music studies with his mother and passed briefly through the

Conservatório, but received the main part of his musical training in Europe. At the age of 15, he

went to study music in Italy accompanied by his mother. He admired Wagner, and as pianist,

studied the approach of the Liszt/von Bulow school. Azevedo describes in his narrative on the

composer that at the visit of Emperor D. Pedro II to Florence, he saw Henrique Oswald playing a

piano recital and decided to sponsor him with a monthly salary. Their deal lasted over 15 years

and it was then replaced by a consular job (Azevedo 1956, 123). Azevedo also emphasizes

Oswald’s ties with Italy as being stronger than with Brazil up to this point. In 1903 he was

offered a position in Brazil, which he took and then moved back to the country with his family.

Most of his works were written away from Brazil. Azevedo describes Oswald’s music as

romantic, similar sounding to Grieg’s non-Scandinavian works. He also finds characteristics of

German, French, and Italian idioms in his music. Il Niege! (in French, It Snows!) for piano has

this European language that he is trying to describe. Pieces that Oswald composed after

returning to Brazil include his Symphony Opus 43 and 3 Piano Etudes. The second etude from

the set presents the rhythmic syncopation made famous at the time by Ernesto Nazareth (as

previously noted). Azevedo finishes his text on Henrique Oswald in agreement with Mário de

Andrade, saying that “the sentiment for Brazil, however, as well as its landscape, could never

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naturally penetrate the overly refined music that he composed...Even residing in Brazil, as he did

after turning fifty, he continued…to live and feel as if other skies sheltered him; the skies that inspired the young composer: Florence, Italy, Europe” (ibid., 132).217 This statement is written

in Mário de Andrade’s line of thought as he described Oswald bringing elements of Brazilian

folk materials into his work, although never becoming truly nationalist for not allowing the environment of the country as a whole to be part of his music. This goes hand in hand with

Andrade’s description of a romanticized use of musical elements, which he rejected in his

nationalist agenda.

The polyphonic treatment of popular melodies in Oswald’s music lost national qualities for he does not employ any popular process. In Andrade’s Ensaio sobre a música brasileira

(1928), he has explained that certain compositions using popular melodies have lost their character in the final product when composers use no national scales – meaning Indigenous,

African or Portuguese – are used. Andrade exemplifies the end of this discourse with Oswald’s piece Serrana (ed. Milão), which he considered “splendid,” but that had nevertheless lost its national character (1928, 53).

Velasquez, Glauco (1884 - 1914)

Glauco Velasquez’s music fell “into a unilateralism so anti-Brazilian,” (Andrade 1928,

28)218 said once Mário de Andrade, to argue that the composer should have recognized broader influences instead of overusing one or other specific element of folklore alone. He returns to this

217 “O sentimento do Brasil, entretanto, como a sua paisagem, nunca puderam penetrar, com naturalidade, na música demasiadamente refinada que ele compunha...mesmo residindo no Brasil, como passou a residir depois dos cinquenta anos, continuou...a viver e a sentir como se outros céus o abrigassem; os céus que inspiraram o jovem compositor: Florença, a Itália, a Europa.” 218 “Uniteralismo tão antibrasileiro.”

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thought by saying that unilateral music is antinational because instead of Brazilian, it would be

Amerindian, African, Portuguese, or European (Andrade, 1928).

Glauco Velasquez was not natural to Brazil. He was born in Naples in 1884, from a

Brazilian mother and Portuguese father, baritone Eduardo Medina Ribas. His father never

legitimized him and is described by Azevedo as being from an influential family of musicians,

already in his “autumn age” when Velasquez was born from an extra-marital relationship

(Azevedo 1956, 236). Velasquez moved with his mother to Brazil in 1897 and enrolled at the

Instituto Nacional de Música in 1898 at the age of 13. Composer Francisco Braga was a friend

of his family in Brazil and also tutored him in his musical education. His first compositions were

sacred vocal works, which he wrote for a little chapel nearby where he lived in Rio de Janeiro.

Later, he wrote piano and chamber music. His musical language followed European tendencies

of the time, namely Wagnerian harmonies and later atonal superposition of sounds, bringing no

particular innovations to it, but which were a novelty in Brazil. To his credit, Azevedo

acclaimed him for his efforts against traditionalism, using new harmonic paths in new aesthetics

(Azevedo 1956, 240).

Velasquez died at the age of 30, leaving many works unfinished. The appreciation that

other musicians of the time had for his music was only then revealed: his last Piano Trio was

finished by Darius Milhaud, and the first act of his opera Soeur Béatrice, orchestrated by

Francisco Braga. We do not know for sure if Mário de Andrade was ever touched by such

undertakings. Luciano Gallet promoted his music by founding the Sociedade Glauco Velasquez,

with the aim of publishing and performing the composer’s pieces. Gallet also acted as

“mediator” for the composer’s music towards Mário de Andrade, who wrote to Gallet that

Velasquez was “an ultimate type of Brazilian, not by his processes of exteriorization, but by his

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interior psychology: dare, exaltation, sudden bleakness, unpredictability, trust and distrust, and I

will even say, lack of order” (Andrade, cited in Azevedo 1956, 242).219

Azevedo has made the point that Velasquez’s light was overshadowed by the music of

Villa-Lobos, from the same time period. He says that comparing the music by the two

composers reveals the “triumph of one and melancholic fate of the other” (ibid., 248).220

Nationalist Composers from Essay Section IV

Composers Gallet, Fernandez, Braga, Barroso Neto, Mignonge, Guarieri, Viana followed

Andrade’s nationalism.

Barroso Neto, Joaquim Antonio (1881 – 1941)

Joaquim Antonio Barroso Neto was the companion of Francisco Braga in Andrade’s analysis. All his compositions might have been known to Mário de Andrade, who outlived him.

Barroso Neto was mainly a composer for the piano and also worked intensively in revising other composers’ works for editions that were widely used by conservatórios around Brazil. The national character of his pieces has been classified as essentially romantic, and perhaps for that reason, they are considered to have contributed very little to the renovation of the Brazilian

musical language (Neves 1981, 70).

219 “Um tipo máximo de brasileiro, não pelos processos de exteriorização, mas pela psicologia interior: arrojo, exaltação, abatimentos súbitos, imprevisto, confiança e desconfiança, e direi mesmo, desordem.”

220 “Triunfo de uma e da melancólica sina da outra.”

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Musicologist Mozart de Araújo agrees with Mário de Andrade in dividing this

composer’s work into two phases, the first still imbued with European models and the second

with national concerns.

Exemplary of his style is Minha Terra, for solo piano. Araújo has noted that this piece still has signs of his first phase – the internationalist – but it also pointed to the future of his

compositions in the sense that the composer was able to capture the essence of the Brazilian

psyche through exploring a “nostalgic state.” Elaborating further on the matter, he adds that

“melancholic and sad, Minha Terra conserves the most specific virtues of the Dolente toada”

(Araújo, 1958).221

A look at the piece reveals that his pianistic writing recalls Schumann or at times,

Mendelssohn. He produces a polyrhythmic effect by placing the melody in the middle voice,

with a bass accompaniment that sparsely plays a syncopated rhythm that anticipates the second

beat of the measure. The upper-voice is brilliant and highly virtuosic, with repeated notes

producing a mandolin-like effect. While the piano writing is technically demanding, it also

displays some of the national characteristics that Mário de Andrade had observed in Brazilian

popular musics, namely the syncopated line of the bass. The texture, with the melody in the

center, is characteristic of choro and seresta ensembles. The harmony is mainly tonal in the

major mode, but also with whole-tone passages, which may lead the ears to the impressionistic

sound.

Braga, Antonio Francisco (1868 – 1945)

221 “Melancólica e triste, Minha Terra conserva as virtudes mais específicas da toada dolente.”

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Francisco Braga, born in Rio in 1868, spent ten years in Europe (1890-1900), perhaps the

years that coincided with Andrade’s classifying him as an internationalist composer. He was in

Europe, sent by the government when his composition was chosen to be the Republic’s anthem.

First living in Paris, Francisco Braga studied with Jules Massenet as his composition teacher.

Massenet’s influence is reflected in his works written during those years, as is the case of the symphonic work Paysage. In 1896, he moved to Dresden and became involved in the operatic scene of Germany, which also influenced him to compose more lyrical inspired works, such as the opera Jupira, and the symphonic poems Marabá and Episódio Sinfonico, after a poem of

Gonçalves Dias. These pieces and works such as Brasil, a march for band that he wrote for the anniversary of the Republic proclamation in 1898, show that Francisco Braga stayed in touch with his Brazilian roots while overseas.

Francisco Braga returned to Brazil to direct the performance of his opera Jupira in Rio de

Janeiro in October of 1900. Only in 1902 did he find a job as a teacher of counterpoint, fugue and composition at the Instituto Nacional de Música.

In Andrade’s essay, this composer stands along with Barroso Neto, first writing pieces characteristic of the internationalism that he described, and in a second phase, consciously entering the nationalist initiated by Villa-Lobos. Luiz Heitor Azevedo speaks of the composer’s second phase after describing his compositional technique as always light, not apparently complex, and a reflection his French education: “Thanks to the absence of a strongly accented artistic individualism, we could find in him that spirit of understanding the evolution of music and art of others …” (Azevedo 1956, 192).222 Even though traces of French music remained

222 “Graças, talvez à essa ausencia de uma individualidade artística fortemente acentuada é que nela encontrávamos aquele espírito de compreensao da evolução musical e da arte alheia...”

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present in his writing, Braga’s nationalism consisted of abandoning aspects of his compositions

that were him leaving apart from the nationalist current.

Fernandez, Lorenzo (1900 – 1973)

Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez223 was born to a family of Spanish parents in Rio de Janeiro, in

1897. After recovering from a nervous breakdown that he suffered in his youth, he decided to

study music, enrolling at the Instituto Nacional de Música in 1918. He was one of the last

students of Frederico Nascimento, whose teaching position he inherited after Nascimento’s

passing in 1925.

Fernandez’s compositions started to gain the public’s attention after he won several

awards, including one for his Trio Brasileiro, Opus 32, granted by the Sociedade de Cultura

Musical in 1924. Andrade has pointed to a “fired” character in the melody of Fernandez’s Trio

Brasileiro, which he recalls to be characteristic of Brazilian popular lyricism (Andrade 1928,

46). The piece displays folk themes as well as original melodies built on constâncias of

Brazilian music. In addition, Andrade is especially fond of Fernandez’s treatment of form in the

Trio. He explains that the composer treated the melody of “Sapo Jururu,” the main melody of the coda, cyclically, along with the other themes in the exposition of the sonata form movement.

This way, he explains, the melody takes on the role of “head,” as opposed to coda, giving unity to the piece and transforming a form that was traditional into “states of musicality” of the artist,

“no longer part of an obliged formal scheme” (ibid., 62).224

223 Mário de Andrade spells this composer’s name as Lourenço Fernandez.

224 “Não mais as partes dum esquema formal obrigatório.”

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Lorenzo Fernandez wrote a number of Suites, in which he managed to explore several

styles of Brazilian dances and musics. One remarkable example is his orchestral suite Reisado

do Pastoreio, in three movements: 1. Reisado; 2. Toada; and 3.Batuque. This piece is from 1930

and already from its title one can notice its popular inspiration, taken from the dramatic dances

Mário de Andrade studied. He also wrote three Suites Brasileiras for solo piano, all with

movements drawn from typical Brazilian popular or folk musics. Movements of the first one are

Velha modinha, Suave Acalanto, and Saudosa Seresta. The second one has movements Ponteio,

Moda, and Cateretê, and the third one, Toada, Seresta, and Jongo. These pieces are still an

important part of the Brazilian piano repertoire. Still within the suite genre Fernandez composed

Suíte para instrumentos de sopro (“Suite for woodwind instrument”) and Suíte Orquestral.

In the 1930’s, Fernandez started to work on an opera in collaboration with modernist poet

Graça Aranha. The poet took on a popular literary theme, the story of Malasarte, to write the libretto that gives the opera’s title.225 Aranha passed away before its completion, so Fernandez

had to complete the libretto. An interesting observation about his compositional process in the

opera is that each character is linked to a motive and a Brazilian music genre or style – except for

the character of Pedro Malasarte, who symbolizes destiny but with no particular musical identity.

Dionisia represents seduction and death, always in Amerindian melodies. Eduardo is the symbol

of love, musically represented by urban serestas. The opera was premiered in Paris in 1933 and

in Rio de Janeiro only in 1941. For Azevedo, this is the first Brazilian opera with a definitive

nationalist manifestation (Azevedo 1965, 323).

Fernandez wrote a total of 48 songs in Portuguese. Toada para você, from 1928, was

composed with a text by Mário de Andrade and in the same year, Fernandez wrote Berceuse da

225 Mário de Andrade also chose this story to be the theme of an opera that he planned to write with Francisco Mignone, as will be noted shortly. Mignone’s opera was entitled Pedro Malasarte.

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Onda. Of the latter piece, Andrade has said that the middle section does not carry any Brazilian

feeling, but it is surrounded by Brazilianity (Andrade 1928, 27). He has also pointed out that

Fernandez used popular phrases in his own melodies (ibid., 44). Andrade’s comments are

particularly revealing for his interest in Fernandez’s work.

Along with his composition and teaching career, Fernandez was an important orchestra

conductor and interpreter of Brazilian music. He also directed the Conservatório Brasileiro de

Música and worked with Villa-Lobos in his canto orfeônico project. Lorenzo Fernandez died in

1948 at the age of 50, outliving Mário de Andrade by three years.

Gallet, Luciano (1893-1931)

In his short 38 years of life, Luciano Gallet was able to compose a good number of orchestra, chamber, and piano works, as well as songs. Mário de Andrade once described his music, saying that “Gallet applied melodies of popular songs directly and integrally into his

compositions” (Andrade 1928, 44). Elsewhere in the same text, Andrade suggested that Gallet’s

compositions are complex in performance and listening, but have succeeded in embracing a broad array of sources of folklore. In his words,

Luciano Gallet has been showing a less provincial and much more intelligent tendency in the Cadernos de Melodias Populares Brasileiras226 (“Notebooks of Brazilian Popular Melodies”), however his works are of positively artistic order, requiring the singer and accompanist a culture that overpasses the medium force. And he requires from the listeners the same. If many of these works are magnificent and if the folklore work of L. Gallet enriches the national artistic production, it is uncontestable that it does not present the possibility of expansion and sufficiency of documents to become critical and practical (ibid., 21).227

226 Published by Editora Wehrs e Cia . Rio de Janeiro. 227 “Luciano Gallet está demonstrando já uma orientaçao menos regionalista e bem mais inteligente com os Cadernos de Melodias Populares Brasileiras (Ed. Wers e Cia, Rio.). Porém, os trabalhos dele sao de ordem positivamente artística e querendo do cantor e do acompanhador cultura que outra passa meia-força. E requer o

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Gallet’s work on folklore has been considered his main contribution to Brazilian music.

In 1930, the composer published the article “A missão dos músicos de agora”228 (“The mission

of today’s musicians”), claiming the abandonment of influences from abroad in a search for

national sources, paralleling Andrade’s ideas.

Luciano Gallet also directed the Instituto Nacional de Música creating the Chair of

National Folklore in 1931. One of his accomplishments at the institution was to develop classes

on Brazilian folklore, again for composition students (Azevedo 1956, 159), encouraging the new

generation of composers to contemplate national matters as inspiration.

Gnatalli, Radamés (1906 – 1988)

Born in 1906, Gnatalli was primarily a pianist, and also played the violin, the clarinet,

and the flute. His early compositional training comes in part from a formal education at the

Conservatório Musical de Porto Alegre, and in part from an informal approach through a contact

with folk and popular music from the south of Brazil. His later experience as orchestra arranger

and conductor at the Orquestra da Rádio Nacional, in Rio de Janeiro also added to his training.

The style of his compositions borders Romantic erudite and North-American jazz music, which has led Brazilian scholars to characterize him a “populist” composer (Neves, 72). His works are divided into two phases: first, using folklore in a direct manner in technically more complex pieces, in a more direct nationalism; and second, taking folkloric elements to transform them into

mesmo dos ouvintes. Se muitos desses trabalhos sao magníficos e se a obra folclórica de L. Gallet enriquece a produção artística nacional é incotestável que não apresenta possibilidade de expansao e suficiência de documentos pra se tornar crítica e prática.”

228 Weco II/1-4, Rio de Janeiro, 1930.

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simpler, less virtuosic compositions. This phase starts with his Concerto for Orchestra of

Violoncellos.

A great part of pieces from his first phase involve the piano. That is the case of Rapsódia

Brasileira and Valsas, both for solo piano, as well as Sonata, for violin and piano, 2 Piano

Concertos, Concerto for piano, violin, and string quartet, and Concertino, for piano, flute, and string orchestra. The composer considered the latter, written in 1942, to be his best work. In this piece, all the instruments have a similar role. The piano has more transparent sonorities, almost imitating the harpsichord, whereas in the first works mentioned he demands real technical virtuosity from the performers (his Rapsódia, for instance, is rather technically lisztian) (Mariz

1994, 259).

One interesting observation about Gnatalli is that in his folk inspired compositions he transcended the geographic limits of his native south, mainly using melodies from the northeast and southeast. By not restraining himself to a particular regional inspiration, and instead blending elements from diverse origins in Brazil, he followed Mário de Andrade’s nationalist concept of rejecting unilateralism.

Guarnieri, Mozart Camargo (1907 – 1993)

Son of an Italian immigrant, Camargo Guarnieri belongs to a younger generation of

composers in Andrade’s list of nationalists. Born in 1907, in Tieté, a small town in the

countryside of São Paulo state, he moved to São Paulo city at the age of fourteen, where he was

able to pursue his musical studies more seriously. Italian conductor Lamberto Baldi, living in

São Paulo at the time, taught him harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration. Guarnieri met

Mário de Andrade in 1928, when he took an aesthetic class taught by Andrade. That same year

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and by appointment of Andrade, Guarnieri started to teach at the Conservatório Dramático e

Musical de São Paulo. The friendship between the two, which blended with a sort of

discipleship, is one of the main points made by Azevedo in his short biography of the composer.

In his description, the young Guarnieri was attracted to Andrade because of his leadership in the

national modernism and because of his reputation of “revolutionary poet and fearsome critic,

whose combative attitude, anti-Italian and anti-conformist, attracted upon his writings and himself the wrath of the ‘owners’ of music…” (Azevedo 1956, 22).229

Guarnieri became a frequent guest at Andrade’s house, always bringing his compositions

to be analyzed by his master, as Guarnieri referred to him. Sonatina, for piano, was written

during this period. Andrade once commented on the piece’s Andante movement, saying that the

main melody placed in its bass part gives it a national quality, because it reflects the style of

choros and serestas (1928).

Mário de Andrade helped Guarnieri introduce his music to the public by often writing

articles on his pieces for Revista Brasileira de Música and Diário de São Paulo.

The strong bond between them also resulted in collaborative works. Guarnieri wrote the music and Mário de Andrade the libretto of the one act comic-opera Pedro Malasarte. The opera was only premiered in 1952, seven years after Andrade’s death.

In 1938, Guarnieri went to Paris to study composition and conducting with Charles

Koechlin, François Ruhlmann and Charles Munch, and later with Nadia Boulanger. His stay in

Europe was shortened because of World War II.

229 “Poeta revolucionário, crítico temível, cuja attitude combatia, antiitaliana e anticonformista, atraía sobre os seus escritos e a sua pessoa as iras dos ‘donos’ da música.”

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Guarnieri’s compositions were always in pre-established forms, mainly focused on

drawing elements from folk and popular sources. He explored atonal compositional techniques

later in his career.

Mignone, Francisco (1897 – 1986)

From a family of Italian immigrants, Francisco Mignone was born in São Paulo. The beginning of the Mignone’s compositional career was criticized by Andrade, who felt that the composer was following Italian tendencies rather than writing music with national function.

Mário de Andrade made several harsh comments such as the following about the composer’s second opera, L’Innocente:230 “With Inocente, he [Mignone] is another follower of the Italian

school” (Azevedo 1956, 301).231 He also once affirmed that “among the living composers,

Mignone is perhaps the one with the most complex problem because of his racial causes and unilaterali-ty of culture that much denationalize and corrupt him” (Andrade 1963b, 239).232 In many of his first compositions, Mignone used Afro-Brazilian music as inspiration source, but within an Italian musical idiom, amounting to Andrade’s interpretation considering the piece regionalist and the use of Brazilian sources, exotic; therefore the composer was being untrue to it.

In 1931, Andrade seemed to have begun to change his conception about Mignone’s music, particularly after hearing Primeira Fantasia Brasileira, for piano. At that occasion,

230 This comment coincides with the time when Italian composer and orchestra conductor Respighi was in Rio and São Paulo for a series of concerts, in 1928. Respighi included Mignone’s Maxixe into his repertoire of concerts.

231 “Com o Inocente ele é mais um na escola italiana.”

232 “Dentre os compositores vivos brasileiros, Mignone é talvez o de problema mais complexo pelas causas raciais e pela unilateralidade de cultura que muito o despaisam e descaminham.”

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Andrade declared: “in this conceptual direction it is that nationality does not misread the

universal preoccupation, it is the side through which Francisco Mignone will be able to give us

valuable works and fecund his personality” (quoted by Azevedo 1956, 302).233 From that point

on, Andrade started to suggest themes for the composer. Compositions Maracatu de Chico Rei

and Festa das Igrejas are results of this colaboration. Mário de Andrade and Francisco Mignone

became close friends upon Andrade’s move to Rio de Janeiro in 1939, where the composer had

been residing since 1933.

Still suggested by Mário de Andrade, Mignone wrote Sinfonia do Trabalho (Symphony of

Work), a work divided into four movements: “Canto da Máquina” (“Machine Singing”), “Canção da Família” (“Family Song”), “Canto do Homem Forte” (“Strong Man Singing”), and “Canto do

Trabalho Fecundo” (“Fecund Work Singing”). Neves has pointed to the social function of this work through its praise for work and workers, a suggestion of Mário de Andrade’s (Neves 1981,

67). A remarkable example of Mário de Andrade’s new appreciation for Mignone’s work is the fact that Mário de Andrade wrote the poem O Café as a libretto to be used by Mignone in a

“choral tragedy” or “choral drama.” The composer, however, never followed up on the project.

From Azevedo and based on correspondence, we learn that Mignone was the closest composer to Andrade at the end of his life. The testimony of Mozart Araújo, from 1958 confirms that later modernist musicologists saw the work of Mignone as exemplary of the nationalist school. Describing Cucumbizinha, for piano solo, composed in 1931, Araújo said that, as it should be, the people are not simply a “supplier of sources of themes and formulas, but a participant of the work of a composer” (1958).234

233 “Nessa orientação conceptiva, em que a nacionalidade não se disvirtua pela preocupação do universal, é que está o lado on Francisco Mignone poderá nos dar obras valiosas e fecundar a sua personalidade.”

234 “Fornecedor de temas e motivos, mas um participante do trabalho do compositor.”

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Viana, Frutuoso de Lima (1896 – 1976)

Composer and virtuoso pianist Frutuoso Viana was born in the small town of Itajubá,

state of Minas Gerais and died in Rio de Janeiro. Motivated by his family, he moved to Rio de

Janeiro to study at the Instituto Nacional de Música in 1917 under Henrique Oswald. Viana met

Villa-Lobos and other modernists in 1912. He was the pianist of Villa-Lobos’s pieces at the

1922 Week of Modern Art in São Paulo. Viana’s relationship with Mário de Andrade was

deepened from 1930 to 1938, when the two were teachers at the Conservatório Dramático e

Musical de São Paulo.

Viana’s compositions were mainly aimed for the piano. Dansa de Negros, for solo piano,

is one of his most played words. It was written between 1923 and 1924, soon after The Week of

Modern Art, and carries some influence from that experience. The piece displays a melody

collected by Mário de Andrade, accompanied in the bass by an ostinato figure in the rhythm of

urban samba, in a continuum accelerando to the end. The form is A – B – A’. Difficult passages

that consist of fast repeated notes and trills of chords between the two hands, a device much used

in piano works by Villa-Lobos to mimic drums, demands a high level of technique from the

pianist. In this case, the modernist’s notion of nationalism justifies virtuosic playing due to its

function of emulating the sound that contextualizes the environment of the melody used.

The later output of Viana has many examples of the use of melodies collected by

Andrade. One interesting example is his Sete Miniaturas (Seven Miniatures),235 where thematic

melodies were taken from Mário de Andrade’s Ensaio sobre a música brasileira. The melodies

235 The movements are: 1.”Canto Infantil”; 2.”Dança de Negros”; 3. “Canto de Negros”; 4. “Canto de Trabalho”; 5. “Dança Caipira”; 6. “O Pregão” (Rio de Janeiro); and 7. “Tanguinho.”

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Viana chose from Andrade’s compilation are all from different parts of the country, showing the composer’s understanding of the all-encompassing, non-provincial premise of nationalism.