Brazilian MusicEncounters between the Popular and the Learned by José Miguel Wisnik The first document which records contact between the Portuguese and the Indians on American soil is a letter from the scribe Pero Vaz de Caminha to the King of Portugal, in 1500, recording, at a particular moment in time, the musical mixing of Europeans and natives in the sound of the gaita (pipes). From the first century of colonization onwards, Jesuit teaching appealed to music, encouraging the combination between elements of tribal music and dance with chants and instrumentation linked to a religious theatre with a medieval basis, a combination which is the origin of many popular festivals and dances that have survived through the ages. In seventeenth century Bahia, it was said that Gregório de Matos, the greatest Brazilian of the baroque period, spent part of his life travelling around the Salvador region chanting verses. In the eighteenth century, the first appearance of modinha and lundu revealed the custom of syncopation, a certain melodic malevolence and a certain sensuality, somewhere between implied and explicit, which appeared to European travellers as clear signs of their own feelings. The characteristics of those two musical genres in some way anticipated the mournful song and the samba, which was to become the genre par excellence of modern popular Brazilian music. But the modinha and the lundu were also reflected in Portugal, in the eighteenth century, via the poet and mixed-race priest Domingos Caldas Barbosa (1740? - 1800), also appearing as stories in literature, in a representative example of interpenetration between the oral and the written, the learned and the popular traditions. Composers of Brazilian Music The three most representative composers of Brazilian music in the written tradition, in the various phases of its development, were the mixed-race priest José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767 - 1830) at the end of the colonial period, Carlos Gomes (1836 - 1896) in the romantic period and Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887 - 1959) in the modern period. José Maurício, who produced essentially religious music at the time King João VI was in Brazil immediately before Independence, was a mixed-race priest (like Caldas Barbosa) who also composed modinhas. Carlos Gomes, who achieved great success in Europe with the opera "Il Guarany" (1870), written in the style of the day, but with an Indian theme, composed a little known collection of popular songs before his departure for Europe. Villa-Lobos, a classically trained cellist, who had experienced the modernist innovations of the Twenties, was familiar with the popular Rio musicians, serenaders, samba dancers and "chorões", a closeness that is reflected in the ambitious collections of the "Choros" and the "Bachianas Brasileiras". The French composer, Darius Milhaud, who lived in Brazil at the end of the 1800's, drew attention to the music of Ernesto Nazareth (1863 - 1943), who combined Chopin and the popular pianists in a finely written collection of polkas and maxixes (lively dances), with traces of habanera (Cuban dance music), which he generally called "Brazilian tangos", becoming part of popular culture and also, after initial resistance, of concert repertoire. It could be said that the permeability between different cultural layers relates to a social life in which the world of the family and the world of routine work co-exist - amongst the folds of slave culture - with casual work, the uncertainty of a dissolute life and popular festival culture, often both sacred and profane, Catholic and pagan. The inter-penetration between the worlds of "order" and "disorder", that the literary critic and theorist, Antonio Cândido called "dialectic and malandragem (roguery)", formed the shifting sand of a fellowship and a culture in which the oral and the written, the "learned" and the "popular" were constantly being rearranged in an unusual manner. If movements for the creation of concert music very often led to a connection with popular music, the more recent developments of refined popular music indicated a link with written music and literature, confirming the dynamic interaction between those levels. Brazilian Music and the bossa nova Antonio Carlos Jobim (1927 - 1994), the great composer of the bossa nova, took as his example Villa-Lobos, even leaving his classical training to compose arrangements for Brazil's Rádio Nacional and, eventually, the sambas and songs that became known by the whole world. The work of Tom Jobim followed a parallel path with that of João Gilberto (1931), the great performer and modern re-creator of the samba, and also with the work of Vinícius de Moraes (1913 - 1980), a poet acknowledged in literary circles since the 1930s, who migrated to popular song at the end of the Fifties. The bossa nova formed a generation of musicians and song-writers who had grown up with samba, the literary tradition and even that of concert music, as well as being open to other influences, ranging from Jorge Benjor to Roberto Carlos, from Chico Buarque, Edu Lobo and Milton Nascimento to Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. Modern Brazilian Music That tradition is what constitutes modern Brazilian popular music, on which the tropicalist movement left its mark at the end of the Sixties, through Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, in particular. By means of collages, dislocations and parodied quotations, tropicalismo brings face to face the worlds of Brazilian popular music, the romanticism of the masses in the so-called "tacky" pop music and avant-garde experiments, in a dialogue with literature, turning this disparate convergence of eras, including craftsmanship, urban-industrial and post pop, into an amazingly complex manifestation of the Brazilian experience within the context of cultural transnationalization. Works of a more instrumental type, open to classical, indigenous, oriental and jazz influence, such as those by Egberto Gismonti, the experimentalism of Hermeto Paschoal, the dodecaphonic incursions of Arrigo Barnabé into the raw urban pop world, are also signs of that receptiveness to differences, elevated by tropicalismo to the status of being Brazil's interpretive feature. In conclusion, it could be said that Brazilian music does not occupy a water-tight place within the framework of globalization, aligned with the field of native and ethnic cultures or those that are purely cosmopolitan, but rather it is positioned within a field of experience and creation in relation to the breaking down of cultural frontiers in the modern world.
Brazilian Music 
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