A Visit to Pianopolis: Brazilian Music for Piano at the Biblioteca Alberto Nepomuceno

Abstract

The rich musical heritage and vital musical traditions of Brazil are the subject of increasing interest throughout the world. Contemporary popular musicians draw large and enthusiastic audiences in the United States, where knowledge of Brazilian music was long limited to the bossa nova of the early 1960s, heard in jazz interpretations by American musicians. The vitality of contemporary Brazilian music in the classical tradition is increasingly acknowledged as well, but a longer overview of music history in Brazil is more difficult to gain for musicians outside (or even inside) the country. A number of signficant stumbling blocks confront the researcher in Brazilian music. Only a tiny fraction of the musical production of Brazil in the almost two centuries since it achieved independence from Portugal in 1822 is available to scholars in American libraries. Of the vast number of musical scores printed in Brazil during this period, very few have been reprinted since their first publication. Bibliographical access to these scores is difficult, as they are not indexed in published catalogs of the holdings of the major collections. Library catalogs in Brazil will eventually be available as OPACs searchable over the Web, but most catalog information is accessible only as local card files. Bibliographies of scholarly work on music by Brazilians are few. Monographs on music published in Brazil commonly lack indexes, making their consultation difficult. A second edition of the most important reference work on Brazilian music, the Enciclopedia da musica brasileira, [1] has just been published, but from an extra-Brazilian point of view, the work has some liabilities, chief among them being the adoption of a single, integrated bibliography at the back of the volume rather than the provision of bibliography for each entry. Scholarship in Brazilian music by researchers from outside the country has not been extensive, which is perhaps not surprising given the low priority of lusophone language and culture in the United States, and even the most fundamental works in Portuguese are unavailable in English translation (for example, the writings of the modernist and nationalist Mario de Andrade). Three of the major music libraries in Rio de Janeiro are the Music Section of the National Library; the collection of the late scholar Mozart de Araujo, now housed at the library of the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil; and the Biblioteca Alberto Nepomuceno, the library of the Escola de Musica of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). The Escola de Musica is one of the oldest continuously operating musical institutions in Brazil, having been founded as the Conservatorio de Musica in 1841. It was incorporated into the Academia de Belas Artes in 1855. The Conservatorio de Musica moved into its first purpose-built quarters in 1872. The change from imperial government to a republic in 1889 affected many of the cultural institutions of the empire, including the Conservatorio, which was replaced by the Instituto Nacional de Musica (INM) in 1890, with composer Leopold Miguez as director. The INM moved to the present location of the Escola de Musica in 1910, occupying what had formerly been the edifice of t he National Library. New construction, including a concert hall, was necessary, and the physical plant arrived at its present configuration in 1922. The institution has gone through various administrative changes over the years, becoming a part of the Universidade do Rio de Janeiro after the revolution of 1930. The university was renamed the Universidade do Brasil in 1937, and received its present appellation, the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, in 1965. The library, named for the second director of the INM, composer Alberto Nepomuceno, holds significant special collections in addition to the resources used to support the teaching mission of the school, including numerous manuscripts of the important composer Jose Mauricio Nunes Garcia. …