Music in Brazil: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture. By John P. Murphy.

Abstract

The idea of surveying the Amerindian, popular, and ‘art’ music of Brazil in a single textbook is rather impractical these days. Perhaps that is why the second edition of Renato Almeida's Historia da música brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1942) remains unmatched in its encyclopedic thoroughness. Since then, the amount of research that has been done on all kinds of Brazilian musics has unveiled repertories that Almeida never dreamt of. However, as specialized books on single composers, genres, and style periods in Brazil are increasing in number and quality, large survey textbooks like Almeida's are becoming rare. David Appleby's The Music of Brazil (Austin, 1983)—never translated into Portuguese—is still the most important textbook on the history of European-fashion ‘art’ music in Brazil; following the model set by Guilherme de Melo in A música no Brasil (Salvador, 1908), it also includes a twenty-page chapter on folk and popular music. Likewise, Oneyda Alvarenga's Música popular brasileira (Porto Alegre, 1950) and Helza Camêu's Introdução ao estudo da música indígena brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1977) are still the main textbooks on Brazilian popular and Amerindian music, despite their many shortcomings. Helza Camêu has never done any actual fieldwork—Amerindian musical instruments gathered by the anthropologists Roquette Pinto and Darcy Ribeiro along with their recordings were the basis of her pioneering books and articles. In Oneyda Alvarenga's comprehensive book, the only comments on mass-mediated music were a couple of shallow and biased paragraphs on early twentieth-century samba recordings.