With a musical culture that ranges from samba to forró and favela funk, and from the music of indigenous Amazonian peoples to the African sounds of candomblé ritual, Brazil’s soundscape matches its social and natural diversity. This course provides an introduction to the traditional and mass-popular sounds, and their role in creating visions of nationhood and Brazilian society over the twentieth century. An introduction to the methods of ethnomusicology will be complemented with relevant field studies in the city of Rio, where students will conduct “participant observation” within selected musical events.
Learning outcomes:
By the end of the course, students will:
Become familiar with the history of Brazilian music and the formation of different styles and traditions
Identify diverse musical genres and associate them to specific regions
Have a first-hand experience with the research methods developed in the field of ethnomusicology
Method of presentation:
Class discussions, audio and video examples, Moodle, field observation and interviews.
Required work and form of assessment:
Class participation (20%); midterm exam (25%); student presentation (25%); final paper (30%).
Final paper: Students will be required to write a paper (10 pages in length) presenting the results of a fieldwork project agreed with the instructor as they relate to some of the topics and issues discussed in class. The fieldwork, consisting of observations and interviews in Rio’s diverse music scenes, will be conducted in groups of 2-3 students. On week 12, students will present the results of their project in class.
Recommended readings: Menezes Bastos, Rafael José de. “Brazil.” In: John Shepherd, David Horn, David Laing (eds.). Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (Volume III, Caribbean and Latin America). London/New York: Continuum: 2005, pp. 212-248.
Week 2: Musical studies in Brazil: Musical ethnography.
Recommended readings: Barz, Gregory and Cooley, Timothy. “Casting Shadows: Fieldwork Is Dead! Long Live Fieldwork!” In: Gregory Barz and Timothy Cooley (eds.). Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. Oxford University Press, 2008 (2nd edition): 3-24.
Recommended reading: Seeger, Anthony. Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People. Cambridge University Press, 1987; Bastos, Rafael José de Menezes. A musicológica Kamayurá: para uma antropologia da comunicação no Alto-Xingu. Florianópolis: UFSC, 1999.
Week 4: The Music of Afro-Brazilian religions.
Required readings: Crook: 112-127; Fryer: 1-26.
Recommended readings: Matory, J. Lorand. Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Martriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton University Press, 2005.
Recommended readings: Matta, Roberto da. Carnival, Rogues, and Heroes: An Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma. University of Notre Dame Press, 1991; Armstrong, Piers. “Bahian Carnival and Social Carnivalesque in Trans-Atlantic Context.” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 2010, 16(4): 447-469.
Week 6: Music traditions from the Brazilian Northeast. Midterm exam.
Required reading: Crook: 70-106 and 230-270.
Recommended reading: Draper, Jack Alden. Forró and Redemptive Regionalism from the Brazilian Northeast: Popular Music in a Culture of Migration. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010; Travassos, Elizabeth. “Ethics in the sung duels of northeastern Brazil: Collective memory and contemporary practice.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 2000, 9(1): 61-94.
Recommended readings: Vianna, Hermano. The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil. University of North Carolina Press, 1999; Araújo, Samuel. Acoustic Labor in the Timing of Everyday Life: A Critical Contribution to the History of Samba in Rio de Janeiro. Ph.D dissertation in ethnomusicology. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1992; Sandroni, Carlos. Feitiço decente: transformações do samba no Rio de Janeiro (1917-1933). Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2001.
Week 8: Discussion of the fieldwork projects proposed by the students.
Recommended readings: Kazadi wa Mukuna. Contribuição Bantu na Música Popular Brasileira: perspectivas etnomusicológicas. São Paulo: Terceira Margem, 2000; Waddey, Ralph. “Samba de Viola and Viola de Samba”, part I. Latin American Music Review, 1980, 1(2): 196-212; Waddey, Ralph. “Samba de Viola and Viola de Samba”, part II. Latin American Music Review, 1981, 2(2): 252-79.
Recommended readings: Perrone, Charles A. and Christopher Dunn (eds.). Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2002; McCann, Bryan. Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil. Duke University Press, 2004.
Week 11: Funk and the soundscape of favelas.
Required readings: Cambria: 167-203 and 233-274; Oosterbaan: 81-104
Recommended readings: Neate, Patrick and Damian Platt. Culture is Our Weapon. Making Music and Changing Lives in Rio de Janeiro. London: Latin American Bureau, 2006; Araújo, Samuel with Grupo Musicultura. “Sound Praxis: Music, Politics and Violence in Brazil.” In: O’Connel, John Morgan and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, (eds.). Music and Conflict. University of Illinois Press, 2010.
Week 12: Student presentations and course conclusions. Final paper due.
Cambria, Vincenzo. Music and Violence in Rio de Janeiro: A Participatory Study in Urban Ethnomusicology. Ph.D dissertation in Ethnomusicology. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, 2012.
Crook, Larry. Brazilian Music: Northeastern Traditions and the Heartbeat of a Modern Nation. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005.
Fryer, Peter. Rhythms of Resistance: African Musical Heritage in Brazil. London: Pluto Press, 2000.
Galinsky, Philip. “Co-option, Cultural Resistance, and Afro-Brazilian Identity: A History of the Pagode Samba Movement in Rio de Janeiro.” In: Latin American Music Review, 1996, 17(2): 120-149.
Galm, Eric A. The Berimbau: Soul of Brazilian Music. University Press of Mississippi, 2010.
McGowan, Chris and Ricardo Pessanha. The Brazilian Sound. Temple University Press, 1998.
Metz, Jerry D. “Cultural Geographies of Afro-Brazilian Symbolic Practice: Tradition and Change in Maracatu de Nação (Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil).” In: Latin American Music Review, 2008, 29(1): 64-95.
Murphy, John P. “The "Rabeca" and Its Music, Old and New, in Pernambuco, Brazil.” In: Latin American Music Review, 1997, 18(2): 147-172.
______. Music in Brazil: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture. Oxford University Press, 2006.
Oosterbaan, Martijn. “Sonic Supremacy: Sound, Space and Charisma in a Favela in Rio de Janeiro.” In: Critique of Anthropology, 2009, 29(1): 81-104.
Pinto, Tiago de Oliveira. “Music and the Tropics: On Goals and Achievements of Ethnomusicology in Brazil.” In: Albrecht Schneider (ed.), Systematic and Comparative Musicology: Concepts, Methods, Findings. Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 24, Frankfurt: Lang, 2008: 315-338. Available at: http://fixcentenario.blogspot.com.br/2008_12_01_archive.html
Reily, Suzel Ana. “Tom Jobim and the Bossa Nova Era.” In: Popular Music, 1996, 5(1):1-16.
Seeger, Anthony. “What Can We Learn When They Sing? Vocal Genres of the Suya Indians of Central Brazil.” In: Ethnomusicology, 1979, 23(3): 373-394.
______. “Ethnography of Music.” In: Helen Myers (ed.), Ethnomusicology: An Introduction. New Grove Handbook in Music. New York: MacMillan, 1992, 88-109.
Sneed, Paul. “Bandidos de Cristo: Representations of the Power of Criminal Factions in Rio's Proibidão Funk.” In: Latin American Music Review, 2007, 28(2): 220-241.
Stroud, Sean. The Defence of Tradition in Brazilian Popular Music: Politics, Culture and the Creation of Música Popular Brasileira. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008.
Brief Biography of Instructor:
Jonas Soares Lana earned his BA in History (2003) and his master’s degree in History and Political Culture (2005) from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. He is currently writing his doctoral dissertation at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro on Rogério Duprat as arranger for Tropicália, a Brazilian popular music movement from the late 1960s. Between 2011 and 2012, he completed his PhD research at the Department of Music at Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, OH). Since 2004, he has taught 20th-century Brazilian classical and popular music at the undergraduate level.
Music and Society in Brazil
With a musical culture that ranges from samba to forró and favela funk, and from the music of indigenous Amazonian peoples to the African sounds of candomblé ritual, Brazil’s soundscape matches its social and natural diversity. This course provides an introduction to the traditional and mass-popular sounds, and their role in creating visions of nationhood and Brazilian society over the twentieth century. An introduction to the methods of ethnomusicology will be complemented with relevant field studies in the city of Rio, where students will conduct “participant observation” within selected musical events.
By the end of the course, students will:
Class discussions, audio and video examples, Moodle, field observation and interviews.
Class participation (20%); midterm exam (25%); student presentation (25%); final paper (30%).
Final paper: Students will be required to write a paper (10 pages in length) presenting the results of a fieldwork project agreed with the instructor as they relate to some of the topics and issues discussed in class. The fieldwork, consisting of observations and interviews in Rio’s diverse music scenes, will be conducted in groups of 2-3 students. On week 12, students will present the results of their project in class.
Week 1: Introduction: Five centuries of music.
Required reading: McGowan & Pessanha: 9-19; Crook: 1-24.
Recommended readings: Menezes Bastos, Rafael José de. “Brazil.” In: John Shepherd, David Horn, David Laing (eds.). Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (Volume III, Caribbean and Latin America). London/New York: Continuum: 2005, pp. 212-248.
Week 2: Musical studies in Brazil: Musical ethnography.
Required readings: Pinto: 315-338; Seeger (1992): 88-109.
Recommended readings: Barz, Gregory and Cooley, Timothy. “Casting Shadows: Fieldwork Is Dead! Long Live Fieldwork!” In: Gregory Barz and Timothy Cooley (eds.). Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. Oxford University Press, 2008 (2nd edition): 3-24.
Week 3: Brazilian indigenous music.
Required readings: Murphy: 63-70; Bastos: 1-14; Seeger (1979): 373-394.
Recommended reading: Seeger, Anthony. Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People. Cambridge University Press, 1987; Bastos, Rafael José de Menezes. A musicológica Kamayurá: para uma antropologia da comunicação no Alto-Xingu. Florianópolis: UFSC, 1999.
Week 4: The Music of Afro-Brazilian religions.
Required readings: Crook: 112-127; Fryer: 1-26.
Recommended readings: Matory, J. Lorand. Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Martriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton University Press, 2005.
Week 5: Brazilian Carnivals.
Required readings: Crook: 48-59; Metz: 64-95; McGowan & Pessanha: 120-129.
Recommended readings: Matta, Roberto da. Carnival, Rogues, and Heroes: An Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma. University of Notre Dame Press, 1991; Armstrong, Piers. “Bahian Carnival and Social Carnivalesque in Trans-Atlantic Context.” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 2010, 16(4): 447-469.
Week 6: Music traditions from the Brazilian Northeast. Midterm exam.
Required reading: Crook: 70-106 and 230-270.
Recommended reading: Draper, Jack Alden. Forró and Redemptive Regionalism from the Brazilian Northeast: Popular Music in a Culture of Migration. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010; Travassos, Elizabeth. “Ethics in the sung duels of northeastern Brazil: Collective memory and contemporary practice.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 2000, 9(1): 61-94.
Week 7: Sambas.
Required readings: Murphy: 1-28; Galinski: 120-149.
Recommended readings: Vianna, Hermano. The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil. University of North Carolina Press, 1999; Araújo, Samuel. Acoustic Labor in the Timing of Everyday Life: A Critical Contribution to the History of Samba in Rio de Janeiro. Ph.D dissertation in ethnomusicology. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1992; Sandroni, Carlos. Feitiço decente: transformações do samba no Rio de Janeiro (1917-1933). Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2001.
Week 8: Discussion of the fieldwork projects proposed by the students.
Week 9: Musical instruments.
Required readings: Galm: 3-33; Murphy (1997): 147-172.
Recommended readings: Kazadi wa Mukuna. Contribuição Bantu na Música Popular Brasileira: perspectivas etnomusicológicas. São Paulo: Terceira Margem, 2000; Waddey, Ralph. “Samba de Viola and Viola de Samba”, part I. Latin American Music Review, 1980, 1(2): 196-212; Waddey, Ralph. “Samba de Viola and Viola de Samba”, part II. Latin American Music Review, 1981, 2(2): 252-79.
Week 10: Brazilian Popular Music.
Required reading: Reily: 1-16; McGowan & Pessanha: 75-101; Stroud: 39-64.
Recommended readings: Perrone, Charles A. and Christopher Dunn (eds.). Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2002; McCann, Bryan. Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil. Duke University Press, 2004.
Week 11: Funk and the soundscape of favelas.
Required readings: Cambria: 167-203 and 233-274; Oosterbaan: 81-104
Recommended readings: Neate, Patrick and Damian Platt. Culture is Our Weapon. Making Music and Changing Lives in Rio de Janeiro. London: Latin American Bureau, 2006; Araújo, Samuel with Grupo Musicultura. “Sound Praxis: Music, Politics and Violence in Brazil.” In: O’Connel, John Morgan and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, (eds.). Music and Conflict. University of Illinois Press, 2010.
Week 12: Student presentations and course conclusions. Final paper due.
Jonas Soares Lana earned his BA in History (2003) and his master’s degree in History and Political Culture (2005) from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. He is currently writing his doctoral dissertation at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro on Rogério Duprat as arranger for Tropicália, a Brazilian popular music movement from the late 1960s. Between 2011 and 2012, he completed his PhD research at the Department of Music at Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, OH). Since 2004, he has taught 20th-century Brazilian classical and popular music at the undergraduate level.