Books of music in Brazil – a new way of understanting its expression

One often says that the true heritage of a people is built through its books. In the very same order of ideas, it’s also a fact that feelings, cultural expression, values and idiosyncrasies are better translated and better kept in literary vehicles. In the case of art and the way art is projected and lived, one can find the best way of understanding both people and art not just by listening to (or tasting in all senses) the products of this art, but also by learning from the vade mecum and the several different “grammars” concerning the fabrication and the conception of it. These books, which in the case of music are the treaties and the several methods, give testimony of a way of thinking and experiencing the cultural manifestation of the people.

Some of the best books produced in Brazil about its music were not born from any kind of comparative analysis or on explanations under the light of European heritage. Although it is a fact (Brazilian musical expression actually has roots in European patterns as well as in African ones), we must agree on what states that its own development opened early ways to a very particular journey of making and understanding music.

Even though, as an independent nation, having not even two centuries yet, Brazil reached the international platform in a wider sense earlier and more effectively than any other Latin-American country. In spite of the unquestionable quality and merit of Argentinean, Chilean or Mexican music, one thinks almost instantaneously in Brazil when music of this side of the planet is evoked. Obviously, this is not a merit only of individual composers but of a whole identity and a very particular skill to condense a modus vivendi into music.

In this sense, searching a source of books which could exemplify Brazilian way of making/understanding/feeling music, I found some titles that support (at the same time that they tell us) this “Brazilian-ness”. Some of them cover the large field of musical investigation itself. Other are searching historical facts to explain the rhetorical within Brazilian music, while another group of titles looks towards harmony, counterpoint and rhythmic under the light of that same Brazilian-ness.

Music is a product of an entire social and historical process that touches not just art but all the domains of practical life. So, it would be impossible to explain or even to name aspects of Brazilian culture not mentioning any of these “vetorial greatnesses”, even less in a time that points each day more to a path named “transdisciplinarity”, that explains and adds dynamism to all the fields of knowledge.

Just to name a few of these books, which we shall be pleased to introduce in the next articles, I’d rather name: Ensaio sobre Música Brasileira [An Essay on Brazilian Music] (Mário de Andrade); Rítmica Viva [Living Rhythmic] (José Eduardo Gramani); História da Música do Brasil [History of Brazilian Music] (Vasco Mariz); and O Som e o Sentido [Sound and Sense] (José Miguel Wisnik).