Samba and jazz overseas: the textual urban landscape of Paris between the two World Wars with the arrival of the new music from America (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Music from the Sea: Social and Cultural aspects on the creation of Jazz and Samba.
2006
Thesis submitted to The National University of Ireland in accordance with the regulations for the Degree of Master in Sociology. The aim of this research is to look at the social and cultural aspects that have been influential in the creation of two important music movements in the twentieth-century: jazz and samba and their major role in modern culture. The starting point concentrates on the major influence of port cities over the music movements that are historically approached, seeing these type of cities as the most important nuclei of popular western music, observing them as fertile ground for a thoughtful sociological analysis that attempts to elucidate new forms of cultural relations such as multiculturalism and hybridism, which is believed to have been profoundly motivated by the Diaspora movement. Arguably, port cities have been considered the first cosmopolitan urban places in modern society. For the purpose of this thesis, the following three main cities in the history of music have been selected to be analysed: New Orleans (USA), New York (USA) and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and their respective music movements, paying a great attention to their major cultural and historical events, looking at their establishment, population make-up, defining characteristics and similarities, which make them particularly unique. This thesis can also be seem as a philosophical attempt to understand the sea as a vast possibility for an intense influx of information, which is reflected in popular modern music as an artistic outcome of its potentiality.
Absent City: interdisciplinarity of an urban feeling between the music and the brazilian migration
This article aims to present the result of scientific research in which music is understood as a social representation of conflicts experienced in the city. It proposes a transdisciplinary approach that adopts the complementarity between urban research field and musical analysis field, in which two examples of Brazilian Popular Music are evaluated. The social impacts of migration brought by the Brazilian urbanization processes in the decades of 1960-1970, are the themes of the songs identified by the survey. The musical analysis has established that the melodic and harmonic choices defined by composers intensify this speech in the lyrics and build the characterization of " urban feeling " that the songs represent. As a result, the article demonstrates that the studies on urban processes can be enriched from transdisciplinary research approaches.
The Reinvention of Brazil and Other Metamorphoses in the World of Chicago Samba 1
Vibrant, 2011
The article demonstrates, through an ethnographic study of Chicago Samba, a Brazilian musical ensemble, that samba and the Brazilians who reconstruct it, circulate within Chicago repeating old narratives tangled in new webs of meanings, paradoxically creating new spaces of sociability and cooperation between normally separate and distant social groups. They build ‘corners of the world’ that temporarily break down borders of all types. In the effort to give life to the narratives that open the market to their products, they recreate them and, in the process, create dialogues and sociabilities that subvert them: kinds of niches of resistance to the dominant narratives regarding their own and their host culture. Even though the entry and vibrant v.8 n.1 bernadete beserra departure from these niches signal temporary abandonment as well as return to the dominant codes, these encounters, no matter how brief, leave in those who venture into them vestiges of and desires for metamorphosis.
Music, City, Ethnicity: Exploring Musical Scenes in Lisbon
Migrações Journal – Special Issue Music and Migration, organized by Maria de São José da Côrte-Real, Lisbon: ACIDI, no. 7, Oct. 2010., 2010
This paper discusses the various ways in which music and cities interact, in a context of increased inter-connectedness between the local and the global. On the premises of the existence of a so-called ‘global culture’, cities tend to reinvent themselves by promoting various (and eventually competing) self-definitions. In the case of Lisbon, this tendency is accompanied by a seemingly increased desire to connect (or re-connect) with the Lusophone world, eventually informing Lisbon’s self-images as an inclusive and multicultural city. In this process, new forms of ethnicity may gain visibility in the marketing of Luso-world music (or world music as practiced in the Portuguese-speaking countries). At the horizon of imagined cities as ‘transcultural megacities’, music tends to gain agency in the promotion of senses of place and belonging, in and to the city.
Heitor Villa-Lobos and the Parisian art scene: how to become a Brazilian musician
This article discusses how the flux of cultural productions between centre and periphery works, taking as an example the field of music production in France and Brazil in the 1920s. The life trajectories of Jean Cocteau, French poet and painter, and Heitor Villa-Lobos, a Brazilian composer, are taken as the main reference points for the discussion. The article concludes that social actors from the periphery tend themselves to accept the opinions and judgements of the social actors from the centre, taking for granted their definitions concerning the criteria that validate their productions. In July 1923, the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos arrived in Paris as a complete unknown. Some five years had passed since his first large-scale concert in Brazil; Villa-Lobos journeyed to Europe with the intention of publicizing his musical output. His entry into the Parisian art world took place through the group of Brazilian modernist painters and writers he had encountered in 1922, immediately before the Modern Art Week in São Paulo. Following his arrival, the composer was invited to a lunch in the studio of the painter Tarsila do Amaral where he met up with, among others, the poet Sérgio Milliet, the pianist João de Souza Lima, the writer Oswald de Andrade and, among the Parisians, the poet Blaise Cendrars, the musician Erik Satie and the poet and painter Jean Cocteau. After the lunch, the artists became engrossed in a lively conversation which drifted into a discussion on the art of musical improvisation. Villa-Lobos, who had already composed an extensive repertoire of piano solos, then sat down to Tarsila's Erard concerto to improvise. Immediately, Jean Cocteau, known for his boutades and his playful behaviour, sat underneath the piano on the ground, " so he could hear better. " At the end of Villa-Lobos's improvisation, however, Cocteau returned to his chair and launched a ferocious attack on what he had heard: in his opinion, the music presented by the composer was no more than an emulation of the styles of Debussy and Ravel. Villa-Lobos * I am grateful for the suggestions of Prof. Lygia Sigaud and the two anonymous readers who reviewed this article. Responsibility for its content remains entirely my own.
Ten (Anti-) Theses for a Brazilian Popular Musical Aesthetic
AM Journal of Art and Media Studies
This article points out some elements that can help to understand the difficulty of analyzing popular music in Brazil with the forms of analysis commonly used by classical aesthetics and philosophy of music. In addition, it indicates some possible paths for the development of a critique of national musical material. To this end, this article retrieves some fundamental questions about the history of popular music in Brazil: its triple origin (African, European and Amerindian), the influence of capitalism in the first decades of the twentieth century, the concept of ‘popular’, its connection with early lyric poetry and its multiple forms of expression. Article received: April 20, 2021; Article accepted: June 23, 2021; Published online: October 15, 2021; Review paper How to cite this article: Burnett, Henry. "Ten (Anti-) Theses for a Brazilian Popular Musical Aesthetic." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 26 (October 2021): 53-61. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i26.469
Brazilian Jazz and Friction of Musicalities (2003)
This article is a brief ethnography of Brazilian instrumental popular music, termed música instrumental in Brazil, which is known in the international universe of jazz as Brazilian jazz. 1 I intend to focus on Brazilian jazz as a musical genre of Brazilian popular music and not as a national adaptation of jazz, as well as search for its main characteristics and socio-cultural nexus in contrast with North American jazz.
Rio de Janeiro’s street music in mid-19th century
IASPM-US 2019 Conference - Musical Cities: Music, Historiography and Myth March 7-10, 2019 New Orleans, LA, 2019
Imperial Rio de Janeiro has been described as busy and noisy, its narrow streets filled with advertising yells, slave work songs, and the grinding tunes of street organs. The communication focus on the barrel organ (realejo in Portuguese, organillo in Spanish, orgue de barbarie in French), discussing the findings of a study based on Rio de Janeiro 19t-century periodicals. It reveals its music being used as soundtrack to mechanical playhouses, church services, and, also, being “sampled” into a 1830s Brazilian song. I will comment on issues of music, technology and identity, in dialogue with recent literature on street music, hoping to contribute to popular music historiography.
Brazilian Jazz and Friction of Musicalit
This article is a brief ethnography of Brazilian instrumental popular music, termed música instrumental in Brazil, which is known in the international universe of jazz as Brazilian jazz. 1 I intend to focus on Brazilian jazz as a musical genre of Brazilian popular music and not as a national adaptation of jazz, as well as search for its main characteristics and socio-cultural nexus in contrast with North American jazz.
Portugal has been an administratively centralized country for various centuries. Culturally, it has been in the shadow of Lisbon, and to a secondary extent Oporto, that a number of provincial towns have thrived, both inland as well as on the coast. Their provincial status, often described as non-cosmopolitan, backwards, marginal, peripheral to development, and constructed in various forms, has created a frame of mind that persisted in time. This exploratory paper looks at cultural life through music in North Portugal at the turn of the nineteenth century, in particular at the city of Guimarães and attempts to provide some details of the transformation of music landscapes in the city.