The ancestors of modern-day Brazilians - the Indians with their reed flutes, the Portuguese with their singers and viola players, and the Africans with their many rhythms - made it inevitable that Brazil would become a distinctly musical country. From the classical compositions of Villa-Lobos to the soft sounds of bossa nova, to the driving beat of samba, Brazil has developed music of striking sophistication, quality and diversity.
When the Jesuit fathers first arrived in Brazil they found that the Indians performed ritual song and dances to the accompaniment of rudimentary wind and percussion instruments. The Jesuits made use of the music to catechise the Indians, replacing the songs' original words with religious ones in the Tupi language. They also introduced the Gregorian chant and taught the flute, bow instruments and the clavichord. Music accompanied the sacramental ceremonies performed in village and church plazas.
African rhythms arrived during the first century of colonisation, and were enriched through contact with Iberian music. One of the most important types of music produced by the negro slaves was the comic song-dance called Lundu. For a long time it was one of the main popular musical forms, even being performed in the Portuguese court during the 19th century. In the second half of the 18th century and during the 19th century a style of sentimental love song called the modinha was popular, sung both in Brazil's salons and in the Portuguese court. No one knows if the modinha originated in Brazil or in Portugal.
Schools of music existed in Bahia in the early 17th century, and religious music was played in churches throughout the colony. As with other art forms, musical activity intensified with the arrival of the Portuguese royal family in 1808. King João VI, a music lover, sent to Europe for the composer Marcos Portugal, and for Sigismund von Neukomm, an Austrian pianist, a pupil of Haydn. Local musicians also attracted the King's attention, such as José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767-1830) who was a notable improviser on the organ and clavichord. João VI appointed him Inspector to the Royal Chapel, a body which had more than 100 instrumentalists and singers, many of whom were foreigners.
By the end of the century, Carlos Gomes (1836-1896), born in the town of Campinas in the state of São Paulo, had produced a number of operas in the prevailing Italian style, especially Il Guarany, an opera based on a famous Brazilian novel by José de Alencar.
Brasílio Itiberê (1848-1913) was the first Brazilian composer to use a popular national motif in erudite music. His 1869 composition, A Sertaneja (The Country Maiden) was played by Franz Liszt and has remained active in piano repertoires.
As in literature and painting, the Week of Modern Art in 1922 revolutionized Brazilian music and brought acceptance to a crop of new composers. Led by Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), they brought avant-garde techniques from Europe and undertook the challenge of transplanting Brazilian folkloric melodies and rhythms to symphonic compositions. Their music often incorporated many popular musical instruments into classical orchestras.
After a while it became possible to identify two principal trends in Brazilian music. Writer Mário de Andrade had advocated that composers should seek inspiration in national life with special emphasis on Brazil's musical folklore. Composer Camargo Guarnieri, an adherent of Andrade, heads the musical school known as "Nationalist". In widely differing compositions, these composers searched for a national language which would not lose the universal character of musical language. After 1939, another musical school began to assert itself, principally as a result of the work carried out by Hans Joachim Koellreutter, the creator of the Live Music Group. This group and others based their music on the universality of musical language. They defended the use of atonalism and dodecaphonism as composition resources.
Brazil's popular music developed parallel to its classical music, and also united traditional European instruments - guitar, piano and flute - with an entire rhythm section including frying pans, small barrels with a membrane and a stick inside (cuícas) that make wheezing sounds, and tambourines. During the 1930s Brazilian popular music played on the radio became a powerful means of mass communication. Three of the best-known composers of this period are Noel Rosa, Lamartine Babo and Ary Barroso (1903-1963). Barroso's principal singer, Carmen Miranda, went on to achieve an international reputation when she appeared in a series of Hollywood films.
In the mid-1960s the haunting lyrics of The Girl From Ipanema, carried by a rich melodic line, produced the first big international hit to emerge from the bossa nova movement of Brazilian singers and composers. It put Brazilian popular music on the map and brought instant fame to composer Tom Jobim and lyricist-poet Vinicius de Moraes.
Bossa nova had been born in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1950's. At first it was played as intimate music in the apartments of Rio's middle and upper-middle classes. The music combined the Brazilian samba beat with American jazz. It was to become a trademark of a new concept of music - a little sad, sometimes sung off-key, and with lyrics of great importance.
In 1968, in a period of dictatorship, urban guerrillas, and anxiety about how to change the political system, the Tropicalists appeared: Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Gal Costa. Tropicalism can be described as a blending of international music (such as Latin beats and rock'n'roll) with national rhythms. It is very much its own creation: lyrical, intelligent, with faster tempos and fuller rhythms than bossa nova.
Popular regional music in Brazil includes forró from the northeast, in which the accordion and the flute join guitars and percussion in a footstomping country dance; the energetic frevo, also from the northeast; the chorinho (literally "little tears") from Rio, which combines various types and sizes of guitars, flutes, percussion and an occasional clarinet or saxophone to produce a gentle form of instrumental music; and the internationally successful lambada. When danced, lambada is sensual and fast-paced; it got its name from the Portuguese verb "to whip or flog" referring to the smacking of thigh against thigh. But the most typical of Brazilian popular music is the seductive rhythm of the samba. No one is sure of the exact origin of samba. Some people believe it was born on the streets of Rio de Janeiro with contributions from three different sources - Portuguese courtly songs, African rhythms and native Indian fast footwork. Others believe samba is purely African in origin and evolved from the batuque, a kind of music based on percussion instruments and hand clapping. Today in Brazil, popular music continues to explore new rhythms and new melodies. Its interpreters and composers make use of all possible musical resources in order to please their many and diverse audiences.
Music in Brazil has clearly developed through two distinct movements: the written tradition (transposed from European music), also called "learned" or "concert", and the non-written tradition (resulting from the mixing of European, indigenous and African music). Both have developed in their own way and, as in many other countries, they have converged at certain points. In Brazil, those encounters between the popular and learned traditions have specific importance, for therein lies one of the extraordinary features of Brazilian musical production.
