/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/MUSIC-BRAZIL: Ambitious Multimedia Anthology Revels in Diversity

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 16 2000 (IPS) - Brazil’s musical diversity is manifest in the multitude of styles and compositions included in a project that is feeding the public’s eager ears, eyes and hearts through a 15-episode TV programme, four compact discs, a book and a website.

This collection, the brainchild of anthropologist Hermano Vianna, is an effort to highlight the talents of a country that is still relatively unknown on the world music market, though many nationally known musicians’ compact disc sales run in the millions.

‘Axé, pagode, maracatú, forró, choro, dobrado, funk, rap, sertanejo, brega, samba, fandango, carozo, bumba-meu-boi, congadas’ and ‘umbigadas’ are just some of the musical genres, rhythms and musical rites gathered in the ‘Musica do Brasil’ project.

A team of 18 people logged a total of 18,000 km as they spent a year travelling throughout this vast country, recording sounds and images of shows, festivals, religious ceremonies and interviews. Fifteen videos resulted from this marathon tour and are currently being shown on one of Brazil’s cable television stations.

The 30-minute video programmes are presented Gilberto Gil, a favourite Brazilian singer-songwriter, and are organised by theme – rhythms and instruments – instead of the usual regional approach.

The TV series director, Belisario Franca, an experienced TV documentarist, focussed on the thematic relationships in the music because they are “richer than geographical categories.” This way, the viewer can compare the different approaches to a common musical element, he explained.

As a result, there is a programme dedicated to religious issues, one “to the white saints,” another “to the black saints,” to the indigenous communities and their various musical styles, and to popular theatre and dance.

There are also programmes in the series that focus on musical instruments as the point of unity: wind instruments, stringed instruments and the accordion, which has a major musical presence in Brazil’s rural areas.

The documentary series presents some surprising facts, such as Brazil’s pioneering role in the use of the electric guitar, which appeared in the early 1950s in the “electric trios” of Bahía state’s Carnivals long before the instrument was popularised the world over through rock ‘n roll, says Franca.

The electric guitar years ago established itself as a “traditional” instrument in towns far from the industrial urban centres, often wired by a local electrician.

The project’s four compact discs, with a total of 108 musical pieces, are divided into music “of the seas and lands,” “of men, women and children,” “of the saints” and “of things, animals and plants.”

The accompanying book, with Vianna’s texts and 132 photos by Ernesto Baldán, is the project’s vehicle with the most limited diffusion. The initial edition printed just 5,000 copies.

The book’s focus, explained the anthropologist, is not just Brazilian music, “but the people who make it, their happiness, (which) fights misery in order to prevent whatever is miserable from contaminating their entire world, their lives.”

The television series portion of the project is an effort to portray the personal stories of unknown musicians, each with their own dramatic and interesting past.

An entertainment company linked to ‘Abril,’ Brazil’s largest magazine publisher, sponsored the four-million-dollar project, which also entails an Internet site.

The site (www.musicabr.com.br) serves as an open-access database on the diversity of Brazil’s cultural expressions through music.

Vianna has made a career of musical research, with greater attention to the artistic and social side than to the anthropological.

For the author of the book “The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil,” the cultural and social appreciation of “funk,” for example, is important. This musical movement in Rio de Janeiro’s poor peripheral neighbourhoods was sharply rejected by the middle class after several violent incidents occurred at funk dance events.

“Musica do Brasil” provides a series of Brazil’s musical overviews made throughout the 20th century. The pioneer of Brazilian musical history, writer Mario de Andrade, carried out a far-reaching study of the nation’s folklore.

In his footsteps came musicologists and cultural institutions that tried to create collections of the country’s musical wealth, primarily as recordings.

But today’s technological advances have allowed the project to be executed on several formats: video, CDs, books and the Internet.

Vianna did not seek the “roots” of Brazilian music, as his predecessors had done, who attempted to preserve them in their supposed “purity.”

“There never existed an original purity,” commented Vianna, who argues that musical styles are a product of mixing and “contaminations,” not of isolation. Disseminating the music, making it known to the public, is the best way to preserve it, he concluded.

A fever seems to be spreading in Brazil as more and more people bring the nation’s music to the audiovisual media. In addition to Vianna’s project and his 15-part TV series, a film about Heitor Villa-Lobos, considered the best classical music composer in the country, is finally making its way to the big screen.

“Villa-Lobos: A Life of Passion” was film director Zelito Viana’s life dream, and he took 15 years to produce it. But critics were not enthused by the end product, saying it lacked rhythm, an essential element for a film that has music at its centre.

The 500-year anniversary celebrations of the Portuguese arrival in Brazil prompted various initiatives to commemorate or document the history of Brazilian music in books, videos and compact discs.

The government’s educational television station also produced a series of seven documentaries on the cultural diversity of Bahía state, were music permeates all aspects of life.