In November 1916, a young Afro-Brazilian musician named Donga registered sheet music for the song "Pelo telefone" ("On the Telephone") at the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. This apparently simple act—claiming ownership of a musical composition—set in motion a series of events that would shake Brazil's cultural landscape. Before the debut of "Pelo telephone," samba was a somewhat obscure term, but by the late 1920s, the wildly popular song had helped to make it synonymous with Brazilian national music.
The success of "Pelo telephone" embroiled Donga in controversy. A group of musicians claimed that he had stolen their work, and a prominent journalist accused him of selling out his people in pursuit of profit and fame. Within this single episode are many of the concerns that animate Making Samba, including intellectual property claims, the Brazilian state, popular music, race, gender, national identity, and the history of Afro-Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro. By tracing the careers of Rio's pioneering black musicians from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s, Marc A. Hertzman revises the histories of samba and of Brazilian national culture.
In November 1916, a young Afro-Brazilian musician named Donga registered sheet music for the song "Pelo telefone" ("On the Telephone") at the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. This apparently simple act—claiming ownership of a musical composition—set in motion a series of events that would shake Brazil's cultural landscape. Before the debut of "Pelo telephone," samba was a somewhat obscure term, but by the late 1920s, the wildly popular song had helped to make it synonymous with Brazilian national music.
The success of "Pelo telephone" embroiled Donga in controversy. A group of musicians claimed that he had stolen their work, and a prominent journalist accused him of selling out his people in pursuit of profit and fame. Within this single episode are many of the concerns that animate Making Samba, including intellectual property claims, the Brazilian state, popular music, race, gender, national identity, and the history of Afro-Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro. By tracing the careers of Rio's pioneering black musicians from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s, Marc A. Hertzman revises the histories of samba and of Brazilian national culture.
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In November 1916, a young Afro-Brazilian musician named Donga registered sheet music for the song "Pelo telefone" ("On the Telephone") at the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. This apparently simple act—claiming ownership of a musical composition—set in motion a series of events that would shake Brazil's cultural landscape. Before the debut of "Pelo telephone," samba was a somewhat obscure term, but by the late 1920s, the wildly popular song had helped to make it synonymous with Brazilian national music.
The success of "Pelo telephone" embroiled Donga in controversy. A group of musicians claimed that he had stolen their work, and a prominent journalist accused him of selling out his people in pursuit of profit and fame. Within this single episode are many of the concerns that animate Making Samba, including intellectual property claims, the Brazilian state, popular music, race, gender, national identity, and the history of Afro-Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro. By tracing the careers of Rio's pioneering black musicians from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s, Marc A. Hertzman revises the histories of samba and of Brazilian national culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822391906 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/16/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Marc A. Hertzman is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and Director of the Center for Brazilian Studies at Columbia University.
Read an Excerpt
MAKING SAMBA
A NEW HISTORY OF RACE AND MUSIC IN BRAZIL
By Marc A. Hertzman
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2013 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5430-7
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
BETWEEN FASCINATION AND FEAR
Musicians' Worlds in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro
During the colonial (1500–1822) and imperial (1822–89) eras, myriad sounds filled the streets of Rio, the colonial and national capital from 1763 to 1960. Vendors hawked their wares. People conversed in Yoruba, Kikongo, and Kimbundu and played music on European, African, American, and newly improvised instruments. Passersby could expect to hear the sounds of slaves keeping rhythm on drums and rattles, or clapping and singing as they trudged through the city bearing enormous loads of cargo on their backs, shoulders, and heads. The adventuresome, unimpeded paths traveled by those sounds contrasted with the strict codes of conduct that governed the street as well as the home. Some slaves were required to bow or kneel while kissing their master's hand each morning. Outside, etiquette demanded that they cede the walkway to oncoming whites and forbade them from returning blows leveled against them by whites. The city's social hierarchy was marked by dress, hairstyles, and jewelry. Owners often draped their slaves in fine clothing as a display of their own status. Place of residence and consumption practices also helped define social standing. Private music lessons were among the most obvious signs of privilege.
In 1845, a Christian missionary from the United States commented on what he saw and heard in Brazil. "Music has a powerful effect in exhilarating the spirits of the negro, and certainly no one should deny him the privilege of softening his hard lot by producing the harmony of sounds, which are sweet to him, however uncouth to other ears." "It is said," he continued, "that an attempt was at one time made to secure greater quietness in the streets by forbidding the negroes to sing." The attempted prohibition ultimately failed when slaves ceased working in protest. The sounds of the street remained etched in the missionary's mind. "The impression made upon the stranger by the mingled sound of a hundred voices falling upon his ear at once, is not soon forgotten."
Passing through Rio, Thomas Ewbank, a U.S. diplomat, noted how music shaped the workday. There is a "general use," he wrote, of "a species of melody, regularly executed, morning, noon, and night," which called slaves to work and signaled the end of the day. The sounds that filled Rio's streets often blurred the lines between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. As slaves learned to play European instruments, they often added their own interpretation. Some were said to apply "African imagination" to the seemingly dull task of ringing church bells. Travelers observed slaves humming or whistling the latest songs from Europe and noted their mastery of religious songs with Latin lyrics and of other intricate vocal pieces. Musicians performed on Afro-Brazilian feast days, in elite concert halls, and in the confines of wealthy private residences. An observer estimated that one-third of the members of the orchestra at Rio's opera house were of African descent. Well-to-do cariocas (people or things from Rio) competed to bring the best black and mixed-race musicians into their homes for private concerts.
The number of instruments on which music was played matched the variety of sounds floating through Rio's streets. But no instrument drew more attention or elicited more fear among travelers and elites than the drum. Drums of various shapes and sizes were prominent at the massive gatherings that took place every Sunday at the Campo de Santana, a square where as many as two thousand slaves regularly congregated. Tolerance for such manifestations fluctuated over time. Before abolition, authorities regulated and often forbade large slave gatherings, especially those with music. In 1817, dances held by the Nossa Senhora do Rosário brotherhood at the Campo de Santana were prohibited. In 1833, a justice of the peace sought to prohibit slaves from playing drums by arguing that the noise attracted slaves from neighboring plantations. In 1849, the police broke up a group of more than two hundred slaves performing batuque, a broad term used to describe drum circles and various drum-based performances. In response to repressive measures, slaves played drums surreptitiously and employed other percussion instruments—scraps of iron, pottery, seashells, stones, wood—or simply created rhythms by clapping their hands.
Prohibitions against drum circles and other musical manifestations were tied to fears of slave revolts and marked by confusion about how and where to draw the line between legitimate music and illicit religious devotion. An 1835 uprising of Malê slaves in Bahia stoked fears sparked earlier by the Haitian Revolution, and it sent shocks of panic through Brazil's slave-owning circles. The fact that many African-derived religious rites involved musical accompaniment made it difficult for outsiders to distinguish between entertainment and what elites deemed to be savagery or subversion. As part of larger measures to prevent slave rebellions during the 1830s and 1840s various towns and provinces prohibited slave carnivals and certain religious practices. Popular perceptions that linked blackness, music, and feitiçaria, a broad term used to refer to "witchcraft" and "devil worship," endured long after those laws expired or ceased to be enforced.
As did local elites, travelers looked upon slave music and religion with a combination of fascination and fear. Ewbank described a file of furniture-porting slaves. "While looking on, a yell and hurlement burst forth that made me start as if the shrieks were actually from Tartarus. From dark spirits they really came.... Chanting only at intervals, they passed the lower part of the Cattete in silence, and then struck up the Angola warble that surprised me." The performance of a band of black musicians produced similar consternation in the French artist and traveler Jean-Baptiste Debret. The combination of instruments (clarinets, a triangle, a horn, and two types of African drums) and a repertoire that included waltzes, marches, and lundus created what Debret called a "horrible racket produced by shrill and out-of-tune music." "That unexpressable 'imbroglio' of style and harmony," he continued, "irritates the nervous system with its revolting barbarism [and] imprints a feeling of terror in the heart of man, even a well-disposed one."
The massive gathering he witnessed at the Campo de Santana tantalized Briton J. P. Robertson. "If slavery were not to be seen in any other form than the one in which it was exhibited to me there," he wrote, "I should be forced to conclude that, of the many conditions in the world, that of the African slave is one of the most happy." In the performance he found "a singular spectacle of African hilarity, uproar, and confusion, as is not perhaps to be witnessed, on the same extensive scale, in any other country out of Africa itself." Robertson was particularly intrigued by the elaborate dress worn by many of the participants. Their suits and hats contrasted the "almost naked" black workers he saw elsewhere. Ultimately, it was the performers' bodily displays that most fascinated him. To the furious sounds of rattles and drums, "eight or ten figurantes were moving to and fro, in the midst of the circle, in a way to exhibit the human frame divine under every conceivable variety of contortion and gesticulation." Some participants "seemed wrapped in all the furor of demons." The frenzy continued until nightfall, when participants collapsed in a sweaty, exhausted heap:
Every looker-on participated in the sibylline spirit which animated the dancers and musicians; the welking rang with the wild enthusiasm of the negro clans; till thousands of voices, accompanied by the whole music on the field, closed in a scene of jubilee which had continued nearly all day, under the burning rays of a tropical sun, and which had been supported by such bodily exertions on the part of the several performers, as bathed their frames in one continual torrent of perspiration.
Robertson's fascination with sounds and bodies is indicative of a larger obsession with the physicality of race, prominently on display in the pages of nineteenth-century Latin American travel writings, which commonly included descriptions of local flora and fauna alongside intricate and sensational illustrations and descriptions of body shape, piercings, and markings of "savage" African and American peoples. His observations also resonated with long-standing tropes linking blackness, Africa, musicality, and rhythm. As was true elsewhere, in Brazil the mix of fear and fascination expressed by travelers like Robertson dovetailed with definitions of race and music already centuries in the making and which would remain in place for many years to come.
The Tangled Roots of Lundu
Brazil's vast area and regional power cleavages hindered full cultural or political cohesion, but that did not prevent observers (domestic and foreign) from treating single musical genres as representatives of the entire colony or nation. One such genre, which in fact can refer to a dance and several styles of music, was lundu. Lundu (also often lundum, landu, londu, etc.) is often referred to as Brazil's first black or African national music. The word apparently derives from calundu, a Central African healing ritual featuring drums, scrapers, and a circle of adherents surrounding one or two leaders. Many of calundu's characteristic elements—collective gatherings, spirit possession, curing, percussive music, and dance—are also found in various Afro-Brazilian religions. The calundu that was practiced in Brazil through the early eighteenth century closely resembled rituals performed at the same time in Central Africa, the region of origin for the vast majority of slaves who were brought to Brazil during the seventeenth century. During the first two decades of the eighteenth century, the influx of slaves from the Bight of Benin brought new rituals, though few Luso-Brazilian observers distinguished one African practice from another. By the turn of the nineteenth century, calundu had become a generic term, at least among Luso-Brazilians, who used it to describe multiple rituals. Among the various forms of lundu dance (lundu-dança) performed in Portugal and Brazil, several basic characteristics stand out: a circle of participants and musicians, two individuals dancing in the middle of the circle, arms raised and moving, feet stamping the ground. The partners probably began and ended their performances by touching bellies with umbigadas, or belly blows. The first known written mention of lundu as a dance, penned in 1780, suggests that it was executed at least on occasion by whites and pardos, and this description distinguishes it from fully African practices.
Domingos Caldas Barbosa (ca. 1738–1800), the son of a white man and an Angolan woman, is credited with popularizing lundu salon music (lundu-canção), a genre distinct from both calundu healing rituals and lundu-dança. Barbosa, who spent the last thirty years of life in Lisbon, played a crucial role in securing visibility for Brazilian music abroad. Though long recognized as the creator of lundu-canção, the vast majority of the works credited to him were labeled lundus only after his death, and there are some doubts about whether he actually composed music or just wrote poetry set to music by others. Regardless, Barbosa certainly wrote about the dance "lundum" and was influenced by what he saw and heard at popular gatherings in Brazil, where revelers danced lundu. But a distinct musical genre of the same name does not appear to have congealed until the early 1800s, after Barbosa's death. In Portugal, Barbosa and Portuguese artists developed lyrics and music that either referenced lundudança or was meant to accompany it. By around the middle of the nineteenth century, Brazilians had embraced lundu-canção on a large scale, but the definition of "lundu" remained elastic, referring to both a circle dance rooted in a form of calundu and music played in posh salons. By the turn of the twentieth century, this latter form of lundu-canção was closely associated with an evolving Brazilian national identity. But references to calundu and lundu-dança lived on in the lyrics and music of lundu-canção, as did circle dances, which were still practiced especially in rural areas.
Despite the tangled relationships among calundu the Central African healing ritual, calundu the later generic term for various African ceremonies, and lundu-canção and lundu-dança, twentieth-century observers often used "lundu" as a generic umbrella term to emphasize direct African origins. In 1944, the famous writer and music scholar Mário de Andrade described lundu as "the first Afro-black musical form to be disseminated among all classes of Brazilians and become a 'national' music." A more recent study suggests, "Lundu arose in the early eighteenth century from the music of Bantu slaves." Another states that the music was "probably originally developed by Angolan slaves." Scholars who locate lundu-canção entirely within African and Afro-Brazilian traditions often fail to distinguish between the dance and the music. They also often treat syncopation, an often racialized term, as a sign of lundu's African origins. In the simplest terms, syncopation may be described as a surprising pause or rhythmic dislocation. Though syncopation is found in all kinds of music, it is frequently (and narrowly) associated with "black" or "African" forms.
Carlos Sandroni challenges the simple equation of blackness and syncopation by showing how white, formally trained musicians in nineteenth-century Brazil often sought to infuse their music with what they considered to be African characteristics. They did so somewhat awkwardly, unable to perfectly reproduce the sounds that they associated with Africa and Afro-Brazilians. As a result, parts of their music seem out of place or irregular: in a word, syncopated. The syncopations of most nineteenth-century Brazilian lundus, Sandroni shows, are not the expressions of Africa they are often taken to be and instead are products of a rough collision of European, African, and American influences. Nineteenth-century salon lundus, Sandroni writes, were
composed by professionals ... [who] employed syncopations the way that white actors painted themselves black: the musical dialectic of bourgeois lundu [was] "marked," like a country accent ... syncopations were applied enthusiastically, as a characteristic ingredient and an imitation of what would have been, to white ears of the day, musical "negritude."
"Musical blackface" was complemented in salon lundu with lyrical caricatures of slave life. Black protagonists depicted in song spoke with a lisp, mispronounced words, and were otherwise depicted as hapless, happy-go-lucky stooges. Male characters danced, made jokes, and entertained their white masters. As they did elsewhere in the Atlantic world, white performers in Brazil donned black paint to sing about slave life. Dark-skinned women danced and entertained in the worlds conjured in lundu lyrics, often serving as examples of black lasciviousness or as objects of male desire. While lundu made few direct musical contributions to twentieth-century samba, its legacy was far-reaching in other ways. As we will see, samba, like lundu, was shaped by multiple groups and individuals but is often defined simply as black, its complex history reduced to essentialized, oversimplified terms and origin stories.
State Patronage and the "Civilizing Mission"
In 1808, the Portuguese royal court, fleeing Napoleon, arrived in Brazil and lifted bans on cultural institutions such as the printing press. After the court's arrival, prince regent Dom João, later King Dom João VI, welcomed in "refined" literature, science, and music from Europe. Dom João VI, his son Pedro I, and his grandson Pedro II all nurtured personal interest in the arts and enthusiastically courted experts from abroad to help cultivate a "native" culture, which would be acceptably sophisticated and also uniquely Brazilian. Most funding went to literature, painting, and the sciences, but music was by no means ignored. One author describes Dom João's reign in Brazil (1808–21) as a "musical orgy" and his return to Portugal a "disaster for music in Brazil." Pedro I and Pedro II both studied musical theory and played and wrote music. João VI encouraged musical instruction for slaves, many of whom sang in church choirs. He also built a musical program in the Capela Real (Royal Chapel). An autonomous musical conservatory, the Conservatório de Música, was established in 1841.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from MAKING SAMBA by Marc A. Hertzman. Copyright © 2013 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
A Note about Brazilian Terminology, Currency, and Orthography ixAbbreviations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1. Between Fascination and Fear: Musicians' Worlds in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro 17
2. Beyond the Punishment Paradigm: Popular Entertainment and Social Control after Abolition 31
3. Musicians Outside the Circle: Race, Wealth, and Property in Fred Figner's Music Market 66
4. "Our Music": "Pelo telefone," the Oito Batutas, and the Rise of "Samba" 94
5. Mediators and Competitors: Musicians, Journalists, and the Roda do Samba 116
6. Bodies and Minds: Mapping Africa and Brazil during the Golden Age 146
7. Alliances and Limits: The SBAT and the Rise of the Entertainment Class 169
8. Everywhere and Nowhere: The UBC and the Consolidation of Racial and Gendered Difference 194
9. After the Golden Age: Reinvention and Political Change 227
Conclusion 244
Notes 253
Bibliography 299
Index 335
A photo gallery
What People are Saying About This
"I'm looking forward to the Portuguese translation, because [Making Samba] is a significant contribution to our [Brazilians'] collective understanding of ourselves, made through an academic reading of the larger social world of samba."
"Making Samba is revisionist history at its best. Marc A. Hertzman takes on cherished myths of Brazilian popular culture and carefully debunks them, demonstrating through pioneering research and painstaking analysis where, how, and why they were created. In addition, he illuminates the links between popular music, race, labor, and intellectual property. This should attract considerable attention; no other study of Brazil has done similar work."
"In Making Samba, Marc A. Hertzman narrates with great skill and clarity the complex history of Brazil's foundational musical genre. In doing so, he reveals how this celebrated, often romanticized Afro-Brazilian form emerged out of an acutely material set of social conditions and in close relation to Brazil's modern struggles over race, artistic ownership, and popular culture. By focusing in large part on the actual laboring lives of the musicians who negotiated Brazil's commercial/legal structures and technologies of circulation/dissemination, Hertzman brings alive samba's modern story while also telling a powerful tale about the music's generative cultural power. A remarkable contribution to popular music studies, suggesting compelling parallels with musical traditions to the north."