A Unique Brazilian Composer

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.

"Noted Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos holds a distinctive position as an international artist, and in Gerard Béhague's comprehensive study a truly critical assessment of his creative output is available for the first time. Villa-Lobos was a representative of the most natural and direct expressions of Brazil's popular culture, constantly 'in search of the Brazilian soul.' Indeed 'Alma Brasileira' was the subtitle he gave to the piano piece Choros No. 5, and the musical manifestations of that soul preoccupied him throughout his life. Expanded from a prize-winning essay, the present study provides a critical appraisal of the significant aspects of his life as well as an in-depth analysis of his musical language. With over fifty musical examples, a bibliography, and a discography, this book presents a thorough analysis of Villa-Lobos's composition, craftsmanship, and ideology that should appeal to musicologists, students, and all who have an interest in Latin American cultural and historical studies. Villa-Lobos once stated, 'I consider my works as letters that I wrote to Posterity, without expecting any answer.' This book provides readings of a selected number of such 'letters' and in the process attempts to give some answers regarding the uniqueness of the music of one of the most creative composers of the twentieth century." --Back cover.

This innovative volume traces Brazil's singular character, exploring both the remarkable richness and cohesion of the national culture and the contradictions and tensions that have developed over time. What shared experiences give its citizens their sense of being Brazilian? What memories bind them together? What metaphors and stereotypes of identity have emerged? Which groups are privileged over others in idealized representations of the nation? The contributors—a multidisciplinary group of U.S. and Brazilian scholars—offer a fresh look at questions that have been asked since the early nineteenth century and that continue to drive nationalist discourse today. Their chapters explore Brazilian identity through an innovative framework that brings in seldom-considered aspects of art, music, and visual images, offering a compelling analysis of how nationalism functions as a social, political, and cultural construction in Latin America. Contributions by: Cristina Antunes, Dain Borges, Valéria Costa e Silva, James Green, Efrain Kristal, Ludwig Lauerhass Jr., Cristina Magaldi, Elizabeth A. Marchant, José Mindlin, Carmen Nava, José Luis Passos, Robert Stam, and Valéria Torres

“Hello, hello Brazil” was the standard greeting Brazilian radio announcers of the 1930s used to welcome their audience into an expanding cultural marketplace. New genres like samba and repackaged older ones like choro served as the currency in this marketplace, minted in the capital in Rio de Janeiro and circulated nationally by the burgeoning recording and broadcasting industries. Bryan McCann chronicles the flourishing of Brazilian popular music between the 1920s and the 1950s. Through analysis of the competing projects of composers, producers, bureaucrats, and fans, he shows that Brazilians alternately envisioned popular music as the foundation for a unified national culture and used it as a tool to probe racial and regional divisions. McCann explores the links between the growth of the culture industry, rapid industrialization, and the rise and fall of Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo dictatorship. He argues that these processes opened a window of opportunity for the creation of enduring cultural patterns and demonstrates that the understandings of popular music cemented in the mid–twentieth century continue to structure Brazilian cultural life in the early twenty-first.

A comprehensive survey of this significant composer's works, with sampler CD.

Appleby is a scholar and musician specializing in the music of his native Brazil, and in particular the work of Villa-Lobos. He augments the many biographies and musical analyses of the country's best known composer with insights from his own five decades of performing his music and interviews with his family and friends. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

First published in 1999, this volume examines the impact of political, social and cultural developments on the nation’s most popular musical form, samba, in the context of the period 1930-45, one of huge social change in Brazil, with the introduction of industrialization under the authoritarian regime of Getúlio Vargas. She looks at the context in which the songs were written, the life styles and social positions of the composers (sambistas), and their relationship to political and commercial structures. By studying samba lyrics we can obtain a clear picture of samba lyrics we can obtain a clear picture of samba’s shifting status as it was transformed from the music of working-class blacks and was appropriated by mainstream middle-class culture. The final chapters of the book focus on the lyrics of three influential sambistas: Ataúlfo Alves, Noel Rosa and Ari Barroso, and look at the manner in which their songs both comply with and flout tradition and authority.

(Book). Charlie Byrd, Herbie Mann, and others brought in bags full of discs from a trip to Brazil in 1961. Stan Getz listened to them and recorded "Desafinado," which stayed for 70 weeks on the Billboard charts. Since then, no one can deny bossa nova's global appeal and influence upon jazz and world music. While celebrating bossa nova's 50-year presence in the United States, we can learn more about the movement's champion, Jobim, through poet and novelist Helena Jobim's Antonio Carlos Jobim: An Illuminated Man . His personal, intellectual, and professional history comes alive. With a vast, intimate, and revealing set of photographs, and an engaging, elegant and unique prose, this is the story of a true 20th-century's genius. Helena Jobim does justice to her brother's poetic voice. The composer of "Waters of March" read, questioned, and re-created the world he lived in not only through mesmerizing melodies, but also through down-to-earth poetry. The biography also reveals Antonio Carlos Jobim's serious ecological concerns. To his 400 songs of inexplicable grace he has added his own epigraph in An Illuminated Man : "Every time a tree is cut down here on Earth, I believe it will grow again somewhere else, in another world. So, when I die, it is to this place that I want to go, where forests live in peace."