Music Scenes and Migrations: Space and Transnationalism in Brazil, Portugal and the Atlantic

‘Music Scenes and Migrations’ brings together new work from Brazilian and European scholars around the themes of musical place and transnationalism across the Atlantic triangle connecting Brazil, Africa and Europe. Moving beyond now-contested models for conceptualizing international musical relations and hierarchies of powers and influence, such as global/local or centre/periphery, the volume draws attention instead to the role of the city, in particular, in producing, signifying and mediating music-making in the colonial and post-colonial Portuguese-speaking world. In considering the roles played by cities as hubs of cultural intersection, socialization, exchange and transformation; as sites of political intervention and contestation; and as homes to large concentrations of consumers, technologies and media, Rio de Janeiro necessarily figures prominently, given its historical importance as an international port at the centre of the Lusophone Atlantic world. The volume also gives attention to other urban centres, within Brazil and abroad, towards which musicians and musical traditions have migrated and converged – such as São Paulo, Lisbon and Madrid – where they have reinvented themselves; where notions of Brazilian and Lusophone identity have been reconfigured; and where independent, peripheral and underground scenes have contested the hegemony of the musical ‘mainstream’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jun 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785273865

Book preview

Music Scenes and Migrations

Music Scenes and Migrations

Space and Transnationalism in Brazil, Portugal and the Atlantic

Edited by

David Treece

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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© 2020 David Treece editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936470

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-384-1 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-384-1 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

David Treece

Part 1 Colonial and Postcolonial Transnationalisms, Migrations and Diasporas

Chapter 1 The Cimboa and Cape Verdean Transcultural Heritage

Luiz Moretto

Chapter 2 Lundus , Street Organs, Music Boxes and the ‘Cachucha’: Early Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Crossings between Europe and Rio de Janeiro

Martha Tupinambá de Ulhôa

Chapter 3 Música caipira and Rooting

Ivan Vilela

Chapter 4 Lusofonia as Intervention: Postcolonial Intercultural Traffic in Lusophone Hip Hop Events

Bart Paul Vanspauwen

Chapter 5 ‘A Piece of Brazil in Lisbon’: Brazilian Musical Practices in the Portuguese Capital

Amanda Fernandes Guerreiro

Chapter 6 ‘Calentando la Ciudad’: Intimacy and Cosmopolitanism among Brazilian Musicians in Madrid

Gabril Dan Hoskin

Part 2 Relocating Rio de Janeiro

Chapter 7 Samba, Its Places and Its City

Cláudia Neiva de Matos

Chapter 8 Between Temple Yards and Hillsides: Rio de Janeiro’s Samba, Its Spaces, Humour and Identity

Fabiana Lopes da Cunha

Chapter 9 The Construction of a Canonical Space for Samba and Choro within the Brazilian Social Imaginary

Micael Herschmann and Felipe Trotta

Chapter 10 The National Arts Foundation and the Monumentalization of Rio de Janeiro’s Popular Music as National Heritage

Tânia da Costa Garcia

Chapter 11 Samba, Anti-Racism and Communitarian Politics in 1970s Rio de Janeiro: Candeia and the Quilombo Project

David Treece

Chapter 12 Samba, Pagode and Mediation: From Backyard to Disc

Waldir de Amorim Pinto

Part 3 Demetropolitanizing the Musical City: Other Scenes, Industries, Technologies

Chapter 13 Brazilian Post-Punk in the Catalogue of the Independent Record Company Baratos Afins

Marcia Tosta Dias

Chapter 14 Música Pesada Brasileira: Sepultura and the Reinvention of Brazilian Sound

Jeder Silveira Janotti Junior

Chapter 15 Digital Culture, Music Video, and the Brazilian Peripheral Pop Music Scene

Simone Pereira de Sá

Chapter 16 An Introduction to the New Social Place of Brazilian Rap: The Work of Emicida

Daniela Vieira dos Santos

Chapter 17 Another Music in a Different (and Unstable) Room: A Route through Underground Music Scenes in Contemporary Portuguese Society

Paula Guerra

Notes on Contributors

Notes

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

1.1 Pascoal Fernandes playing the cimboa . (Photograph: Luiz Moretto)

2.1 Paradigmatic comparison between ‘Maria Cachucha/Maria Caxuxa’, and ‘Lá no largo da Sé’. (Provided by the author)

4.1 ‘How long? Shall they kill our prophets while we … stand aside and look? (Bob Marley)’. Graffiti by Slap Slapsktr, in reference to the hunger strike by Luso-Angolan rapper (Ikonoclasta) Luaty Beirão in 2015. (Photograph: Bart Vanspauwen)

6.1 An advert for the Mais Brasil FM carnival festivities, Madrid. (Sourced by the author)

6.2 Fabio Goiano and partner performing at El Rodeo, Madrid. (Provided by the author)

6.3 An advert for the Brazilian-themed bar El Rodeo, Madrid. (Sourced by the author)

13.1 Cover of the album Akira S e as Garotas que Erraram by Akira S e as Garotas que Erraram. (By kind permission of Baratos Afins Discos)

17.1 Mão Morta Gig at the Cinema Império, Lisbon, 10 October 1987. (By kind permission of José Faisca)

Table

13.1 Albums and Artists: Baratos Afins Label, 1980s–Post-Punk

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We gratefully acknowledge the support of King’s College London, for making awards from its International Partnerships Fund, Arts and Humanities Faculty International Collaboration Fund and Modern Languages Research Initiatives Fund, to make possible the symposium ‘City to City: Urban Crossroads in the Music of Africa, Brazil and Portugal’ (2016), which gave rise to this publication; and for the award of a publication subvention by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

We thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their comments on the draft of this book, and the editorial team at Anthem Press for bringing the volume to fruition.

Finally, we thank the following for their work on the translation of texts from the Portuguese:

Ana Oliveira and Lucy Robinson, respectively, for the translation and for the revision of Chapter 17; Chris McGowan for the translation of Chapter 2; Ingrid Bejerman for the translation of Chapter 14; Julia Felmanas for the translation of Chapters 8, 10, 12, 13 and 16; Saulo Adriano for the translation of Chapter 3 and Simone do Vale for the translation of Chapter 15.

INTRODUCTION

David Treece

In his interdisciplinary account of black culture, religiosity and territoriality, The Temple Yard and the City (O Terreiro e a Cidade, 2002), Afro-Brazilian scholar Muniz Sodré opens his discussion of space and modernity by recalling how, in classical antiquity, music had a special, symbolic value in defining the boundaries of the city:

Broadly speaking, […] the pre-Socratics (especially the Pythagoreans) see space as that entire ambit inside which the inhabitants of a community move about. The myth of Linus [the inventor of melody, rhythm and songs], the son of Apollo, founder of Athens, can bring some clarification to the matter. It is said in the myth that, when Linus died, the people, trees and animals wept. The Athenean space extended as far as the echoes of their laments, as far as the music was able to resound. (Sodré 2002, 22)¹

By imagining the constitution of urban space in these terms, as the sonic, material projection of our humanity into the environment we inhabit, the myth of Linus eloquently draws attention to the unique capacity of music to give temporal and spatial form to our collective inner lives, and so to ‘gather up and reveal to us the structures of the internal and external social worlds and the relations obtaining between them’ (Shepherd and Wicke 1997, 129). It is this articulatory, relational power, intensifying our shared sense of being and identity in time and space, which gives music its distinctive social meaning, as Micael Herschmann and Felipe Trotta remind us in the pages of this book: ‘However individualized musical experience may have become today […] it is still largely an experience of encounter, based on the setting up of social (and communicative) relationships […]. Since that sociability is achieved through music, it must be in verbal and non-verbal sonic communication that we will find the key to the sharing of worldviews, thinking and values that suffuses musical experiences’ (see Chapter 9).

Much has been written in recent years on the topic of music, space and place.² But what special challenges are posed by the phenomenon of popular music-making within the multi-continental spatial field occupied by Portuguese-speaking peoples and territories, that of the so-called Lusophone world?

Evidently, this is a space articulated by shared, violently disruptive and exploitative colonial and postcolonial histories, by the distinctive movements, migrations and crossings within, between and beyond the territories that are a product of those histories, and by the diverse cultural, social and political identities which have been constructed, in part, through the activity of music-making in various kinds of space and location, whether national, regional, urban, cosmopolitan, Atlantic or virtual. As this book will demonstrate, far from demanding a single, unifying model for theorizing this field, the best recent scholarship has drawn on, and contributed to, the variety of approaches produced in the last three or four decades to make sense of the complexity of musical place, space and movement in this context, not least in its articulation between the local and the international.

All the contributions here, while acutely conscious of the profound, far-reaching impact and legacy of the colonial experience, are equally sceptical, whether implicitly or explicitly, of earlier centre-periphery models for conceptualizing the historical consequences of the Portuguese colonial empire’s expansionist project for those peoples of the African, American and Asian continents who fell under its dominion (Buchholz 2018). Such models are justifiably criticized for taking for granted a hierarchical, unidirectional flow of cultural ‘influence’, ‘impression’ and ‘spread’ from metropolis to colony that leads little room for recognizing the creative agency of subject communities and individuals and their powerful role in constructing, transforming and subverting the cultures and identities at the ‘centre’.

A landmark contribution to the field of English-language studies on Brazilian popular music, Perrone and Dunn’s Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization (2001), argued that ‘the relationship of the system of national forms to European and American models is fundamental’ (Perrone and Dunn 2001, 8). With the benefit of nearly twenty years’ hindsight, it is striking to note how, in that collection of essays, ‘internationalization in Brazilian popular music’ is posed insistently as a matter of surveying the problems and anxieties of imitation, appropriation, influx, influence and their contestations. Non-hierarchical or more decentralized alternatives beyond that paradigm get just a brief mention, as if they were as yet only glimpsed on the horizon of the globalizing imperative (Perrone and Dunn 2001, 30–31).

One such alternative is the concept of cosmopolitanism. As Stuart Hall already remarked in 1992 when considering the contemporary postcolonial landscape,

the products of the new diasporas created by the post-colonial migrations are obliged to come to terms with the new cultures they inhabit, without simply assimilating to them and losing their identities completely. […] they are irrevocably the product of several interlocking histories and cultures, belonging at one and the same time to several ‘homes’ (and to no one particular ‘home’). (Hall 1992, 110)

Thomas Turino invokes the concept of cosmopolitanism as a means of analysing cultural phenomena that do not share geographical proximity but are connected across space by what he calls ‘cosmopolitan loops’, that is to say, different forms of media, interchanges and shared habitus (Turino 2001, 7). With specific reference to the field of music, meanwhile, Martin Stokes has also argued in favour of a shift away from the language of ‘globalization’, with its emphasis on assimilation and absorption, towards thinking in terms of musical cosmopolitanism, thus inviting us

to think about how people in specific places and at specific times have embraced the music of others, and how, in doing so, they have enabled music styles and musical ideas, musicians and musical instruments to circulate (globally) in particular ways. The shift of emphasis is significant, and, in my view, highly productive. Most importantly, it restores human agencies and creativities to the scene of analysis, and allows us to think of music as a process in the making of ‘worlds’, rather than a passive reaction to global systems. (Stokes 2007, 6)

The present volume has its origins precisely in this phenomenon of musical cosmopolitanism and transnationalism as observed in connection with the migrant experience in Europe.³ Three of the studies presented here, those by Bart Vanspauwen, Amanda Guerreiro and Gabril Hoskin (Chapters 4–6), examine the activities of diasporic Portuguese-speaking musical communities in the cities of Lisbon and Madrid, bearing out both Stokes’s perspective and George Lipsitz’s observation regarding the connective power of music in immigrant communities to build unity between and across geographical spaces and dispersed peoples and individuals; given its status ‘as a highly visible (and audible) commodity, [music] comes to stand for the specificity of social experience in identifiable communities when it captures the attention, and even allegiance of people from many different locations’ (Lipsitz 1994, 126).

A multi-continental postcolonial space such as that of the Portuguese-speaking world has also suggested non-binary paradigms that are more specifically geared to its historical, cultural and geographical distinctiveness. One of these – Lusofonia (‘Lusophony’) – is modelled on the Community of Portuguese-speaking Countries (CPLP) or ‘Lusophone Commonwealth’, a political association founded in 1996 to foster cultural ties and, more recently, political, diplomatic and trade cooperation between its nine member nations (Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé e Príncipe and East Timor). As a linguistic-cultural and geopolitical concept, Lusofonia has been regarded critically as a neocolonial construction, an attempted reconfiguration of Portugal’s now dissolved material empire as a heterogeneous symbolic ‘community’. It displays uneasy resonances with earlier imperialist discourses advocating the notion of Portuguese colonial exceptionalism, such as Gilberto Freyre’s Lusotropicalism, and Lusofonia has doubtless played its part in state efforts to reinvent Portugal’s postcolonial identity in the world (Margarido 2000; Almeida 2004; Arenas 2005; McKnee 2012; Vakil 2013). Yet, as Bart Vanspauwen’s study of Lusophone hip hop in Lisbon over the last 20 years suggests (Chapter 4), this has not prevented young musicians from engaging creatively and critically with the concept in the context of the new multiculturalism.

The diasporic-migrant experience has also, paradoxically perhaps, provided a context for the reinvigoration of another spatial (as well as political and cultural) category, that of the national, which had perhaps appeared to be on the wane. Within Brazil, certainly, especially since the late 1980s – following the end of the cycle of state-sponsored initiatives to monumentalize Rio de Janeiro’s popular music traditions as ‘national heritage’ (examined by Tânia da Costa Garcia in Chapter 10), and the disintegration of the nationalist discourses of social consensus after the end of the 1964–85 military dictatorship – there has been a marked decline in the authority of musical nationalism as narrative and discourse, in favour of regional, local, community-based and ethnic identities and affiliations. In the case of the Rio de Janeiro-based Quilombo project of the mid-1970s (explored in Chapter 11), anti-racist communitarian ideas of Afro-Brazilian and popular identity, rooted in the collective musical practices and traditions of the city’s northern suburbs, explicitly challenged the nationalist discourse of ‘racial democracy’ which the spectacle of Carnival had increasingly come to embody. More recently, within the post-1990s hip hop movement of the São Paulo periphery, a ‘new school’ generation represented by the rapper Emicida (examined by Daniela Vieira dos Santos in Chapter 16) has also taken on the national myths of cordiality and social mobility, if somewhat more ambivalently and uneasily. In both cases, the lugar de fala or ‘enunciatory place’ of black identity and agency is simultaneously the lugar territorial or territorial locus of Brazil’s urban peripheries, suburbs and morros (hillside communities).

But for the migrant Brazilian musicians of Lisbon and Madrid, whose condition is that of heterogeneous communities within a host city abroad, ‘national’ identity, which they might imagine to have left behind them at home, can all too easily return to haunt them, as Guerreiro and Hoskin discuss in Chapters 5 and 6, respectively. Contending with the pressures of social integration, economic survival, and local culture industry and tourism agendas centering around ideas of cultural ‘authenticity’, these musicians find themselves obliged to relinquish their own, often non-canonical musical tastes, such as música sertaneja, axé, forró and pagode, in favour of repertoires, typified by samba and MPB (Música Popular Brasileira), that correspond to local expectations and notions of brasilidade or ‘Brazilianness’. In these spaces inhabited by transnational musical communities, as Biddle and Knights argue, the national becomes a symbolically fluid ‘territory’, unstable in its encounter with ‘real’ nation states and with ‘real’ national and nationalist aspirations (Biddle and Knights 2007, 14).

As other contributions to the present volume illustrate, music-making has been a rich, and sometimes vitally expressive, means of articulating the migrant experience and migrant identities in earlier historical moments, too, from the colonial period across the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Música caipira (the subject of Ivan Vilela’s essay in Chapter 3), the music of São Paulo’s peasant communities, emerged out of the colonial encounter between an Amerindian heritage and guitar-based balladeering traditions from Europe, and it went on to become the voice of the migratory experience of the caipiras who made the transition to the region’s towns and cities, especially from the early twentieth century. For Luiz Moretto (Chapter 1), in their journeys across the Atlantic world the one-stringed fiddles, such as the Cape Verdean cimboa and other versions encountered in continental Africa and in Brazil, have functioned as ‘instruments of agency’; that is, not just as the artefacts of a particular material culture, but as active agents in the encounter between different cultural traditions, giving rise to modern creole identities. Meanwhile, the transatlantic world of Martha Tupinambá de Ulhôa’s ‘Lundus, street organs, music boxes, and the cachucha’ (explored in Chapter 2) is that of the popular song-forms and early recording technology which interacted as they travelled to and fro between Europe and Rio de Janeiro in the 1830s.

Indeed, another way of conceptualizing this transnational space is precisely in terms of the Atlantic paradigm itself, which has been such a focus of academic interest since it was theorized by Paul Gilroy in terms of the black diasporic experience (Gilroy 1993). From 2007, serious attention began to be given to mapping the Lusophone dimension that had been largely absent from this model. In Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic, Naro, Sansi-Roca and Treece argued, as had Gilroy, for the special significance of music, both as metaphor and as cultural practice, in expressing the dynamic of the Atlantic space:

There is no better example of the contrapuntal movement of Atlantic history than the fate of black music-making whose conceptions of time, space, and motion have so profoundly reshaped those of Western, or even global musical culture. […] Musical experience – itself a central thread of Atlantic cultural history – is in many ways akin to the fluid, temporally dynamic, multidimensional fabric of oceanic space. […] This ‘ocean of sound’ is a virtual, contingent space, structured and made meaningful only insofar as it is ‘performed’ in real time, in the historical present, by those voices, bodies, vessels, and instruments that vibrate and move across it. Music can therefore encourage us to think of the colonial experience with a simultaneous attention to its historical and geographical dimensions, as a temporal and spatial process, a dynamic field of resonances, rather than as a static entity, a unitary map of frontiers and pathways. (Naro, Sansi-Roca and Treece 2007, 6)

In this context, Rio de Janeiro is the ‘Atlantic’ city par excellence. Considering the roles played by cities as hubs of cultural intersection, socialization, exchange and transformation, as sites of political intervention and contestation, and as homes to large concentrations of consumers, technologies and media, Rio de Janeiro figures prominently in this book, given its historical importance, first as an international port after its elevation to the status of Imperial capital in 1808 and then as Brazil’s national capital until 1960. In the wake of the reconfiguration of the city’s physical and cultural landscape, after a drastic programme of urban reforms at the turn of the twentieth century levelled the popular tenements of the city centre and evicted its predominantly Afro-Brazilian residents, music played a key role in articulating the new geographies of social and ethnic identity that these communities were forced to reinvent within the matrix of African religiosity, recreational traditions and festivities and the emergent cultural industries (the topic of Fabiana Lopes da Cunha’s essay in Chapter 8).

In the cartography of samba, musical identity, meaning and toponymy are densely bound up with each other, as sites of musical tradition and activity, histories, memories and mythologies, individual artists and subgenres form a dense fabric that offers a rich source of material for the very discourses of the samba repertoire (see Chapter 7 by Claudia Neiva de Matos). The space and location of urban popular music in Rio de Janeiro, as anywhere else, has been a contested terrain, in which certain genres (such as samba and choro) have competed for legitimation within and sometimes against national markets, state cultural policies and nationalist discourses and narratives in journalism and academic scholarship (see Chapter 9 by Herschmann and Trotta), or are reinvented and renewed, as in the case of the 1980s pagode, the theme of Waldir de Amorim Pinto’s essay (Chapter 12).

Notwithstanding the prominence given here to Rio de Janeiro, the volume also considers other urban centres within Brazil and abroad, towards which musicians and musical traditions have migrated and converged, where they have reinvented themselves, where notions of Brazilian and ‘Lusophone’ identity have been reconfigured, and where independent, peripheral and underground tendencies have contested the hegemony of the musical ‘mainstream’, whether national or international. While several of the essays exploring these trends work with topics in which geographical locatedness is still familiarly connected to cities or their neighbourhoods, in two cases the idea of musical location moves in fascinating new directions. The first of these is Marcia Tosta Dias’s study of the independent record company Baratos Afins (Chapter 13) which, as a recording label and record store housed in a São Paulo shopping arcade, functioned from the early 1980s as an extraordinary focus and reference-point for musical activity and consumption ranging across jazz, rock, instrumental music and MPB. The other is Simone Pereira de Sá’s analysis of digital culture and YouTube video consumption, which draws on actor-network theory to map what she terms the Peripheral Brazilian Pop Music Network, a field dominated by genres such as sertanejo and funk (Chapter 15).

A common thread in many of the histories narrated here is the role of music in struggles over the occupation and ownership of public spaces. Speaking of recent disputes in Rio de Janeiro around community ownership and state appropriation of cultural space in the regenerated port area (the historical ‘cradle’ of modern samba and black urban identity in the city), Micael Herschmann recalls Henri Lefebvre’s Le Droit à la ville (The Right to the City, 1968), in which Lefebvre envisaged, not a city determined by the decision-making of urban administrators and by capitalist imperatives, but one co-created by its inhabitants in accordance with their collective, day-to-day interests. And here Herschmann invokes the idea of the ‘musical city’:

In a number of cities around the world, musical culture has become a kind of battle-ground, involving conflicts and tensions about pertinent themes such as gentrification, tolerance, security and accessibility. Furthermore, musical scenes and circuits are seeing their social significance steadily strengthened in the fabric of everyday existence upon which urban life is based. As such, we can claim that increasingly, and in different parts of the globe, actors are constructing a ‘musical politics’, which repeatedly makes its demand for what Henri Lefebvre named the ‘right to the city’. (Herschmann 2018)

A fundamental concept mentioned here is that of musical scenes. Deployed extensively elsewhere in this volume – most notably in Herschmann and Trotta’s essay on samba and choro, Jeder Janotti Junior’s examination of ‘Heavy Brazilian Music’, Simone Pereira de Sá’s study of digital culture, music video and peripheral pop, and Paula Guerra’s concluding essay on underground music in contemporary Portugal, where it is theorized at length – a scene is a way of mapping ‘clusters’ of cultural life in terms of the intersections between territory, musical genre and social activity. Although used informally for many years by musicians, audiences, journalists and others, it was first conceptualized academically by Will Straw (2004a; 2004b), in an effort to move beyond subculture as the defining conceptual framework for examining the relationship between music, community and place. Scene is conceived as a more expansive and flexible means of explaining collective investment in particular music genres, no longer being solely tied to physical community spaces, but also coalescing around more trans-local networks embracing a variety of urban and regional settings. Bennett and Peterson’s key innovation (2004) was the addition of the virtual scene, suggesting the possibility of scenes in a purely mediated, online context with no physical basis as such. In his essay in this volume, Janotti proposes a further dimension, that of sonorities, which he defines as

socio-technical processes, the fruit of a symbiosis between human bodies and sonic objects (such as instruments, amplifiers, equalizers, loudspeakers, sound reproducers, headphones) and which, in the case of recordings, presuppose a collective labour involving musicians, technicians and producers.

Structure

Organized into three parts, the overarching structure of this book describes a tidal motion, from the shifting currents of the transatlantic crossings and internal migrations that have shaped the colonial and postcolonial field of Lusophone music-making, to a nexus of arrival, encounter and struggle where the local, the national and the international meet in the entrepôt that is the city of Rio de Janeiro, and back outwards to the contemporary ‘ocean of sound’ that is the decentralized, deterritorialized and transnational virtual space of the twenty-first century.

Part 1, Colonial and Postcolonial Transnationalisms, Migrations and Diasporas, focuses on the musical movements and fluxes that have traversed the Atlantic world since the colonial period, including the diasporic extensions of African instruments and music-making; the role of early forms of mechanical music-recording in mediating between Portuguese and Brazilian popular songs in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro; the story of música caipira in articulating the experience of ‘rooting’ and ‘uprooting’ in the twentieth-century migratory movements of the São Paulo peasantry, and the contemporary phenomenon of Brazilian musicians living in the cities of Lisbon and Madrid, where they negotiate the needs and expectations of their expatriate communities, tourists and local audiences.

Part 2, Relocating Rio de Janeiro, considers how, in its identification with key musical traditions such as samba, pagode and choro, the city has been a contested space – geographically, symbolically and politically – whether in the memories and mythologies of key neighbourhoods and locations of music-making as expressed in the musical discourses themselves, through music’s involvement in material and symbolic forms of community life and popular culture, including religion, carnival and other festivals, or through the competing claims of official state institutions and policies, the recording industry, and grassroots communitarian initiatives. In these efforts to map the city’s musical history and geography, every topographical term and toponym – morro, asfalto, Cidade Nova, Lapa, subúrbio, terreiro, Pequena África – is replete with meaning.

In Part 3, Demetropolitanizing the Musical City – Other Scenes, Industries, Technologies, we explore how contemporary developments in the independent, underground and peripheral music scenes in Brazil and Portugal have challenged traditional narratives and hierarchies that dichotomized the field in terms of national tradition versus internationalism, mainstream versus margins and pop versus popular. Genres such as sertaneja universitária, funk, heavy metal, post-punk rock and rap are considered in the light of profound shifts in the economies and technologies of the music industry, including fluctuations in the phonographic sector, the internationalization of audiences, and the rise of YouTube, among other video-based digital platforms, as a predominant medium for the consumption of music.

Part 1

Colonial and postcolonial transnationalisms, migrations and diasporas

Chapter 1

THE CIMBOA AND CAPE VERDEAN TRANSCULTURAL HERITAGE

Luiz Moretto

Bowed stringed lutes, and among them the one-stringed fiddle, are one of the counter-hegemonic cultural practices that have mediated critical, decolonial perspectives in the former Portuguese empire. They are an example of how musical objects can function as ‘instruments of agency’ (Bates 2012) in the interactions between people and their material world, and of how, through processes of revival and reinvention of traditional practice, such agency can give rise to modern creole identities. Taking one such case, this chapter examines the material culture of the Cape Verdean cimboa, exploring its likely connections with practices in continental Africa, and the significance of the revivals it has undergone in contemporary Cape Verde and Brazil.¹

The Cape Verdean one-stringed bowed lute, or cimboa, can be found today in the interior of the island of Santiago, where it is associated with dances of the archipelago and autochthonous rhythms such as the batuku. The municipality of São Domingos, a site of traditional batuku practices, was home to the renowned singer Ntóni Denti d’Oro, the cimboa player Mano Mendi and his apprentice Pascoal Fernandes, who in recent years has extended fiddle practice across other genres in an attempt to legitimize its revival (Bithell and Hill 2014). Considering one-stringed fiddles and their geographical distribution in Africa, and based on the instrument’s characteristics as defined by Jacqueline Djedje (2008), I speculate that the cimboa could be a Cape Verdean recreation of the Gambian Fulbe nyanyeru or riti.² This essay also draws on ethnographic data from the narratives of Brazilian musician Gentil do Orocongo, to posit a link between his one-stringed bowed lute and the Cape Verdean cimboa.

African fiddles spread to diverse regions as enslaved peoples who were forcibly displaced from the continent managed to take knowledge of some of their artefacts with them, including their musical instruments. As a consequence, these instruments should not be regarded simply as the artefacts of a particular material culture; they are not only representative of that culture but are themselves agents in the encounter between different cultural traditions. The narratives provided by my interviewees support the idea that the cimboa has been put to new uses in contemporary Cape Verde.

In Brazil, according to the oral narratives, the cimboa was introduced by a Cape Verdean who arrived on the island of Florianópolis. The Cape Verdean citizen taught a Brazilian musician to play the instrument and he, in his turn, incorporated the music into the practices and style familiar to him and his community. Thus, the fiddle’s morphology and sound were transformed and integrated by this player into the musical genres familiar to his artistic practice within Brazil.

The Cimboa: Fulbe Heritage?

The cimboa or cimbó is similar to instruments found in Upper Guinea such as the nyanyeru and riti. Upper Guinea, which today includes the countries of Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, originally comprised a number of small states with distinct political and ethnolinguistic boundaries, including Futa Jallon in central Guinea and the territories of the Mandinka and Wolof peoples, among others. The Portuguese gathered slaves from all these different regions of Upper Guinea and brought them to Cape Verde, which lay on the trade route from Africa to the Americas, to be used either as forced labour or for export to the Americas (Eltis and Richardson 2010, 96). Among those ethnic groups transported to the archipelago were the Mandinka, Wolof and Fulbe (Carreira 1983).

Santiago was the island with the highest number of forcibly displaced Africans, and the wild areas between the mountains and the valleys were often settled by runaway captives who formed communities or ‘maroons’. The cimboa provides a melodic accompaniment to the batuku dance genre that originated in the rural interior prior to the urbanization of the archipelago (Hurley-Glowa 1997, 119), where I interviewed a cimboa maker and musician. The main rhythmic pattern of this genre shapes the character of fiddle playing in the batuku ensemble, which follows a number of cultural parameters and aesthetic features relating to song, percussion and dance.

The cimboa is fashioned out of a buli (a hemispherical gourd covered with goatskin). Its neck is fixed through the body resonator with a tuning peg at its tip and a hank of horsehair, and its bridge is made of a small piece of gourd. Similar fiddles are played by members of ethnic groups such as the Fulbe, while the Dagbamba play the nyanyeru, goje and the gondze. However, the term cimboa could be of Mandinka origin. Ethnologist Jean-Yves Loude believes that it derives from cimbi, ‘a Mandinka word referring to a type of kora in Western Africa’ (Loude 1998). Loude is probably referring to the Mandinka simbi, a seven-stringed bowed harp that is generally played by hunters but is also a part of the repertoire of instruments used by the jelis, a caste of musicians.³ In terms of its construction, the cimboa is similar in shape and size to the nyanyeru fiddle of the Fulbe or