BRAZILIAN MUSIC AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS: - Elisabeth Blin

I: TRADITION
Early Origins of Protest Music: Music As Resistance
Discovery-Acculturation-Miscegenation
“Brazil is a love story between races.”
Stefan Zweig, 1994 8
The complexity of Brazilian identity has long been a subject of debate. Travelers of
the seventeenth century were already amazed at the juxtaposition of genres, races and
diverse rituals present in Brazil. Three hundred years later, the Brazilian historian
Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987) called “the complexity of Brazil” “an anthropological
problem. 9 ” The difficulty of the Brazilian people to define their own identity is explained
by Caetano Veloso who sees Brazil as “a name without a country, (…) the double, the
shadow, the negative image of the great adventure of the New World. 10 ”
The origins of modern Brazil are bound in a melting pot where miscegenation
and black slave resistance have generated a unique musical sound. As a result,
music in Brazil is the primary manifestation of both Brazilianness and protest.
The osmosis of black and white cultures became the foundation of Brazilian
society in the sixteenth century, and the Mexican writer, Jose de Vasconcelos,
even speculated that “Brazil might be the first country in the Americas to achieve his
ideal of forming the ‘cosmic race,’ a people who were neither European, African or
8 Bresil, Terre d’Avenir, La Tour d’Aigues : Editions de l’Aube, In Delfino 1998, Brasil: A Musica,
Panorama Des Musiques Populaires Bresiliennes (Marseille: Editions Parentheses), 15 (230 pages)
9 Vianna, 58
10 Veloso, 4
3