Brazil in France, 1922: an anthropological study of the congenital international nexus of popular music.(Critical essay)

ABSTRACT: In 1922, the famous musical ensemble from Rio de Janeiro, Os Batutas, spent six months in Paris, playing in night clubs and parties. The group was under the direction of Pixinguinha and included Donga, composer of "Pelo Telefone's" music. The trip is a little-known episode in the history of Brazilian popular music, with important consequences for Pixinguinha's career and the future of Brazilian popular music. The article is an anthropological study, approaching it as the departure phase toward Pixinguinha's consecration. Theoretically, the article is based on the author's formulations regarding the understanding of popular music as a crucial language of the system of relationships of modern nation-states, with articulated local, regional, national, and global nexuses. Here art, foil and popular music are considered as universes in communication and sound recording ("phonography") as a constitutive process. The reconstruction of the journey is made through the reading of French newspaper and other texts of the time.

RESUMO: Em 1922, o famoso grupo musical carioca, Os Oito Batutas, passou seis meses em Paris, apresentando-se em casas notumas e festas. O grupo era dirigido pot Pixinguinha e incluia Donga, autor da musica de Pelo Telefone. A viagem e um episodio pouco conhecido da historia da musica popular brasileira, com consequencias importantes para a carreira de Pixinguinha e para o futuro dessa musica. O artigo e um estudo antropologico que a aborda como fase inicial na direcao da consagracao de Pixinguinha. Teoricamente, o artigo e baseado nas formulacoes do autor a respeito da compreensao da musica popular como linguagem crucial do sistema de relacoes dos estados-nacoes modemos, com nexos locals, regionais, nacionais, e globais articulados. Essas formulacoes estabelecem as musicas erudita, popular, e folclorica como universos em comunicacao e a fonografia como processo constitutivo da musica. A reconstituicao da viagem e feita atraves da leitura de jornais e outros textos franceses da epoca.

A memoria de Gerard Behague, amigo e guru.

In recent papers (Menezes Bastos 1996, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2002a, 2002b, 2003, 2005), I have developed the idea that Brazilian popular music--or any popular music--can only be fully understood within a framework that simultaneously addresses local, regional, national, and global meanings; and that approaches art, folk, and popular music as linked phenomena. This idea has been fruitful in the study of Brazilian popular music from this music's inaugural phase, represented by the genres modinha and lundu. These constituted one of the first cases of globalization in the realm of modem Western popular music (from the eighteenth century on), within the context of the system of relationships involving the respective nation-states. French vocal romance and court air, Italian bel' canto, and other musical genres linked the Brazilian forms to Europe. These genres, along with their Brazilian and Portuguese variants, formed a Luso-Brazilian node of the system--one node among other plausible European-Hispano-American nodes--a modernization of moda, a label that in both countries had defined since the early eighteenth century any kind of song having love as one of its crucial universes of meaning. Local versions were soon erected as emblems of Brazilian and Portuguese national identities. Domingos Caldas Barbosa (Rio, 1738-Lisbon, 1800) was the demiurgic point of encounter of this global system, toward the formalization of the Luso-Brazilian genres.

I have also proposed that since its origins in the eighteenth century, prior to Brazil's formal independence from Portugal, Brazilian popular music has been a privileged arena in which the country's crucial questions could be discussed. Customs involving class, ethnicity, nationality, gender, family, and other kinds of relationships have been some of its preferred topics. This inclination was particularly evident during critical periods of Brazilian history--such as the politically dense 1930s (see Menezes Bastos 1999b)--when society at the local, regional, and national levels was divided into often incompatible positions. Therefore, Brazilian popular music, since its very inception, has been a crucial dialogical system through which the various segments of Brazilian society could converse about the country and the world, negotiate positions, and, typically, discuss identities. The proposition under analysis necessarily views Brazil not only in terms of what happened in Rio de Janeiro, as the canonical narratives usually do, but in its entirety. Note that the international context was congenital to the genesis of samba, since the time when the label--as that of tango in Argentina (Sandroni 1996, 140)--was just an umbrella term for pan-Latin American African-ness linked to the music-dance sphere.

Finally, my recent work (1) has taken as a starting point the suggestion that in the 1930s, at the same time that Carioca samba became Brazil's emblematic national popular music, Argentine tango was undergoing a similar phenomenon (Grunewald 1994), and that the two events were symptomatically simultaneous with the disappearance in Brazil of the so-called tanguinho or Brazilian tango (Tinhorao 1991, 97-102). In other Latin American countries, it seems that an analogous process took place, as in Cuba respective to rumba (Alen 1984; Daniel 1995). This points to the fact that these emergences were not simply coincidental, but were systematically related social-cultural phenomena within the international system of modem nation-states, involving Latin American linkages with Western Europe and the United States. This can be truly understood only within a global framework of layered musical relationships in which musical genres epitomize local (cities, regions, countries, etc.) forms of sociability. Within this framework, Paris performed an absolutely crucial role as the location par excellence for the consecration of emblematic national Latin American musical genres until the 1920s. Later, with the consolidation of jazz, a genre that was itself baptized in "La Ville Lumiere," as the new musical katholon of the world system, that role migrated to the United States. It was to that Paris, then, the city still often viewed as Europe's cultural capital, the city that for Brazilian elites of the time was the cultural capital of the world, that the thereafter famous Brazilian musical ensemble Os Oito Batutas traveled in 1922 under the guidance of Pixinguinha. Through this trip, a figurative journey to the center of the earth, Pixinguinha made his foundational step in the transformation of Afro-Brazilian heritage from a cultural problem into a solution, preempting a wider cultural transformation that would only be consolidated in Brazil during the 1930s.

"Les Batutas" in Paris: A Brazilian Journey to the Center of Earth