Tamara Elena Livingston-Isenhour and Thomas George Caracas Garcia. Choro: A Social History of a Brazilian Popular Music.(Book review)

TAMARA ELENA LIVINGSTON-ISENHOUR and THOMAS GEORGE CARACAS GARCIA. Choro: A Social History of a Brazilian Popular Music. 2005. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Brazilian choro shares much with its more markedly Afro-Brazilian relative samba, which eclipses the largely instrumental genre in the national and international spotlight. Both begin to emerge during the Brazilian belle epoque, their respective mixtures of African and European musical elements celebrated by the New Republic in the 1930s as representative of the nation's foundational racial and cultural mixture. Choro: A Social History of a Brazilian Popular Music by Tamara Elena Livingston-Isenhour and Thomas George Caracas Garcia aims to correct choro's underrepresentation in the English-language literature by examining choro performance practice in the shifting context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazil.

Choro occupies much of the same historical terrain covered by recent samba scholarship, including The Mystery of Samba by Hermano Vianna and Feitico Decente by Carlos Sandroni. Vianna's and Sandroni's books are useful to assign together in a seminar on Latin American music because they complement each other. Vianna's book is a historical work written by an anthropologist focusing on salient issues surrounding popular music, racial mixture, social class and modernist nationalism broadly spanning the last two centuries. Sandroni is an ethnomusicologist, guitarist and composer who is well versed in historical musicology. His book focuses on the pivotal years in the development of the samba, 1917-1931, as he examines how the issues discussed by Vianna mentioned above affect samba's musical details as the style crystallizes as a musical emblem of the Brazilian nation.

Instead of publishing separate books readable in tandem like Vianna and Sandroni, Thomas Garcia and Tamara Elena Livingston-Isenhour, a PhD in performance practice and an ethnomusicologist, respectively, decided to coauthor Choro, combining their work on these familiar themes of popular music, race, class, and Brazilian modernism. Both guitarists who admire Villa-Lobos, Garcia and Livingston-Isenhour joined forces after discovering the extent to which their research dovetailed. Garcia wrote his dissertation on the history of the choro from the 1870s to the 1950s, and Livingston-Isenhour focused on the choro revival from the 1970s until the present. The resulting book is an ambitious mixture of broad social history, detailed analysis of choro musical style, and ethnography of performance practice.

The book begins with brief personal accounts of how the two authors came to become interested in the genre through their studies of Heitor Villa-Lobos's choro-influenced concert music for guitar. This movement from studying Villa-Lobos to researching choro identifies a core constituency of the book's intended audience: Villa-Lobos devotees who desire to learn more about this genre of popular music that often influenced the composer's work. Chapter 1 begins with a useful outline of the genre's musical characteristics, including examples of standard rhythms, countermelodies, and basslines. Chapters 2 and 4 examine the genres lundu, modinha, and maxixe that preceded choro, and the origins of choro in the choromeleiro ensembles and barber's groups. Interspersed within this account of this account of the genre's consolidation, Chapter 4 also provides concise New Grove-style biographies of the principal composers and performers of early choro: Joaquim Antonio da Silva Calado, Anacleto de Medeiros, and Francisca Edwiges Neves "Chiquinha" Gonzaga.

Chapter 3 interrupts this broader historical narrative with a discussion of a privileged context of choro music-making: the roda, or porous circle of musicians in a bar, backyard, or private party. The chapter began with a fictionalized account of an 1893 roda that read as a textual equivalent of a dramatic historical reenactment. Upon first reading, I was skeptical of this passage, which risks falling into caricature. I must concede, however, that the students in my undergraduate survey class responded quite positively to this imaginative exercise; they insisted that it allowed them to better envision the context of the genre's early history, and offered respire from the drier prose of prior historical sections. Through its focus on the context of the roda, ...