Colonial-era Brazilian music: a review essay of recent recordings.(Essay)

INTRODUCTION

What does the late 1960s Brazilian popular music movement Tropicalia have in common with the late 1700s Sao Paulo mestre de capela Andre da Silva Gomes (1752-1844)? They both had a collaborator--in a manner of speaking--in the composer and arranger Rogerio Duprat. When the Silva Gomes manuscripts were discovered in 1960, Duprat devoted himself to their transcription and edition. This was a couple of years before he would spearhead the avant-garde musica nova movement, and it was seven years before his involvement with Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Tom Ze, and the rock band Mutantes as the musical arranger for the seminal album Tropicalia, ou panis et circensis (Polydor LPNG 44.018 [1967]; reissued on compact disc as Polygram 119 271 [1997]). Having known of Duprat for his avant-garde work and his distinctive arrangements for rock and popular musicians, I was at first surprised to see his name associated with eighteenth century sacred music. I should not have been: Duprat is referred to as "the George Martin of Brazil," in part for his pioneering work with the Tropicalist musicians, but also for his familiarity with Western classical traditions. His brother, Regis Duprat, is a musicologist and performer of colonial music. Indeed, the lasting influence of Tropicalia owes to its original mixture of erudite and popular culture. (1) The Sao Paulo based classical music label Paulus has released two recordings of music by Silva Gomes, as well as other recordings of sacred music from roughly the same period. These CDs are among several I will review in this essay on recordings of music from colonial-era Brazil released since 1995. My intention here is not primarily to evaluate the quality of these recordings, although I will do so to some extent, but rather to draw attention to their existence and to elaborate in broad terms the current status of recorded performances of music from Brazil's colonial period. Among the ensembles whose recordings will be described in this essay are: the Brasilessentia Vocal Group and Orchestra, Collegium Musicium de Minas, Camerata Novo Horizonte de Sao Paulo, Ensemble Turicum, Quadro Cervantes, Vox Brasiliensis, and a group called XVIII-21 Musiques des Lumieres. All of these CDs were released on small labels or, in some cases, by the artists themselves, and thus are difficult to acquire in the United States.

BACKGROUND

Brazil's colonial period is generally said to have begun when Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral landed on the shores of Bahia in 1500, and to have ended in 1822 after King Joao VI--who brought his entire court to Rio de Janeiro in 1808--returned to Lisbon, leaving his son Prince Pedro in charge of the colony. The Portuguese royal court had fled Napoleon's armies in 1807 in more than 70 ships escorted by the British Navy. In exchange, Britain secured favorable trading rights with Brazil, which gave it considerable control over the country's economy for about 100 years. Nevertheless, the presence of King Joao and his court invigorated public life in Rio de Janeiro. The residency of this monarch in his colony is unique in the history of European colonialism. The city suddenly became more cosmopolitan. Among the important items that accompanied the court's transfer to Rio was Dom Joao's library of some 60,000 volumes, which were made available to the public in Brazil. In 1811, Portugal's most renowned composer, Marcos Portugal, also came to Rio, displacing the exceptionally gifted but less famous priest Jose Mauricio Nunes Garcia, known in Brazil as Jose Mauricio, from the position of mestre de capela of the Royal Chapel. Shortly after his father's departure for Lisbon in 1822, Prince Pedro read the writing on the wall and declared the country's independence. He created the Empire of Brazil and named himself emperor. The empire remained under the control of descendents of the Portuguese royalty until 1889 when the army overthrew Emperor Pedro II and formed a Republic. Hence, Portuguese metropolitan culture--and European culture more generally--remained dominant in the former colony for several years after formal independence from Portugal.

Almost no written music remains from the period before the mid-1700s, with the exception of a few pieces from the second quarter of the eighteenth century (the Mogi das Cruzes folios, for example, discussed below). The majority of existing manuscripts date from 1770 onward. During this period, art music composition was overwhelmingly centered on religious music. Hence, when we speak of written music from Brazil's colonial era we refer primarily to what is known from manuscripts and other sources of a relatively limited period of time beginning with the second quarter of the eighteenth century and ending in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Since Portugal did not allow any publishing in the colony, all such sources are hand copied and many scores have had to be reconstructed from various incomplete parts.

Many colonial manuscripts were destroyed, although it is likely that there are still historically important works to be discovered in Brazil. Uruguayan musicologist Fransisco Curt Lange (1903-1997), the pioneer of the study of Brazilian colonial music in the state of Minas Gerais, peppered his articles on the topic with prickly stories of neglected, destroyed, or narrowly salvaged manuscripts: "A lot of music was sold by the pound for packing meat and various articles in shops," he wrote. "I learned of 27 archives burned in the street ... because they 'were inconvenient.' Many scores were sacrificed for making fireworks rockets, preferred for their high resistance to the gunpowder." (2) Lange provided a monumental impetus for the development of a serious historical musicology of Brazilian colonial music and, indeed, for the development of the discipline of musicology in general in Brazil. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, there was a significant intensification in the study of Brazilian art music from the later colonial period and from the beginning of the Imperial era (1822-1889).

New research, performances, and recordings were also spurred by the cultural celebrations surrounding the commemoration of 500 years since Pedro Alvares Cabral's landing on the littoral of what would become Brazil. Many local and state government institutions and national businesses such as the Itau Bank and oil giant Petrobras began to sponsor musicological endeavors. (3) Attractive editions of works were published by scholars such as Paulo Castagna, Regis Duprat and others; (4) the biographies of the composers and musicians active in the colonial period were augmented; the number of public performances of such repertoire expanded considerably, with increased overseas exposure; and new recordings were released of the works of important composers such as the above-mentioned Andre da Silva Gomes and Jose Mauricio Nunes Garcia (1767-1830), Luis Alvares Pinto (1719-1789), Jose Joaquim Emerico Lobo de Mesquita (1746-1805), Manoel Dias de Oliveira (1738-1813), and Marcos Coelho Neto (ca. 1750-1823). The quality of such recordings varies; some present rather lifeless interpretations and poor audio quality, while others feature spirited performances with period instruments.