CONSIDER FOR BUILDING BRIDGES SESSION
The phenomenon of bossa nova, and the success of its singers and composers in the United States in the late 1950s, helped the urban popular song become the most important commodity in Brazilian culture: it was the first Brazilian art genre to be exported and disseminated throughout the Americas. Through this dissemination Brazilian music came to have an enormous influence on the composition of popular music in both South and North America, and yet the genre has been scarcely treated in scholarship. The proposed lecture will begin to address this lacuna. It is crucial to understand the processes through which the Brazilian urban popular song came to be, and the development of its theoretical framework must be understood within the context of its social, cultural and political history. The simple description of events which characterizes previous literature must mature into a more profound analysis, and a more nuanced understanding, which will provide the impetus for future discussion and debate.
The goal of this paper is to give an overview of the development of Brazilian urban song in the past century, and to consider aspects of its composition, including the use of harmonic, melodic, rhythmic and formal features characteristic of Brazilian music. I will then demonstrate the ways in which these formal characteristics were expressive of the social, cultural and political context where they were developed and employed.
The urban song has been in constant evolution since the early days of radio in the 1930s. Due in part to the government's necessity to find a national musical style to help its nationalistic agenda, the samba, once relegated to the lower classes, was adapted by recording companies and transformed into a more lyrical style, resulting in the sambasong; this became the most important type of urban song before the rise of bossa nova. The samba-song gained status and became the preferred musical genre of the middle and upper classes, prevailing in popularity over the folk, instrumental and classical Brazilian varieties.
By the mid-sixties, bossa nova was influencing every aspect of musical production, but its influence was sometimes more idealistic than formalistic. The success overseas was a wake up call: composers realized they were dealing with a product that could represent their culture both inside and outside the country. Musicians started to call the genre Modem Brazilian Popular Music (in Portuguese, the acronym MMPB), losing the "modem" soon after and becoming only MPB. Television networks started to support the urban song as never before (or after), creating programs specialized in these different currents. During this time, when the dictatorship imposed restrictions upon artistic expression, composers became ever more creative to express themselves while evading censorship. Many were forced to move abroad and a few were imprisoned. The Tropicalia movement in the late 1960s could be said to represent the tront-line of the battle, opening doors to new ideas and creating an alternative to purist nationalism. They advocated "cannibalism" in the arts, a way of absorbing and appropriating foreign influences to establish a national identity. Late in the final decade of the twentieth century, the national urban song became one of the few entertainment-related fields to beat the foreign competition in a market oversaturated by American and European products.
In the twenty-first century, the Brazilian urban popular song - born just over seventy years ago - has come to be regarded by many Brazilians as "classic." It has become one of the most important musical genres of this country in which music is perhaps the primary means of expression of volatile social, cultural and political movements. An increased scholarly awareness of the genre will yield opportunity for better understandings of both modem Brazilian culture as a whole, and of modem popular music throughout the Americas.