Presentation
This course offers a general view of the history of Brazilian music considering that musical production and fruition in Brazil can only be understood in depth from a contemporary perspective if structured upon a tripod whose legs correspond to different but interconnected social practices: : 1) traditional music, practiced mainly by the basis of the Brazilian social pyramid, frequently engaged in the celebration of daily life and relying essentially on direct oral transmission; 2) classical music, a social practice destined basically to the entertainment of a selected segment of the upper social strata, associated to the imposition of aesthetical, religious and behavioral patterns of excellence and whose transmission characteristically takes place by means of written sources; 3) mediatic music, conceived originally as a product of the cultural industry, whose transmission is designed to make use of the various media of mass communication but that, as remarked by Herbert Marcuse, has never been exempt from expressing the essential contradictions of the society that it intends to represent.
II) From folk-lore to mass culture: the genesis of Brazilian popular music as a mediatic phenomenon;
III) Cosmopolitanism vs Regionalism: the 20th century dilemma
IV) The Villa-Lobos phenomenon as an exponente of Brazilian art and ethos
V) The ascension of Bossa Nova and the Golden Age of mass media music in Brazil
VI) Traditional music in the Cariri region: a view from the roots of Brazilian musical praxis