When a British Tour Changed Perspectives on Colonial Brazilian Music

A British tour that changed perspectives on colonial Brazilian music

The year is not given, but a leading British choir and orchestra were scheduled to tour São Paulo and Minas Gerais, performing local works. For a group of such distinction to focus on what was then called the colonial music of Brazil was virtually unprecedented. Rumors suggested that the ensemble’s director was not particularly enthusiastic about the repertoire. He was unfamiliar with it, and when local musicologists presented pieces they considered suitable for the tour, he remained underwhelmed. Nonetheless, the concerts in São Paulo and São João del Rei were remarkable. The program opened with the gradual Angelus Domine, a brief piece by Manoel Dias de Oliveira (1738–1813), followed by the relatively well-known Novena de Nossa Senhora do Pilar (1779) by Francisco Gomes da Rocha (c 1740–1808). This sectional work had been performed and recorded many times after Francisco Curt Lange’s edition, but it had never sounded so focused, especially in the string writing, which is unusually agitated by late eighteenth-century Mineiro standards. The concerts concluded with the Responsórios Fúnebres (1807), an unfinished late work by João de Deus de Castro Lobo (1794–1832), whose life bridged the colonial period and beyond. In his youth, he worked at Vila Rica’s opera house—built in 1769 and still functioning—and operatic influences are evident in most of his works, even in a piece written for a funeral service. In the Responsórios Fúnebres, Castro Lobo employs a dense orchestral texture with demanding vocal parts and frequent rhythmic-harmonic patterns that aim for a dramatic or grandiose effect, yet within tightly structured forms dictated by liturgical needs.

Those performances quickly became benchmarks. Soon afterward, European music festivals and recording labels developed an interest in colonial Brazil. Excellent recordings followed, particularly those by Jean-Cristophe Frisch with Ensemble XVIII-21 (recorded on K617) and Luiz Alves da Silva with Ensemble Turicum (Claves and K617), which also explored repertoire from Pernambuco and Rio de Janeiro. Yet musicologists in Brazil still treasure cassette tapes, duplicated from an imperfect recording of the São Paulo concert. These would later be converted into MP3 files and eventually find their way onto the iPods of younger enthusiasts. Listening to that 2001 recording was one of the experiences that propelled me into historical musicology. The following year I enrolled in the graduate program in musicology at the University of São Paulo.

Newspapers in São Paulo were unusually enthusiastic about the British group’s concert, and almost everyone in São João del Rei loved them. Almost. During the gold rush from the early eighteenth century until the arrival of the Portuguese court in 1808, Minas Gerais was the center of a thriving musical culture. Dozens of composers and hundreds of performers were cataloged in pioneering studies by Francisco Curt Lange. In São João del Rei and neighboring Tiradentes—the birthplace of Manoel Dias de Oliveira—musical societies can trace their activities back to the 1770s and proudly cherish the Lira Sanjoanense as the oldest continuously active orchestra in South America. The society holds a remarkable archive of manuscript scores from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including the earliest examples of Brazilian chamber music. So when local musicians and some of the most devoted Catholics in the region—people who grew up attending feasts and processions accompanied by their two-hundred-year-old orchestras—went to that concert and listened to the British renditions of “their” music, they felt a little uneasy. The tempos seemed too fast, too dance-like. What would happen if a procession had to follow that music? Would it turn into a Carnival parade? Besides, it was too “perfect.” The performers’ confidence was perceived by some as a distracting display of human arrogance. But Mineros are usually tolerant of those who approach their traditions. One local musician confided that the British were very good—what they needed was a longer stay in the region so they could learn the proper way to perform that music.

Would the outcome have been different if a British group had visited the same region in 1790? Certainly some locals would still have dismissed a perceived un-Catholic approach, but the sense of alienation from their own music would not have been nearly as strong as in 2001, because the eighteenth-century visitors would surely have been familiar with the Neapolitan style then pervasive in Portugal and Brazil. What is certain is that a performance given by the Companhia de Música—as the Lira Sanjoanense was known in the eighteenth century—would have sounded very different from one by their successors in 2004.

Competition was fierce among musicians in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais. Judging by some challenging passages in Castro Lobo’s music, especially in his Missa e Credo a Oito Vozes, few major orchestras and choirs in Brazil today have professionals of equivalent standard. Additionally, many things changed during the nineteenth century in terms of musical performance and instrument-making. Another change was the conservative turn the Catholic Church took around 1870, with the Caecilian movement and the First Vatican Council. This shift certainly shaped a more pious and less flashy style of performing sacred music, even in remote Minas Gerais. On top of that, economic difficulties during most of the nineteenth century forced many musicians to relocate to Rio de Janeiro, which altered local performance practices and allowed for fewer displays of virtuosity.

If performance practices evolved, the musical repertoire, some of which dates from the gold-rush era, never stopped being performed locally. Mineiro orchestras remained active, probably because they were able to adapt and reinvent themselves, remaining meaningful and functional within their changing community. Musicologists may or may not approve of how these orchestras play, but we are all grateful that they have preserved some of the richest musical archives in Brazil. But what if, in this process of reinventing themselves, the keepers of a specific musical repertoire also modify it to make it more suited to changing tastes and practices?

Here is another story. The Portuguese musician Theodoro Cyro de Sousa was only fifteen when he sailed to Brazil as the newly appointed chapel master of the Cathedral of Salvador, Bahia. The year was 1769. While he left some works at the Patriarchal Seminar in Lisbon, the Motetos para os passos da procissão do Senhor are his only surviving works from Brazil. In 1995, Alexandre Bispo published an edition based on an 1885 copy he found in the archive of a wind band in Alagoinhas, a town not far from Salvador. The instrumentation did not correspond to late eighteenth-century Luso-Brazilian practices. Some of the winds had obviously been added during the mid- or late nineteenth century to substitute for strings at a time when wind bands were replacing orchestras in many provincial towns throughout Brazil—or when orchestras like the Lira Sanjoanense functioned as wind bands. In 2004, the piece was performed and recorded by an orchestra of students and amateur musicians in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, after Sérgio Dias restored it to something approaching its “original” state, with voices, winds, and strings.

This story has interesting implications. At a conference after the concert, ethnomusicologist Manuel Veiga stated that the attempt to “old-fashionize” a living tradition made no sense to him. He questioned why some musicologists have such an aversion to practices of updating music, which are so common in virtually all musical traditions. An obvious—and perhaps cynical—rejoinder would be that early music scholars and performers should surely be allowed to do their own updating (or perhaps downdating) to make the music relevant to their own communities. Here we come to a phenomenon that Bastide, Hobsbawm, Taruskin, and others have analyzed under different names: we think we are doing something very old, but in fact, what we do is very new.

Brazilian archives hold many works in several stages of revision, from simple reorchestrations to recompositions of entire sections, often maintaining the original identification of authorship. In most cases, there is at least one autograph or copy prepared during the composer’s lifetime, and these are the usual choices when establishing a text for a musical edition. However, that was not the case with the project Acervo da Música Brasileira, sponsored by the Archdiocese of Mariana and directed by Paulo Castagna. Mariana’s Museu da Música holds one of the most impressive archives in the country. The project’s aim was to edit key works in the version that survived in their archives, even though an autograph of the same piece—sometimes with very different music—was known to exist elsewhere. Thanks to that, we can study different versions of the same piece, even resorting to facsimile copies, since these are available on the Museu’s website. High-quality recordings accompanied each of the collection’s nine volumes. Castro Lobo’s Responsórios were included in the volume and CD titled Música Fúnebre.

The issue of musical updating has always captured my interest. Working with guitar and salterio tablatures and more recently with theatrical music in eighteenth-century Brazil and Portugal, it is fascinating to see how much a reworked score can reveal about musical practices and the level of autonomy individuals exercised when approaching the authority of a musical text. Unfortunately, some analytical and methodological tools can mislead us into classifying everything as a kind of adulteration or corruption. As popular music scholars and ethnomusicologists have already discovered, one of the most pressing tasks when encountering a previously unstudied repertoire is to develop an analytical approach that is sensitive to the music under consideration, without imposing unsuitable or culturally inappropriate value judgments.

But it is not only when dealing with reworking practices that some forms of analysis are unhelpful. One last story. In a previous editorial in this journal, Manuel Carlos de Brito discussed aspects of Mozart reception in Portugal. Historically, the distaste—or at least lack of enthusiasm—for his music in that country did not arise from an anti-hegemonic resistance to the beginnings of an inexorable German invasion of the Western musical canon. Audiences simply wanted more singable melodies and a thinner orchestral texture, and performers wanted clearer spots for ornamentation. Mozart’s operas were not very successful in Portugal and Brazil, yet his Requiem was performed several times in Lisbon during the early nineteenth century and even in Rio de Janeiro in 1819, conducted by local composer José Maurício Nunes Garcia—with a new ending written by Sigismund Neukomm during his residence there. Even considering the relative success of at least one of his sacred works, I suspect that if we approach music composed for audiences who were not particularly fond of Mozart with the largely nineteenth-century Germanic analytical tools that were developed precisely to establish Mozart’s style as paradigmatic, we risk a biased picture. When analyzing music composed in Minas Gerais or Rio de Janeiro, we would find only superficial similarities with the Viennese classical style. And when analyzing Mozart, we might overlook features that made audiences yawn in early nineteenth-century Lisbon. Looking for a place for Mineiro music in the Western canon, Francisco Curt Lange fell into a similar trap. Rather than exploring the Neapolitan models absorbed by Portuguese composers and then exported to the colony, he traced flawed connections with Mannheim, Bohemia, and even the early Haydn.

Cultural and contextual approaches are natural choices when studying the musical practices of Portugal and its South American colony, especially if we consider issues of ethnicity and power. At the same time, textual analysis of the music remains necessary if one wants to draw a useful picture of the musical output of a given composer, region, or period—to identify anonymous works, stylistic trends or schools, and to deal with issues of continuity and change. That is, of course, if we still consider those things necessary. It is easy to dismiss Iberian and Latin American musicology as too positivistic—as I often hear—but we actually need even more archival work and manuscript studies. Despite the large quantity of eighteenth-century music manuscripts scattered through dozens of archives in Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo, we lack sufficient editions, catalogs, or even biographies. Even the work done by a handful of musicologists from previous generations needs systematic reassessment.

And there is the human dimension of studying a repertoire that has helped shape the memory of a remote community and in some cases still plays a significant role in its everyday rituals. What compensation do we offer when we build a career studying the music of a group that has preserved it and kept it functional for two centuries? Should we “fix” their music? When we first hear a Mineiro wind band playing outdoors during a religious festival—or indeed one of their old orchestras—we are not quite sure what we are dealing with. We might recognize the instruments and follow patterns of European phrase structure and common-practice harmony familiar to us, but some aspects do not feel quite right. Tuning, tempos, articulation, ornamentation, sometimes even the instrumentation might approach what we usually classify as “traditional” music or music from an “oral tradition” (when not simply amateurish), while other aspects will collide with our expectations and, I would hope, open our minds to different ways of thinking.

Editing and especially performing this repertoire pushes us into dangerous ethical territory. Often, our choices and priorities differ from those of communities who cherish that repertoire as a living tradition. How we approach their repertoire, orchestras, and bands is a delicate issue. Some exchange will inevitably take place, and the negotiation that follows might be fruitful for both sides—but it could easily result in a blow to the locals’ self-esteem, with harmful consequences, especially if it involves displays of economic and technological power. Anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have debated this issue for decades without reaching agreement on how much interference should be allowed and under what circumstances. On the other hand, most of the time people living in remote or rural communities are savvier than we urban and academic creatures might assume. If they find our discourse about culture and heritage useful, they will soon incorporate it and remodel it to suit their own needs.

As it happens, in recent decades there have been ethically sound and musically fruitful collaborations between musicologists and some communities in Minas Gerais, each side aware of the other’s priorities and accepting their diverging aesthetics. In a still incipient manner, musicologists are finding ways to apply the principle of giving back to the community while conducting their research. The simplest and most common method has been to set aside a number of volumes of edited scores or CDs to be marketed by the archive holders or caretakers. Since not all music in a given archive is still played by local bands or orchestras, published scores and concert performances of forgotten pieces are ways that communities get to know exactly what they have in their history—and they may reincorporate that music into their living tradition, aware that they might be inventing a tradition, as Hobsbawm put it. This is very different from half a century ago, when some musicologists still made a habit of touring the interior, purchasing musical archives, and keeping them for their own use, often portraying themselves as heroes into the bargain.

This is not to say that it would ever be possible or desirable for me to dissociate myself from the complex, historically mediated set of attitudes and preferences that come with being a twenty-first-century musicologist. I still prefer Süssmayr’s ending to Mozart’s Requiem over Neukomm’s. It is perfectly natural for adjectives such as “peculiar” or “odd” to come to mind when hearing the old orchestras from Minas Gerais perform their standard repertoire, but regarding them as a pale reflection of what they once were is just simplistic. They are still fulfilling a liturgical role, just as their eighteenth-century counterparts did—even though the Church, its liturgy, and Mineiro musical taste have all changed. If we still do not know how to deal with that, why not spend some time there? One musician in São João del Rei has already said he would welcome us.