Martha Tupinambá de Ulhôa

Martha Tupinambá de Ulhôa
New rhythms and names:
Marisa Monte, Carlinhos
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Photo: Mario Thompson
Marisa Monte
Brown, Manguebeat, Rap.
Rio de Janeiro, lyrical song and samba;
Salvador, Ogun worship and street carnival; Recife, hip hop and maracatu. Marisa
Monte, Carlinhos Brown, Chico Sciense...
New names and new rhythms in MPB?
New names, yes, but the sounds aren’t that
Ana Carolina
Photo: Prensa 3
new. What do they have in common?
Eclecticism and the mixture of genres and
rhythms, which is a tradition in the
Brazilian musical culture, a culture that is
characterized by absorption and reinter-
Photo: Mario Thompson
pretation of rhythms and forms from a
Carlinhos Brown
variety of ethnic and social backgrounds.
Rap seems to be another story, perhaps the
only totally new element in the MPB scene.
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Photo: Mario Thompson
Lenine
Carioca Marisa Monte is enthralling in the fluency
with which she sings, in a refined way, from traditional
sambas to the classics of North American repertoire.
Recreations are included that have become emblematic,
such as "Chocolate", by Tim Maia, on the record Marisa Monte
Live, of 1988. Initiating in lyrical song, Marisa Monte later
began to sing the popular repertoire in night clubs,
from where she set out on her artistic career. In her shows
and recordings she also introduced her own compositions.
In this category the highlight is for her partnership with
Arnaldo Antunes, in the intriguing "Amor I Love You",
a hit recorded in Memórias, Crônicas e Declarações de Amor,
of 2000. Another field of activity of Marisa’s is musical
production, either of the section of composers of a
traditional samba school, like the Velha Guarda da Portela,
or of records of other artists, like Carlinhos Brown
in the record Omelette Man. 2
Bahian Carlinhos Brown fascinates for the athletic
exhibition of his percussion, which also permeates his lyrics,
chosen more for sonority than for semantics.
His path began with street percussion, related to the carnival
culture, the electric trios and afro music. Another of Carlinhos’s
foundations is inscribed in his stage name:
the influence of James Brown, indicating his preference for
soul/funk and for the use of the body as a performance
instrument. His other foundation is the musical
tradition related to Ogun, the African deity of iron worshipped
in Candeal Pequeno, where Carlinhos was born and raised.
It was there that, in 1992, the artist created the
Timbalada band, a group with more than 100 percussionists
from the neighborhood. Several musical codes are
mixed. Funk, rap, reggae, samba, rock and candomblé
produce a hybrid, at the same time pop, globalized
and also very Bahian music. In 1996 Alfagamabetizado is
launched (a combination of the word “alfabetizado"
(literate) and the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet,
"alpha" and "gamma"), a record that was hailed both
by critics and the public. Still in the same year a
professional school for street musicians was created.
In addition to the school and the Timbalada, Carlinhos a
lso sponsors a band of female percussionists, called
Bolacha Maria, and a children’s band, the Lactomania.
In the nineteenth
century, the polka
lent the agitated
form of dancing
in joined pairs to
the tradition of
dancing in free
pairs of the lundu.
From Pernambuco, Chico Sciense is noteworthy but not alone
amongst several representatives of the pulsating musical
movement that arose in the mangrove region of Recife.
After going through hip hop and post-punk rock,
Chico Science’s group joined other samba-reggae musicians
forming the band Chico Science & Nação Zumbi.
The second work recorded by the group, Afrociberdelia (1996)
shows the type of mixture that became typical of the
movement’s representatives (rap, electronic music, rock and
traditional genres of Pernambuco, such as maracatu, coco,
ciranda, etc.). It is not without reason that Chico Sciense e
Nação Zumbi included three versions of “Maracatu Atômico”,
composed by Jorge Mautner and Nelson Jacobina, in the
previously mentioned CD. Maracatu is related to the place,
the mangrove; atomic for the reference to the global pop culture
pop. The movement as a manifesto (Caranguejos com Cérebro,
published in 1992) appraises the Mangue Bit
(the fertile and thriving mud of the mangroves (mangue)
potentialized by the bits of cybernetics). However,
the emerging sound, the mangrove beat (Manguebeat)
is not the only one, as shown by the work of bands
Mundo Livre S.A. and Mestre Master,
other groups related to the movement.
They are many rhythms, traditional and imported, local
and transnational. In this globalized scene, where
is the specificity of Brazilian music? The question suggests a
contemplation of this course, with influences and
adaptations of foreign music and, also, with the articulation
of a unique musical language. The rhythmic aspect is
without doubt the strongest element in this discussion.
But the rhythm is much more that a sequence of durations
organized in a motif, recognizable here and there.
There are very subtle rhythmic aspects in Brazilian popular
music that are responsible for its "sauce" and its "swing".
This Brazilian way of making music was constructed in a long
historical process of contacts, loans and exchanges between
Brazilian and foreign genres.
In the nineteenth century, the polka lent the agitated form
of dancing in joined pairs to the tradition of dancing in
free pairs of the lundu. The rhythms that accompanied
lundu were the interlaced rhythms of the African drums.
Each dancer of the challenging pair could do an
individual and free choreography in lundu. Polka with its
synchronized and regular bar and choreography was
rearticulated in the new dance that emerged, maxixe.
A dance that was stylized in the first decade of the twentieth
century by dancer Duque in the halls of Paris, spread out
to other Latin American countries. In Brazil, much of the music
called polka at that time was in fact maxixe.
The new dance was also hidden in the first recorded sambas.
Samba consolidates itself as a commercial genre
in the 1930’s, in a crystallization that would only be challenged
about 30 years later. It was when jazz lent its harmonies of
modified chords to the renewal of samba, undertaken by bossa
nova. In the second half of the century, rock, with the
sound of its guitars, contributed to the emancipation of popular
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Photo: Mario Thompson
music from its traditional roots,
through the short but influential Tropicália movement.
None of these loans, however, intervenes with the musical
“accent” of samba, bossa nova and other manifestations
of so-called MPB, particularly in what is known as "division",
that is, in the way the notes are distributed between
melody and accompaniment, a division that does not always
respect the strong notes of the bars. In songs,
the use in this loose synchronizing allows the adjustment
of Portuguese stresses, which are irregular, to the meter
regularity of musical bars. This rhythmic aspect, which I call
"spilt meters" distinguishes the "Brazilian" style in the
performance of several genres of popular music (Ulhôa 1999).
Musicologist Mário de Andrade comments in a study of lundu,
written in 1928, on this rhythmic freedom that emerges not
only in the genres but in the cocos, emboladas and challenges in
traditional northeastern music.
They are free meter forms and he called them "syllabic and
fanciful reciting processes" (Andrade 1976: 80). He was
referring to the stress patterns in spoken language, which bring
their oratory rhythm to traditional popular singing.
This free meter is very much present in the incursions of the
manguebeat groups, just as the spilt meter is typical
of samba and its derivatives.
New musical genres are formed by the deliberate action
of musicians when privileging certain melodic, rhythmic,
tone and harmonic manifestations. They are musical
practices, in turn founded and fused in historically
and geographically specific social practices. An example
of the action of these agents is the previously mentioned version
of polka created by the choro musicians at the end
of the twentieth century.
Introduced in Brazil in 1845, polka had an important role i
n the formation of urban genres in Rio de Janeiro,
the cultural center of the time. Although this denomination was
used until the first decades of the twentieth century,
this bohemian dance in a strongly stressed binary bar – with
emphasis on the first note of the bar – is highly stylized in the
performance of Carioca popular choro musicians. This
stylization occurs also, and mainly, in the dance of joined pairs
that adapts the style of individual choreographic challenge
of lundu to the quadrature of ball-room dancing.
Zeca Baleiro
Rock was not
brazilianized like
polka, since it was
introduced in a
space where the
outline of national
production was
already defined.
This adaptation, as mentioned above,
contributed to the creation of maxixe, the dance and
later song that often appears under the name of polka or tango,
and which is the precursor of samba.
What really draws attention is the rhythmic aspect
of this process of incorporation, in which the angular meter
of polka, in contact with other rhythms, such as
Caribbean habanera and lundu, was made flexible.
One of the aspects of this flexibility is the strong and weak
notes of the bar, which remains binary, as in the
European model, but with the strong note displaced from the
first to the second note, as it appears later in samba.
This displacement of the strong note is quite obvious in the
samba-enrêdo, where it is emphasized by the beat
of the first bass drum, the biggest and most potent
drum in the percussion orchestra (bateria) that is part of the
samba school parades.
Another peculiar aspect is related to the synchronization
between the musical parts, which is precise in the
European model and malleable in the Brazilian case.
As I comment with regard to spilt meter, the
limits of the bar are stretched in the performance of sambas.
In these songs the number of syllables in the verse
and their stress patterns don’t always coincide with the
number of notes and the location of the stress in the musical
bar. This independence between melody and accompaniment
appears in the scores as internal syncopation and in
anticipations of the strong note crossing the imaginary line of
the bars. In other words, in these cases music follows
the European rationale of the binary meter, but
the structure of the bar is reinterpreted, not by opposition,
doing something completely different,
but by the "assimilation of the difference".
The "foreign” musical genres were “brazilianized”,
if not in their form, then in their content. It was thus
with polka, fox, bolero, jazz, even with rock, that is, identity is
stressed by mixture and subtlety in dealing with the other.
Perhaps that is why popular Brazilian music exerts a certain
allure on listeners of the most diverse cultural origins.
If in the nineteenth century polka had an important
role in the formation of genres of Brazilian urban music,
in the twentieth century rock was central in the
modernization of popular music. This modernization
was highlighted by the performance of groups
that acted as true precursors in their specific fields of
production. On one side, initially, the Jovem Guarda, led by
Roberto Carlos, a model of musical production of wide popular
acceptance and commercial success. On the other,
the Tropicália, commanded among others by
Caetano Veloso, a model of production worried about
originality and artistic elaboration. On both sides,
the Beatles were a source of musical inspiration:
for the Jovem Guarda the adolescent iê-iê-iê rock
(a clear reference to the song "She loves you"); for the Tropicália
the experimentation after the album Revolver.
Rock was not brazilianized like polka, since it
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was introduced in a space where the outline of national
production was already defined. The use of the electric guitar
was even questioned by the segment of university
students engaged in social critique at the time (1960’s).
The use of elements from rock by the tropicalists,
themselves members of this community, represented a gesture
of self-criticism, as well as criticism of samba as the only
legitimate representative of brazility. After Tropicália,
MPB song-makers began to incorporate the most varied genres
to their repertoire, not only from other
regional origins (as the northeastern baião), but also foreign
(as Jamaican reggae). In this setting the Jovem Guarda
was considered "alienated" from the social and political
problems of the country under military dictatorship.
In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the use of specific musical genres by
certain composers of this segment
(such as Chico Buarque de Hollanda when composing sambas)
had a connotation of protest.
With the political opening and presidential elections in the mid1980’s this connection with some type of ethnic roots as a
critical index was worn out. The call for the national identity
took place within rock, now recognized as Brazilian Rock.
An emblematic song of the 1980’s is "Faroeste Caboclo"
of the group Legião Urbana (EMI, 1987),
which uses many textures of rock as a sound track to tell
the story of a young northeasterner who goes to the
federal capital (Brasilia) and falls in love, gets involved with
urban violence and then dies in front of the television cameras.
The element of ethnic and cultural identification is quite subtle,
since in terms of sound the song is not particularly "Brazilian"
but for the use of Portuguese.
So it is precisely this use of the Portuguese language that
I would like to continue exploring.
"Faroeste Caboclo" has already been compared by rock critic
Arthur Dapieve to Bob Dylan’s "Hurricane".
In fact, there are many similarities between them, among
which the theme, telling a heroic tale, and the melodic outline
close to speech. However, the prosodic model is not that
of North American folk-rock, but of the Brazilian tradition
known as “repente”. As Renato Russo, author of
Faroeste Caboclo, mentions in some interviews, the song was
easy to compose since it uses the declamatory style
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With the political
opening and
presidential
elections in the
mid-1980’s this
connection with
some type of
ethnic roots as a
critical index was
worn out.
of free meter that is typical of the improvised challenges and
traditional cocos of Brazil’s northeast. In this style of
declaimed singing, the repente, the spilt meter is not used,
but for the strong notes of each bar, since the long phrases with
repeated notes or with short pauses produce a result that is
horizontal and without meter stresses. This is different from
samba, which is clearly binary, but also different from
English rock. This prosodic rhythm is the one observed by
Mário de Andrade, as mentioned above.
Certain basic rhythmic patterns distinguish the majority
of musical genres disseminated by the international media.
An example of this is the electronic keyboards for home use,
which provide the user with a set of the most common patterns
in pop music (such as rock, waltz, bossa nova, bolero, ballad,
Photo: Mario Thompson
Zélia Duncam
reggae, salsa, among others). These stereotyped simplifications,
however, do not substitute the
vigor and excitement of a creative performance, where the
musician intervenes with the construction of the
rhythmic/harmonic base. The machine cannot
simulate the rhythmic indeterminations of musical discourse.
This musical discourse takes for granted a
specific musical ability, a familiarity with culturally determined
grammatical norms.
Taking just one example, think of bossa nova, which sounds
"pasteurized" when played on the electronic keyboards
with the predetermined rhythmic base.
Or it sounds artificial and "hard" when played by
musicians who are not familiar with Brazilian “swing”.
This subtle element is, in my opinion,
closely related to the rhythm of spoken language that is inserted
in the musical practice.
Brazilian Portuguese, as many other languages, uses syllabic
stress as a means of phonologic identification.
A typical example is the three-syllable word whose meaning
changes depending on which syllable the
stress is placed: "sabiá" (the bird), where the stress
is on the last syllable; "sabia" (past of the verb to know), stressed
on the second last syllable; "sábio" (wise),
stressed on the syllable before that.
A large number of words in Portuguese are in the second
category, that is, stressed on the second last syllable.
How to adjust this trend to the western
musical meter, whose bar begins with a strong note?
Simple, just begin the song before the first
note of the bar. That is, the same displaced stress
mentioned above that characterizes samba is also subtly present
in bossa nova.
In the performance of certain songs, the melodic line exists
almost independently from the accompanying
sonorous fabric. This is the case of the genres studied by
Mário de Andrade and, in a certain way,
of rap which, as the name itself reveals, is poetry
recited upon a rhythmic base. But one thing is meter
in the English language, as it appears in
North American rap, the other is the meter of the
Portuguese language as pronounced in Brazil.
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The prosody used in Brazil is syllabic,
the verses being specified by the number of syllables
(from one to twelve, generally, counted up to the last stressed
syllable); each type of verse has a fixed number of
syllables, delimited by the final stress.
Although each word can have stressed and unstressed
syllables, it is the logic of the sentence that prevails.
Depending on its location in a verse or phrase,
a word or stressed syllable can have its stress neglected,
or vary in terms of syllabic limits. In other words,
rhythmic groupings are varied, forming phrases of different
meter sizes and structures.
It is interesting to note that, in certain European
languages, as in English, the stress patterns are isochronous,
that is, they use the same amount of time
between one stresses syllable and another. Therefore,
at least in the case of the English language,
the meter seems to be organized in "regular bars".
When Chico Sciense sings hip hop in Portuguese, as in "Etnia",
of the record Afrociberdélia,
he uses the same free meter division of the northeastern
tradition, and in this way he transforms
and recreates the genre by partial absorption of the difference.
A totally new sound turns up with rap, especially
the one from São Paulo, which imprints the regularity of the
North American language to the lyrics in Portuguese.
Its rhythmic bases also are constructed in a
radically different way than in MPB. Instead of the
creation of a sound fabric composed of the interaction between
the instrumentalists, there is the use of "leftovers"
from pirated samplers, in a mechanical patchwork.
Rather than the fluid melodic outline of singing, there is the
rough discharge of recited text.
Rap was introduced in Brazil by soul dance teams and it
developed especially in São Paulo. The lyrics are
declaimed upon bases from funk records and occasional
scratches. From the end of the 1980’s,
rappers arise throughout the country
(Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, Recife)
but São Paulo remains the center of an independent production
of the genre. The best
known rap group, the Racionais MCs, pours over these
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Rap was
introduced in
Brazil by soul
dance teams and
it developed
especially in
São Paulo.
bases a discourse that denounces the condition
of young blacks living in the poor neighborhoods
of São Paulo. They draw a significant number of people
to their shows (some with about 10,000 people)
and undertake awareness-raising campaigns on topics such
as drugs, police violence and racism.
Their most important record Sobrevivendo no Inferno
(Surviving in Hell) is an independent production of 1998
that sold over a million copies.
But it is above all in the meter that the rap of
São Paulo distinguishes itself from the dominant MPB
production. Rap contrasts with the spilt meter
tradition, in that it imprints on productions in
Portuguese the pattern of isochronous stress of
English, and presents itself as an element that is alien to
consolidated forms of musical expression. Rap also
contrasts with the traditions of northeastern recited song,
Photo: Mario Thompson
with syllabic division but no regular stress patterns. Thence the
conclusion that rap is at the margin of MPB. Rappers see
themselves as in opposition to the "Brazilian" of popular music
and try to construct for the genre a space with its own norms.
However, in the land of manguebeat, rap has been
incorporated and integrated into the local sounds and swings.
Groups such as Faces do Subúrbio declaim lyrics in the
rhythm of the embolada challenges upon bases
using tambourine percussion, a traditional instrument.
In Rio de Janeiro, MV Bill, a renowned rapper, records with
samba musicians. In other words, roots continue
to mix with reinvented foreign trends and new names
appears to liven up the old sound of popular music.
From Marisa Monte to rap it is Brazil that sings and dances its
plural and original rhythm.
Bibliographical references:
Andrade, Mário de. "Lundu do escravo" [1928]. In Música doce Música. 2 ed.
São Paulo: Livraria Martins Editora; Brasilia: INL, 1976, p. 74-80.
Hollanda, Heloisa Buarque de.“The law of the cannibal or How to deal with
the idea of "difference" in Brazil”
http://acd.ufrj.br/pacc/literaria/paper1helo.html [1998, with consultation
on 03/09/2002]
Sandroni, Carlos. Feitiço Decente – Transformações do samba no Rio de
Janeiro (1917-1933) Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Ed.: Editora UFRJ, 2001.
Ulhôa, Martha Tupinambá de. "Métrica Derramada: prosódia musical na
Canção Brasileira Popular " Brasiliana 2 (May 1999): 48-56.
Martha Tupinambá Ulhôa is the head teacher of musicology of the Villa
Lobos Institute and of the Program of Post- Doctorate in Music at the
Univesity of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO). First secretary of ANPPOM
(National Association of Research and Post-Graduation in Music) and Vicepresident of IASPM-LA (Latin American AssociaTION OF popular Music
Studies). As a researcher for CNPq she has been dedicated to the study of
popular Brazilian music.
The reader may find examples of spilt meter (with the name
“contrametricidade”) in transcriptions of samba
Nação Zumbi
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