Between the popular and the erudite: samba, blackness and multiplicity as opportunities for Brazilian Popular Music

Abstract

The objective of the article is to show how the development of Brazilian music is within the scope of multiplicity, which suggests non-dualistic forms of philosophical constitution. There is an attempt at a split between the popular and the erudite, some attributing simplicity to the former as synonymous with alienation and the latter as sophistication as identical to the superior. The point is that Brazilian music had other directions, due to the strong influence of Sons dos Negros, the work of José Ramos Tinhorão. Musicality is strongly linked to the liturgical ceremonialism of the traditions of African-based religions. In these religions, the sacred and the profane, not properly separated into antagonistic poles. Musical and bodily elements were incorporated into the country's cultural traditions when the sacred suffered a certain distance from the profane. But even when the lundu and umbigada, under the influence of another trait, the alembamento ceremonies, common in Angolan culture, became completely separate from terreiro religions, the sacredness of the orixás and voduns still remained as an immaterial sanctuary of history resistance of black people in Brazil. We will also comment on the persecution of these cultural manifestations. And, in the end, we will analyze some sambas from Rio's carnival, as a demonstration of their complexity, heterogeneity and sophistication: the popular, under no circumstances, reduced in relation to the erudite. In fact, both of them, as categorical examples, of the human creative capacity to transform the banal into the extraordinary, through the untimely power of the work of art.