The Blessed and the Sinner

Two Foundation Myths of Brazilian Music Historiography

Rogerio Budasz University of California, Riverside

When nineteen-year-old Jose de Anchieta arrived in the land that the Por-tuguese called Terra do Brasil, he had already heard about the exuberance of the jungle and the creatures it sheltered. The year was 1553, and some reports about the Tupi, the people who inhabited the coastal regions, were available. Pero Vaz de Caminha's 1500 report described them as strong and handsome. Living naked in a place that resembled the Jude<rChristian image of an earthly Paradise, they seemed unaffected by the original sin. With the letters Jesuits started sending after 1549 and the books that Hans Staden and Andre Thevet published in 1557, that first impression was replaced by a more realistic assessment, albeit discouraging for the missionaries, when it became clear that the Tupi also got drunk, engaged in brutal fights, performed strange rituals, and even practiced cannibalism. They, too, were sinners, in urgent need of redemption. And "redemption" came with tragic consequences. By the end of the seventeenth century the majority of the Tupi had vanished from the coastal areas ofthe colony. Some integrated with the European colonists, but most were killed or migrated west.

The effective colonization of the land began in 1532, based on the ex-ploitation of brazilwood and sugar cane. The few colonists who came in search of adventure and fortune were invariably male. Among them, there were noblemen, peasants, and priests. Some had money to invest, while others were destitute and had nothing to lose or to expect in life. Some of them left their families in Portugal, some were single, and many were exiled convicts and outcasts. Most found an Amerindian spouse and constituted a new family in the colony, originating a new ethnic type, the mameiuco, who became the ones mainly responsible for the territorial expansion of the colony in the following century.

Although the colony attracted people from all walks of life, including the Portuguese minor nobility, the majority of colonists could not afford any formal education for their progeny besides the catechism lessons taught by missionaries and priests. Their literary culture was largely based on narrative songs-romances---orally learned or printed in cheap booklets and sung over

167

168 ROGERJO BUDASZ

simple melodies. Many still survive in the traditional music of Portugal and its former colonies. The musical repertory of early colonists and their descen-dants also included songs-cantigas- both in Portuguese and lingua geral, a Tupi dialect that functioned as a lingua franca among coastal Amerindi-ans and colonists. Catholic missionaries often warned against the perceived lewd content of many Portuguese lyrics and the supposed association ofTupi songs with pagan beliefs, so they were quick in providing pious contrafacta versions to be sung instead.

It was in this context that the recently ordained Anchieta arrived with a mission to "save" the souls of the fierce Tupi, making sure their bodies and minds were subjected to the Church and to the Portuguese king, and to pre-vent them from being contaminated by the new bad habits that were brought by the colonists. This ideological front was complemented by a more ag-gressive one, conveyed by the state. Still, the missionaries ' ideology and the political will of Lisbon were not always in accord, as Jesuits in Southern Brazil and Paraguay would learn in the following century, when they fought against the policies of both Spain and Portugal.

The Jesuits began their activities in Brazil in 1549 and monopolized education in the colony for about 200 years. Their main aim was religious indoctrination, but they also taught other subjects, as long as they were useful for their purposes. To the Amerindian boys, they taught music primarily with the purpose of preparing singers to perfOlID in the liturgy, processions, and devotional plays. After being trained, some Amerindian boys and Portuguese orphans who were sent to the colony also assisted in the religious services in villages and plantations. l Jesuit missionaries taught Catholic prayers and hymns in Amerindian languages, Portuguese, and Latin. Anchieta translat-ed to the Tupi language several of these, such as the Salve Regina and Ave Maria, which are included in his Catecismo da lingua brasilica, published posthumously in 1618.2 He also wrote a Tupi grammar, printed in Coimbra in 1595.3

To the Jesuits, it was clear that the minds of the Tupi should be won by persuasion. Moved by the Epistles of Paul-in which he declared that he had become Greek in order to win over the Gentiles- the Jesuits learned the Tupi language and beliefs, ate their food, sang their songs, danced their dances, and played their musical instruments. The Jesuits hoped that the natives would be moved by the Christian faith through the singing of their own songs

IPaulo Castagna, "Fontes bibliogrMicas para 0 estudo da pnitica musical no Brasil nos seculos XVI e XVII" (M.A. thesis, Universidade de Sao Paulo, 1991), i, 53 . 2It was revised by Antonio deAraujo, who included it in his Catecismo na lingoa brasilica, no qual se contem a summa da doctrina christii (Lisbon: Pedro Crasbeeck, 1618). 3Jose de Anchieta, Arte de grammatica da lingua mais usada na costa do Brasil (Coimbra: Antonio Mariz, 1595).

Two F OUNDATION M YTHS OF BRAZILIAN MUSIC H ISTORIOGRAPHY 169

with new Christian words or by learning Catholic hymns and songs translated into their language. Since the Christian notions of devil, demons, angels, soul, and sin had no direct parallel in Tupi mythology, the Jesuits ended up creating an allegorical realm where Catholic saints lived together or fought against some entities of the Tupi mythology.

There is no evidence that the native songs adapted to Christian words by Anchieta and early Jesuits were ever notated, but there is a way to glimpse some other songs they used. Jose de Anchieta compiled most of his poetry and dramas in a codex now held at the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu.4

It illustrates the sixteenth-century practice of changing the words of popular songs in order to convey a devotional character, thus eliminating any vestige of obscenity or profanity. The degree of change in these contrafacta could vmy. Sometimes Anchieta retained much of the original text, but in many cases he preserved only the indication of the melody with which they were supposed to be sung. Thus, he converted the cantiga Venid a suspirar al verde prado into Venid a suspirar con Iesu amado. In Mira Nero de Tarpeya, he changed the romance narrative structure into a poem of five-line stanzas, Mira el malo con dureza, keeping one of the original lines as a refrain. Quien te me enojo, Isabel / que con /tigrimas te tiene is the basis for a smoother a 10 divino version in Quien te visito, Isabel / que Dios en su vientre tiene, al-though the subject matter could not be more different.5

Since the publication of Anchieta's first biography in 1598, just one year after his death, his gifts as a poet and musician have been highlighted, along with reports of miracles and supernatural events surrounding his ex-emplary life-standard material of any hagiography, even more so at a time when the Society of Jesus was in desperate need of more saints.6 Neverthe-less, these accounts are important for our understanding of the actual role music played in Anchieta's work and later uses of his image. His biographers compiled several reports on his practice of composing songs in Portuguese, Spanish, and lingua geral. One of them mentioned that he used to have a "book that he composed with cantigas ao divino, both in Portuguese and 'Gentile' language . .. which evelybody used to sing.»? That was probably the same book that was sent to Rome in 1730 by the Archbishop of Bahia,

4Rorne, Archivurn Rornanum Societatis Iesu, Codex Opp NN 24. 5Rogerio Budasz, "A presen<;a do cancioneiro iberico na lirica de Jose de Anchieta: Urn en-foque rnusicologico," Latin American Music Review 1711 (spring- summer 1996): 42- 77. 6Among others, Quiricio Caxa, Breve relac;i1o da vida e morte do P Jose de Anchieta (1598); Simao Rodrigues, Vida do Padre Jose de Anchieta da Companhia de Jesus (1607); Simao de Vasconcelos, Vida do venertivel Padre Joseph de Anchieta (1672). 7Report by Diogo Teixeira de Carvalho, who met Anchieta in Sao Vicente before 1576 and later in Espirito Santo. Proc. inform. do Rio de Janeiro, f. 107, quoted by Armando Cardoso, in Jose de Ancheta, Lirica Portuguesa e Tupi (Sao Paulo: Loyola, 1984), 40.

170 ROGEmO B UDASZ

along with several other docwnents included in the initial proceedings for his beatification.8 However, after the Jesuits were expelled from Portugal and its colonies in 1759, and the Pope extinguished their order in 1773, Anchieta's beatification was placed on hold for more than 200 years, a period in which he almost disappeared from the historical record.

Anchieta's symbolic resurrection coincided with the nationalistic wave of the late nineteenth century, the last years of monarchy and the beginnings of the Brazilian republic. In 1882, Mello Morais Filho published a small sample of Anchieta's poetry, calling him the creator of Brazilian literature, and in 1923, the Brazilian Literary Academy definitely acknowledged his role by publishing a compilation of his works; at this time, Brazil was still commemorating the centennial ofindependence.9 Nudged into the canon by the early-twentieth-century literary elite, Anchieta's complete codex of reli-gious poems and plays was finally published in 1954 by Maria de Lourdes de Paula Martins. 10 That edition coincided with another remaking of his image by the political elite of Sao Paulo, who promoted his secondary role as one of the founders of the city in 1554.

However, what could explain that in the opening session of the Brazil-ian Academy of Music on July 14, 1945, Anchieta was nominated patron of seat number 1, virtually becoming the patron of art music in Brazil? Re-cently the Academy explained this choice:

The young missionary of the Society of Jesus, who arrived in Brazil when he was 19 years old, dedicated himself to catechization, utilizing theater and music as pedagogical tools. He might be recognized as the pioneer of Music Education and Theater in Brazil. For that reason, ViIla- Lobos chose his name as patron of seat number one of the Brazil-ian Academy of Music, of which he was the founder.11

The choice of Anchieta for such a position appears even more intriguing when we consider that the Brazilian Literary Academy never honored him in similar fashion, although he was undoubtedly the most important poet in the Portuguese, Spanish, and even Tupi languages in sixteenth-century Brazil,

8 A note on the front page of Opp NN 24 affirms that it was "fama antiga e con stante ser autor o venenivel Padre Jose de Anchieta." 9Melo Morais Filho, Curso de Literatura Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1882). Jose de Anchieta, Primeiras letras: cantos de Anchieta, 0 didlogo de Joiio de Lery, trovas indigenas (Rio de Janeiro: A. PintolAnnuario do Brasil, 1923). JOJose de Anchieta, Poesias. Manuscrito do seculo XVI em portugues, castelhano e tupi. Transcri90es, tradu90es e notas de M. de L. de Paula Martins (Sao Paulo: Museu Paulista, 1954). IISee http://www.abmusica.org.br/. Incidentally, the Academy's patron seats are not alTanged in alphabetical order.

Two FOUNDATION MYTHS OF BRAZILIAN MUSIC HISTORJOGRAPHY 171

and many of his literary works have survived. Evidently, he had some musi-cal knowledge-sight-singing is an important element in monastic life-but his musical gifts do not seem to go much further. There is no report on his activity as a composer of music, not even the music of his own cantigas. Nor was Anchieta the most important forerunner of European-style musical activities in Brazil. Other Jesuits did that before him, including Manuel da Nobrega, Juan de Azpilcueta Navarro, and Leonardo Nunes, not to mention Franciscan missionaries already established in the colony when the Jesuits arrived. In addition, the position of chapelmaster of Bahia's cathedral had been created, and before that, official documents stated that Francisco de Va-cas was already active in that town as a "musician and singer."12

Anchieta's iconic status for both religion and arts was increasingly magnified in the early twentieth centulY, and when Villa-Lobos inaugurated the Brazilian Academy of Music in 1945, he soon realized that he could use the Jesuit as a kind of icon. The Academy needed a Tupi Palestrina, and Jose de Anchieta was the closest thing. After this, his biographers never failed to highlight the image of a blessed poet-musician and his supposed musical gifts by sometimes drawing the picture of a childhood immersed in music. In his biography of Anchieta, Helio Abranches Viotti talks about an old report on two of the poet's brothers who were priests in Tenerife (Canary Islands) that played the harpsichord and organ. 13 It has been noted that the Jesuit was a relative of the Basque composer Juan de Anchieta, who was chaplain and singer to Queen Isabel of Spain after 1489, and then her chapelmaster after 1495. Although the nature of their kinship remains unclear, one of the most favored hypotheses by early-twentieth--century biographers identifies the chapelrnaster as Jose de Anchieta's grandfather. 14 In the absence of fac-tual information about Anchieta's musical activities before arriving in Brazil, biographers drew the image of a gifted musician by familial proximity.

While most Brazilian intellectuals were celebrating Anchieta's heroic role as a writer, musician, educator, peacemaker, and co-founder of Sao Pau-lo, a group of avant-garde artists from that city challenged the relevance of all of this. In his 1928 Manifesto Antrop6fago (Carmibal Manifesto), Oswald

l2No musical works of any of these forerunners have survived. Supporting documentation transcribed in Castagna, Fontes Bibliograficas, iii, 601-{)8 . 13Jose de Anchieta, Poesias (Sao Paulo: Edusp; Brasilia: Itatiaia, 1989),25. ' 4Francisco Gonzalez Luis, Jose de Anchieta, vida y obra (Laguna: Ayuntamiento de La La-guna, 1988), 22-24, points out that the idea originated after Adolphe Coster's study Juan de Anchieta et lafamille de Loyola (Paris, 1930), in which he transcribes the chapelmaster's will, dated 1522-23, containing infonnation about his son named Juan. Jose de Anchieta's father, Juan de Anchieta, fled to the Canary Islands in 1525, after taking part in a rebellion. '50swald de Andrade, "Manifesto AntropOfago," Revista de Antropofagia III (May 1928): 3-7.

172 ROGERIO B UDASZ

de Andrade placed himself "against Anchieta in the land of Iracema singing [pun = flirting] the eleven thousand virgins from heaven," 15 adding that the outcast patriarch Joao Ramalho should be regarded as the true founder of Sao Paulo. Ramalho was shipwrecked not too far from Sao Paulo around 1513 and joined the Tupi. He had dozens of wives and many descendants of mixed race, but he was no artist. The avant-garde elite of the 1920s and '30s wanted to break away from the traditional European culture and the institu-tions that transplanted it to Brazil, thus rejecting Anchieta and everything that he represented. Yet they lacked a powerful icon.

One year after Andrade's manifesto, the Brazilian Literary Academy published the first comprehensive edition of the poems attributed to Gregorio de Mattos e Guerra (1636-1696), by Afranio Peixoto. 16 However, that edi-tion did not include the most notorious part of his output, the erotic-if not pornographic-poems. In a gesture curiously similar to Anchieta's "purifica-tion" of profane songs, Peixoto chose not to publish the most graphic lyrics, while replacing some sensitive expressions with others. In 1969, igniting the rage of the governmental censors and the ovation of the current avant-garde, James Amado finally published an edition including the expurgated poems.17

In 1968, Robert Stevenson acknowledged for the first time the musico-logical significance of Mattos's writings in a pioneering article not yet fully absorbed by Brazilian musicologists. 18 For Stevenson, "a careful reading of his entire works might further illuminate the seventeenth-century musical scene in Bahia," a call to work that was accepted in 1991 by Paulo Cast-agna, who transcribed and commented on the musical aspects of Mattos's poetry in thirty pages of his master's thesis,19 followed by myself a few years later, with musical transcriptions of dances and songs he mentioned and para-phrased.20 A richer panorama of descriptions and critiques of musical and theatrical functions, choreographies, instrumentalists, and singers was then sketched and complemented with musical recordings. But Mattos was not simply a chronicler. He also used to sing, play the guitar, and compose al-ternative texts-glosas and paraphrases-to Spanish tonos and Portuguese modas. Just like Anchieta's contrafacta, some of these songs were based

16Afranio Peixoto (ed.), Obras de Gregorio de Mattos (Rio de Janeiro: Academia Brasileira, 1923-33). 17Jarnes Amado (ed.), Obras completas de Gregorio de Matos e Guerra: cronica do viver baiano seiscentista (Salvador: Janaina, 1969). 18Robert Stevenson, "Some Portuguese Sources for Early Brazilian Music History," Anuario-Yearbook-Anuario Instituto Interamericano de Investigacion Musical 4 (1968) : 1--43. 19Castagna, Fontes Bibliograficas, iii, 511--4l. 2°Rogerio Budasz, A musica no tempo de Gregorio de Mattos: musica iberica e afro-brasilei-ra na Bahia dos seculos XVII e XVIII (Curitiba: DeArteslUFPR, 2004), and the CD by Ensem-ble Banza, Iberian andAJrican--Brazilian Music of the Seventeenth Century, Naxos 8.557969, 2006.

Two FOUNDATION MYTHS OF BRAZILIAN MUSIC HISTORlOGRAPHY 173

on popular Iberian tunes, but there is no evidence that he ever composed the music of any of his poems.

More than thirty years of archival research by Fernando da Rocha Peres enhanced our knowledge of Mattos's marriage, the years he lived in Portugal, and how he was denounced to the Inquisition. However, for decades literary scholars have known that the poems attributed to Mattos in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century codices are all apographs, of doubtful authorship. The main source of information about his life is an early--eighteenth-century ro-manced biography written by Manuel Pereira Rabelo, whom Joao Adolfo Hansen considers to be the first compiler and virtual creator of the myth.21

The body of work that has been traditionally ascribed to him constitutes a collection of poems of various authors who lived in Brazil and Portugal be-tween the mid- seventeenth and mid--eighteenth centuries. As Wilson Mar-tins summarizes it: 22

It might be that the idea implicit in James Amado's edition is not so . absurd as it would have seemed back then: by the name of Gregorio de Mattos we could comprehend, without major problems and excessive hesitation, something like a collective poet, a kind of constellation of poets, in which the anonymous and unknown ones are dissolved in a figure of the eponym, in which they transubstantiate to form this great and imaginary Brazilian poet of the seventeenth century: Gregorio de Mattos.

This collective Mattos provides a wealth of information about the mu-sic heard in the streets, houses, convents, and brothels of Bahia during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Not surprisingly, the content of many of these poems matches what is known about the historical Mattos, and that helps feed the myth. The fact that he benefited from some musical instruction is compatible with many of the poems ascribed to him, especially those that highlight music terminology: describing the priests of Bahia hav-ing a difficult time singing a certain passage, using erotic puns to write an entire poem about the guitar, and criticizing a voice-and-cello performance by Dominican nuns.

A significant number of poems deal with the music of blacks and mulat-toes, the music of the Afro-Brazilian religious ceremonies of calundus, and the music of festivals and gatherings promoted by the Catholic brotherhoods of blacks and mulattoes, such as the paturi and the caozinho. The connection with Afro-Brazilian culture and the fact that, according to Rabelo, Mattos used to sing his poems while accompanying himself on the guitar make him

21 Joao Adolfo Hansen, A satira e 0 engenho (Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989). 2lWilson Martins, Hist6ria da inteligencia brasileira (Sao Paulo: T. A. Queiroz, 1992), 227.

174 ROCERJO BUDASZ

a perfect candidate for the post of pioneer of Brazilian Popular Music (MPB), at a time when avant-garde artists and music critics were seeking legitimacy, a founding genius, the creator of a school, in short, a historical thread that could explain their own existence.

In his 1893 essay titled "Gregorio de Matos," Araripe Junior exposed his theory of obnubilation, a phenomenon that would assail Europeans living in Brazil. Afnmio Coutinho described it as "the power of external pressure, that is, the physical environment-soil, landscape, flora, climate--over the man's mind powers ... the adaptation of the colonists to the new environment, through a process of mimesis, leading to the abandonment of the motherland's habits."23 Since Mattos spent several decades in Portugal before returning to his homeland in Bahia, and there are stylistic differences between the works from each period ascribed to him, Araripe saw in him a confiImation of his the-ories, as Joao Adolfo Hansen wittily summarized: "the detenninistic ideology of Araripe JUnior proposes that in Bahia the tropic weather causes relapse syn-apses or cerebral connections, which also results in their sexual relaxation." 24

For Araripe Junior, Mattos was the true creator of both literature and popular music in Brazil, by dancing and singing lundus with the mulatas of Bahia. 25 Araripe referred to him as "Homer of the lundu," after truncated readings of Manuel Pereira Rabelo (he mentioned the Greek poet and a gourd guitar supposedly built by Mattos) and poems in which Mattos used the word lundus. Araripe did not know that in Mattos's time, lundus did not mean the late-eighteenth-century dance, but rather an Afro-Brazilian religious cer-emony, also known as calundus. In 1946, in the introduction of his anthology of Mattos's poems, Segismundo Spina recycled Araripe's text, perpetuating the expression Homero do lundu.26 It was only in 1963 that Mozart Arau-jo pointed out that the lundu-dance and the lundu--song appeared almost a century after Mattos's death. Nonetheless, even after that, Ary Vasconcelos (1977) and Waldenyr Caldas (1985) still affirmed that Mattos composed and sang lundus, a measure they use to evaluate his importance to Brazilian popu-lar music history.

As late as 2004, Ricardo Cravo Albin affirmed:27

One of the earliest records of popular singing is from the great satiric poet Greg6rio de Matos Guerra, the Hell's Mouth, who, even as an old

23 Afranio Coutinho, A lradir;iio aforlunada: 0 espirilo da naeionalidade no eriliea brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Jose Olympio, 1968), 129. 24Joao Adolfo Hansen, "Gregorio, Gregorios," Nossa historia 11 (September 2004): 46. 25Tristao de Alencar Araripe Junior, GregoriO de Matos (Rio de Janeiro: Garnier, 1910), 125, 169. 26Segismundo Spina, A poesia de Gregorio de Matos (Sao Paulo: Assunr,:ao, 1946). 27Ricardo CravoAlbim, 0 livro de aura da MPB (Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro, 2004),18.

Two FOUNDATION MYTHS OF BRAZILIAN M USIC HISTORIOGRAPHY

man, tried to seduce the most delicious slaves of Bahia, singing his dissolute verses to the sound of a wire guitar.

175

Except for the "escravas mais apetitosas" part, Albin reproduces al-most literally Jose Ramos Tinhorao's 1972 comments:28

Since the late seventeenth century, the satiric poet Gregorio de Matos Guerra, nicknamed Hell's Mouth, used to seduce (even as an old man) many mulatto girls, singing his dissolute verses to the sound of a wire guitar that he made himself.

What Manuel Pereira Rabelo painted as a character flaw-the poet's unrestrained life-became, after the late nineteenth century, one of the most praised aspects of his "biographies." If someone was to be chosen forerunner of Brazilian popular music, it was indispensable to establish some kind of as-sociation with malandragem, a celebrated early-twentieth-century lifestyle that combined idleness, cunning, and a type of slyness known as malicia, which is typically used in relation with capoeira and soccer. Mattos's clos-est rival in that dispute was the eighteenth-century poet and guitar player Domingos Caldas Barbosa, a mulatto historically associated with the com-position and performance of Brazilian lundus and modinhas. The problem was his perceived bootlicking character and readiness to bow to aristocratic tastes. Caldas Barbosa was no malandro.29

Maybe to stress Mattos's participation in the creation of an early form of urban popular music, Tinhodio transfigured the gourd guitar (the viola de cabat;a mentioned by Rabelo) into the much later wire guitar (viola de ar-arne), an instrument that has connections with nineteenth-century modinhas and lundus, although there is nothing to suggest that guitars were strung with wire in Portugal or Brazil during the seventeenth century. Mattos's gourd guitar was probably a variant of the banza-a term that appears in some of this poems-the gut-strung predecessor of both the banjo and the viola de cabara, which is still played in some parts of Brazil. Despite the absence of evidence, it became commonplace in Brazilian historiography after Tinhorao to assume that the wire guitar had been introduced very early in the colonial period and that Mattos played such an instrument.

Rabelo's assertion that Gregorio and his brothers Pedro and Eusebio were trained in music is plausible and corroborated in Eusebio de Mattos's

28Jose Ramos Tinhorao, "Donga e os primitivos," liner notes, His/aria da Musica Popular Brasileira 48 (Sao Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1972). 29That perception is slowly changing, as recent research sheds new light on the poet's life and works: Domingos Caldas Barbosa and Manuel Morais, Muzica escolhida da viola de Lereno (Lisbon: Estar/CHA-UE, 2003); and Jose Ramos Tinhorao, Domingos Caldas Barbosa: 0

poeta da viola, da modinha e do lundu (Sao Paulo: Editora 34,2004).

176 ROGERIO BUDASZ

biographies. As in the case of Anchieta, this is another example of evaluating someone's musicianship by familial proximity.

Like many Bahians of his time, Mattos was accustomed to the Afro-Ibe-rian sonorities of the guitar. Although he described the contexts in which he heard or played such music, in brothels, traveling with his closest friends, and at the religious festivities of the black and mulatto brotherhoods, this would hardly make him a champion of Afro-Brazilian culture. In fact, some of his verses show a conspicuous degree of arrogance, racism, religious intoler-ance, and homophobia. When Mattos described how he viewed entertainment among those groups that he despised and loved at the same time, he always stressed his hierarchical superiority. Of course, the easy answer would be to blame these contradictions on the mUltiplicity of authors that constitute the lit-erary Mattos. But similar contradictions surface in the writings of eighteenth-century white poets in colonial Brazil-Tomas Antonio Gonzaga and Claudio Manuel da Costa-and in Portugal-Manuel Maria de Barbosa du Bocage, and Nicolau Tolentino de Almeida-to name but a few. The fact is that the literary Mattos was a true reflection of the collective white Bahian of his time, a racist homophobe who loved the music and the bodies of those he despised.

The real Mattos, the lawyer and judge, was never as relevant. Yet the collective, revolutionary Mattos has been an appropriate subject for mUltiple and often contradictory readings, offering material to many avant-gardes. He has been a handy predecessor of Andrade's cannibal movement, Rio's malan-dragem, Sao Paulo's concrete poetry, and Bahia's tropicalia.30 This collective Mattos is also dangerous, sometimes hurting those he should empathize with, those who, like him, suffered from religious and political hypocrisy.

But there is still a final paradox. Why did Villa-Lobos, the self-pro-claimed "white Indian," choose to honor Anchieta, a civilizing hero, to be the patron of his Academy? After all, Brazilian modernism of the 1920s-of which Villa-Lobos was a known exponent-advocated exactly the opposite: to release the inner savage. The likely answer is that twenty years later, he had little in common with the rebellious ways of the composer of the Choros. The repeated use of old fonnulas and the influence of Vargas's populist ideol-ogy somehow resulted in a certain "academism" in his works and actions of the 1930s and '40s.

By the time he chose Anchieta, Villa-Lobos himself was already an icon and his work canonized. One of the intended functions of the Brazilian Academy of Music was to promote it 31

30For a detailed account of these appropriations, see Hansen, A Scitira eo Engenho, 321-58. 3lAs described in the Academy website, http://www.abmusica.org.brihistor.htm (accessed June 30,2011).

Two F OUNDATION MYTHS OF B RAZILlAlv MUSIC HISTORIOGRAPHY

The great carioca composer, first president of the Academy, left in his will half of his copyright earnings to be used by the institution for the promotion of his work, the work of his fellow academics, and of Brazil-ian music in general.

177

The production of foundation myths accompanies and reinforces the process of state fonnation, but the whole thing might take place in a more lateral, than vertical, fashion through individual actions of members of civil society. This seems to be the case here, although Villa-Lobos's discourse intertwined with that of Gerulio Vargas, and his individual actions were often backed by the state. Nevertheless, by creating an Academy and providing resources for its perpetuation, Villa-Lobos provided his own elite group of composers with a house, a narrative, and a pantheon.

Villa-Lobos 's interest in Anchieta took another direction in 1952. In anticipation of Sao Paulo's quadricentennial, he finished his tenth symphony, Sume pater patrium, nicknamed Amerindia and premiered in Paris in 1957. In the fourth movement, he set to music a section of Anchieta's poem De Beata Virgine. After sharing the Jesuit's seat and mystique at the Academy, Villa-Lobos now positioned himself as his co-author.

During the late 1950s and early ' 60s, Brazil enjoyed a short period ofop-timism and democratic stability. In the quickly modernizing country, newly empowered radio hosts and popular-music critics resisted Anglo-American cultural hegemony while searching for a national tradition in popular music in a process analogous to the nationalism of the early republic, through which they elaborated a nanative that was different from that of elite art music. They were working with a concept that in 1966 Caetano Veloso would define as linha evolutiva, or the evolutionary line of popular music,32 that is, that samba emerged as the quintessential fonn of Brazilian popular music only in 1930s Rio de Janeiro. This time became known as the Epoca de Ouro, or Golden Age of popular music, coinciding with a wider availability and coverage of commercial radio in Brazil. Not coincidentally, sambas of that period are characterized by the glorification and satire of Rio's malandragem and malicia. Since then, and until the Tropiccilia movement, the evolution of Brazilian popular music has been analyzed primarily from the point of view of transformations in samba, leaving aside genres that developed outside Rio de Janeiro or that were perceived as deprived of a national character. It was only in the late 1960s that other readings began to be accepted.

Musicological studies, particularly by Mozart Araujo, Jose Ramos Tin-horao, and Baptista Siqueira, have shown that popular music existed in Brazil before the Epoca de Ouro, but these did not fit the critical nanative. A

31Caetano Veloso and FeITeira Gullar, "Que caminho seguir na musica popular brasileira?" Revista brasileira 7 (May 1966): 375-85.

178 ROGERJO B UDASZ

conspicuous link between literature and popular music made it possible for critics to borrow ideas from Araripe Junior to Haraldo de Campos-the last of the great apologists of Mattos. Music and literary critics and pop stars per-ceived in his verses the voice of anti--establishment and anti-oppression during a period when many of them were suffering under the dictatorial regime.33

In 1972, military oppression was at its peak in Brazil. Exiled in London, Caetano Veloso released his record Transa. The meaning of this ambiguous word may be a ''well-done transaction," a "well--elaborated thing," or, more common-ly, the sexual act. TIle third track of the LP was a setting of Mattos's "Triste Bahia." The poem-a paraphrase of Francisco Rodrigues Lobo's "Fermoso Tejo meu"-was a critique of Bahia's economic and social decadence during the late seventeenth century, which resulted from mercantilist policies, forcing Bahians to trade their work and their wealth for useless foreign commodities.

Veloso structured his song the same way Mattos did in many of his poems. It begins with a mote alheio, a quotation fram someone else, fol-lowed by a number of glosas or variations. In Veloso's song, the mote comes from the first two stanzas of Mattos's "Triste Bahia oh quao dessemelhante," lightly retouched, after which he continues with his own reflecting on con-temporary events in far-away Bahia and on his condition as an exile.34

Triste Bahia, oh quao desseme-Ihante estas

E estou do nosso antigo estado Pobre te vejo a ti, tu a mi

empenhado Rica te vejo [ sic] eu ja, tu a mi

abundante.

Triste Bahia, oh quao desseme-Ihante

A ti tocou-te a maquina mercante Que em tua larga barra tern entrado A mim vern me tocando e tern

trocado Tanto neg6cio e tanto negociante.

Sad Bahia, oh, how different you are And I am of our former state Poor is how I see you, you see

myself indebted Rich is how I see [ sic] you once,

you saw me abundant.

Sad Bahia, oh, how different

The mercantile machine that enters Your large harbor has touched you It has been changing me and

changing So many businesses and business-

men.

33James Amado and Haroldo de Campos noticed that poetical devices found in Tropicaiia songs and poems of the Poesia Concreta movement-parody, recomposition, and combinato-riality, to nanle a few-are essentially the same techniques used by Gregorio de Mattos. 34Caetano Veloso, Transa, Philips-Polygranl CD 838.511-2, P 1972, P 1989.

Two FOUNDATION M YTHS OF B RAZILIA1v M USIC HISTORIOGRAPHY 179

Triste, oh quao dessemelhante, triste. . .

Pastinha ja foi a Africa

Pastinha ja foi a Africa Pra mostrar capoeira do Brasil Eu ja vivo tao cansado De viver aqui na terra.

Minha mae, eu vou pra lua Eu mais a minha mulher Vamos fazer urn ranchinho Tudo feito de sape, minha mae eu

. vou pra lua E seja 0 que Deus quiser.

Triste, oh quao dessemelhante E, a, galo canta o galo cantou, camara

E cocoroca, e cocoroca, camara

E, varna-nos embora, e vama-nos em bora camara

E, pelo mundo afora, e pelo mundo afora camara

E, triste Bahia, e, triste Bahia, camara

Bandeira branca enfiada em pau forte.

Afoxe lei, lei, lea

Bandeira branca, bandeira branca enfiada em pau forte

o vapor da cachoeira nao navega mais.no mar.

Triste Recancavo, oh, quao dessemelhante

Sad, oh, so different, sad .

Pastinha [a capoeira master] had already gone to Africa

Pastinha had already gone to Africa To show Brazil's capoeira I feel so tired these days Of living here on Earth [on this

land].

Mother, I am going to the moon Me and my wife We will build a hut A mud cottage, mother, I am going

to the moon The way God wants.

Sad, oh, so different Eh, oh, the rooster crows The rooster crowed, camara [my

friend] Eh, cocoroca, [cock-a-doodle-

doo] cocoroca, camara Eh, let's go away, eh, let's go away

Eh, across the world, eh, across the world, camara

Eh, sad Bahia, eh, sad Bahia, camara

White flag raised on strong wood.

Afoxe, lei, lei, lea [ritual procession cry]

White flag, white flag raised on strong wood

The steamboat from Cachoeira no longer sails in the sea.

Sad Recancavo [the All Saints Bay region], oh, so different

180

Maria pegue 0 mato e hora, arriba a saia e varno-nos em bora

Pe dentro, pe fora, quem tiver pe pequeno vai embora.

Oh, virgem mae purls sima Bandeira branca enfiada em pau

forte Trago no peito a estrela do norte Bandeira branca enfiada em pau

forte.

ROGERIO BUDASZ

Maria, hit the road, it's time, raise up your skirt and let's go

Foot inside, foot outside, if you have a small foot get out.

Oh, virgin, purest mother White flag raised on strong wood

I bring the northern star in my chest White flag raised on strong wood.

Veloso's "Triste Bahia" is a political critique of both military rule in Brazil, responsible for his exile, and the Magalhaes-farnily oligarchy in Ba-hia, which used to control the local economy and government. It is above all an exercise in Tropicalista collage, combining Mattos's verses with musico-poetical structures of capoeira and umbanda. Mattos's authoritative voice, like an ancient and angry prophet, is set to music as a ladainha for voice and berimbau, one of the usual ways of accompanying a fight in capoeira de An-gola style. After the A/oxe cry that marks the beginning of the last section, Veloso conveys a sense of unorthodox religiosity to Mattos's opening repri-mand, by patching together a famous ponto de umbanda, a musical invoca-tion of an entity in the syncretic Umbanda religion, with a line of a Marian hymn that looks deceptively Catholic. Actually, the hymn "Oh virgem mae purissima" comes from another syncretic religion, the Santo Daime, with which Veloso had contact in the late 1960s. Veloso reinvented Mattos in his own image and likeness and in the process answered his own claim for a return to the evolutionary line in Brazilian popular music.

Since it is so elusive, the music of Anchieta and Mattos resists scrutiny. Their surviving literary texts are outstanding in quality and historical rel-evance, but they are surrounded by controversies of transmission and author-ship. Sketchy biographies paint the character of both Anchieta and Mattos as ranging from the despicable to the heroic, and the judgment of subsequent generations is often tainted by anachronism and influenced by all sorts of agendas. The result is a perfect ground for the flourishing of myths.

Poems ascribed to Anchieta and Mattos, even if actually written by their contemporaries, do shed some light on musical practices of Portuguese America at a time when musical sources are not available. If there are many uncertainties about how much they actually studied music and whether they ever composed any music, there can be no doubt that the process of reinter-preting and reconstructing their images is far from complete.