Music in Brazil: Texts and Contexts | Luciana Requião (UFF)
Abstract: The editorial “Music in Brazil: texts and contexts” by Luciana Requião highlights the progress of music studies as an interdisciplinary field that integrates political, economic, social and cultural aspects. The dossier reviews nine recent academic works that explore Brazilian music in its complex social relations and collective processes.
Keywords: interdisciplinarity, Brazilian music, and cultural studies.
Music in Brazil has become an increasingly interdisciplinary field of study, moving away from a research model that focuses on illustrious figures in the history of music, or that privileges music as an isolated fact, ignoring the political, economic, social and cultural conditions of its production.
When it comes to the work of musicians, we find scattered research in the most diverse fields of knowledge, such as education, communication, sociology, history, and anthropology. If at some point musician-researchers had to leave their own fields to study music more broadly, it’s important to note that the 21st century has ushered in a series of studies by musician-researchers, most of them in the field of ethnomusicology, which seeks to tell the story of history by considering music-making in its multiple dimensions.
The dossier Music in Brazil: texts and contexts presents book reviews that, as a whole, show us a complex of social relations, temporalities and spatialities that help us to understand the diversity and conditions in which Brazilian music has been and is produced. These are nine works, mostly the result of academic research, published in the last four years. Two of them were published between 2012 and 2018, and the third is a classic by José Ramos Tinhorão, originally published in 1997, with a review of its 2011 edition. The reviews are presented in chronological order, starting with the most recently published books.
The authors of the reviews are musicologists – Masters, Doctors and PhDs – whose own research expresses an understanding of music-making as part of multiple processes and multiple determinations, in other words, that music should be treated as an essentially collective activity that permeates and is permeated by countless aspects of social life.
With this dossier, we hope to contribute to understanding music no longer as something isolated from social, cultural, political and economic life, but as the fruit of the development of human sociability in collective practices. In this sense, we take up the concept of acoustic work of Samuel Araújo, one of the authors reviewed, in order to reiterate the need and urgency of recognizing music as something that is understood/implicated in the social dynamics of the relationships established between human beings when making music.
Author
Luciana Requião holds a PhD in Education from UFF and a Master’s degree in Music from UNIRIO. She is a professor at the Angra dos Reis Institute of Education (IEAR/UFF) and at UNIRIO’s Graduate Program in Music. She has published, among others, Eis aí a Lapa…: processos e relações de trabalho do músico nas casas de shows da Lapa (São Paulo: Annablume, 2010) e Festa acabada, músicos a pé!: um estudo crítico sobre as relações de trabalho de músicos atuantes no estado do Rio de Janeiro” (2016). ID: LATTES: http://lattes.cnpq.br/2687869588131721; ID ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0351-0578; E-mail: lucianarequiao@id.uff.br; Instagram: lucianareq.
To cite this text
REQUIÃO, Luciana. Música no Brasil: textos e contextos. Crítica Historiográfica. Natal, v.4, n.17, May/June, 2024. Available at <https://www.criticahistoriografica.com.br/en/music-in-brazil-texts-and-contexts-luciana-requiao-uff/>.
This editorial was produced with Artificial Intellignce (AI) resources, in accordance witht regulations annouceed in Crítica Historiográfica, 4/5/2023.
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