Magaldi Cosmopolitanism and World Music

Cosmopolitanism and World Music
in Rio de Janeiro at the Turn

of the Twentieth Century
Cristina Magaldi
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The urban reforms in Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of the twentieth
century were central to the new Republican government’s motto of
“Civilization and Progress.” From sanitation and electrical lighting of
streets and parks to the construction of neoclassical buildings and large
boulevards comparable to those of contemporary Paris, urban renova-
tions marked important moments of both political affirmation and
cultural transition in the Brazilian capital. On the one hand, the urban-
ization projects emptied public coffers, and the bota abaixo (demolitions)
forced thousands of residents to relocate to poor conditions in suburban
areas;1 on the other hand, the revamping of old Rio de Janeiro provided
much-needed infrastructure to a city that had grown continually in the
previous decades, doubling its 1890 population to almost a million
people by 1910.2
The new landscape also came to symbolize the dream of a growing
(mostly white) middle class, as new architectural façades and public
spaces changed fashions and behavioral patterns, giving Rio’s residents
the feeling of being at the center of their country. The new capital
became an icon of urban transformation and modernity to be followed by
“the rest” of an agrarian Brazil viewed by the political and intellectual
elite as backward. Mayor Pereira Passos’s plan to reinvigorate the Brazilian
capital also highlighted the government’s attempt to put the country at
the center of the Western world, showcasing Brazil’s embrace of European
ideals of civilization and progress that associated modernization with
urbanization. Having Hausmann’s Paris as a model, the urban transform-
ation of Rio de Janeiro was accompanied by carefully designed postcards
that helped project new images of the country abroad and attract foreign
investors and visitors.3 Most importantly, the new urban landscape
allowed the Brazilian capital entrance to the European Belle Époque and
turned the city into a cosmopolitan center in the Americas (Figure 1).
doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdp021 92:329 –364

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330 The Musical Quarterly

Figure 1. Avenida Central, Rio de Janeiro, first decade of the 20th century. Photo by
Augusto Malta. Fundação Museu da Imagem e do Som, Rio de Janeiro.
The new Rio de Janeiro landscape was also part of a pattern of

urban growth and transformation that went beyond Brazilian politics and
that reflected an international historical moment of political and social
transition and globalization.4 In fact, besides a new urban landscape, at
the beginning of the century Rio de Janeiro shared several other features
with emerging cities in Europe and the Americas as follows: (1) it
housed a large number of immigrants; (2) it provided the stage for the
introduction of new technologies and became a magnet for foreign visi-
tors and investors; and (3) the city saw an unprecedented growth of its
population, a diversification of its ethnic fabric and cultural expressions,
and the empowerment of a growing middle class. Cities in Europe and
the Americas were also linked by a set of shared images, as emerging
technologies in photography and film helped Western European ideas,
ideologies, and fashions travel faster and farther. Furthermore, as the
growth and spread of a capitalist economy opened new markets for cul-
tural goods in cities worldwide, it also set in motion a cosmopolitan cul-
tural fabric of unprecedented outreach—an early globalized world
culture that anticipates our own time.
Even if the idea of globalization was daunting, this early sense of
global connection became an essential part of a new urban culture that
Cosmopolitanism and World Music in Rio de Janeiro 331
pervaded Rio de Janeiro.5 Local writers left numerous accounts of the

feeling of “being part of the world.” Olavo Bilac told his readers in 1907,
for instance, that while walking from one Rio de Janeiro neighborhood
to the next, and from one movie theater to the next, he could easily
and quickly also travel “to Paris, Rome, New York, and Milan.”6 Bilac
and his contemporaries were puzzled by the new sounds of the busy,
modern city and often described Rio de Janeiro’s soundscapes by
highlighting the noise of cars and electric bondes (cable cars), the
rhythmic clicks of typewriters, and the parroting sounds of gramophones.
Although hardly studied systematically, popular music played a key role
in strengthening this cultural connection among emerging cities and in

shaping the new urban culture of the Brazilian capital.
The international circulation of music driven by the growing
music-publication business, the alliance between the music and enter-
tainment industries in urban areas, and the introduction of new technol-
ogies like movies and the gramophone, permitted an unprecedented
sharing of repertories and musical practices between Rio de Janeiro’s
emerging middle class and those of contemporary cities in the Americas
and Europe. This temporal-sonic experience not only paralleled but
also intensified the global connections fostered by large boulevards,
architectural façades, photographic images, and early movies. If trans-
forming the urban landscape can be viewed as a tangible example of
the Republican government’s attempt to connect Rio de Janeiro to an
international circuit of cosmopolitan culture, then a “cosmopolitan
state of mind”7 was also achieved by a soundscape—repertories,
performance practices, and listening experiences—that fostered strong
links between residents in the Brazilian capital and those in other
contemporary cities.
In this essay, I focus on the international circulation of music as a
globalizing force that allowed for the creation of a cosmopolitan culture
in the early 1900s. My main goal is to offer insights into issues of cosmo-
politan identities and popular musics in general, and in the Brazilian
capital in particular. Rather than presenting early popular musics in Rio
de Janeiro in their potential to display early signs of Brazilianness, I show
the emergence of popular music in the city as part of a larger context of
international urban culture. One aspect of the early globalization of
music is of special significance: the availability, in early twentieth-
century Rio de Janeiro, of dances and songs from “far away places,” a
phenomenon that can be understood as an early stage of the “world
music” trend so familiar at the turn of the twenty-first century. These
songs and dances, both imported and reproduced locally, serve as
examples of how the new middle class of Rio de Janeiro imagined
themselves and their Others. I am most interested, however, in an

emergent musical cosmopolitanism and in early examples of “world
music” as ephemeral international fashions that can offer an alternative
to the often historicized understandings of the role of music in identity
politics of early twentieth-century Brazil. By seeing the emergence of
popular musics in the Brazilian capital as an outgrowth of an international
circuit of music production, circulation, and consumption, rather than as
a localized phenomenon, I offer ways to “de-essentialize” Brazilian popular
music history and revisit general assumptions about race, nationalism, and
musical identity in the first part of the twentieth century.

Globalization and Music in
Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro
The globalization of cultural production, and of music in particular, so
real and prevalent at the turn of the twenty-first century, has received a
great deal of attention from scholars in a variety of disciplines. Some
writers have been skeptical of the panorama of music dissemination en
masse and see as a result a homogenization of musical cultures and the
universalization of the mundane as the music industry in central areas
indiscriminately explores and/or imposes musics on markets worldwide.
Others have addressed the wide circulation of music as an enrichment
of music making through artistic cross-pollination and as an opportunity
for empowerment of musicians and audiences in peripheral areas.8 As
the acceleration and intensification of globalization continues to chal-
lenge our understanding of the relations between music and group iden-
tities on local, national, and international levels, scholars have turned
their attention to musical repertories and practices that have crossed
national boundaries to create transnational and transcultural bonds.9 If
present-day processes of music distribution and sharing have caused the
spread of rock and hip-hop to be viewed as an international phenom-
enon, these processes have also challenged essentialist views of music
and group identities outside centers of musical production. Richard
Middleton has pointed out that, during the 1990s, the globalization of
music led large and small, global and local musical systems to reach an
“uneasy but mutually advantageous coexistence.”10 Thus, there is a
trend in recent scholarship toward reconsidering and (re)theorizing con-
temporary relationships between music, nationalisms, and universalisms,
while rethinking relationships of gender, race, and sociocultural identi-
ties within the politics of nationalisms and globalization.11
Attempts to shed light on earlier globalizing eras have been
limited, however. Nayan Chanda has noted that our understanding of
globalization is predominantly ahistorical, because it is linked too much

to recent socioeconomic and cultural history. He points out that
“massive economic integration, and with it cultural globalization, has far
outpaced our global mindset, which is still rooted in nationalist terms.”12
Nonetheless, social scientists have offered case-specific examples of how
globalization and cultural cosmopolitanism have historically worked con-
comitantly with a range of contrasting nationalisms, postulating that the
very idea of nation building, within and beyond the nation-state, is his-
torically intertwined with globalization.13 Thus, the assumptions we
make about globalization, nationalisms, and cosmopolitanisms, and the
resultant cultural articulations of belonging and detachment, of Self and

Otherness, need to be understood not only within fluid geographical
boundaries but also across historical contexts.
The dynamics of music and globalization have yet to be systemati-
cally approached from a historical perspective. Musicologists have exam-
ined European art-music repertories and practices as ways of exoticizing
the European Other, but less so as powerful political tools in the imper-
ialistic expansion of Western European countries. In the field of popular
music and globalization, studies often portray a contemporary globalized
world that has altered, positively or negatively, a set of previous cultural
and musical systems that are axiomatically defined as static or undis-
rupted by cultural interactions. Because scholars of popular music tend
to situate their object of study in the middle and later part of the twen-
tieth century, our understanding of popular music as a global commodity
is defined essentially by an absence of history: the newness element in
the contemporary globalization of music is often key to analytical argu-
ments about issues of identity politics. This, of course, is an issue that
spills beyond globalization, for popular musics and their history in
Europe and the Americas have themselves been approached as carica-
tures and presented as an Other that cannot be understood through the
same lens used to assess recent musical systems and are therefore left
out of mainstream historical narratives.14 Musicological studies dealing
with popular music before the 1920s are indeed scarce, although the
recent books by Juan Pablo González (2005) and Derek Scott (2008)
might invite others to investigate this largely unexplored area.15 The few
studies that touch on the history of the globalization of popular music
have generated essentialist views of the music of the past, ones that vali-
date popular musical practices outside the center of musical production
by mythical associations with local authenticity, roots, and “folk” cul-
tural purity. If, as Veit Erlmann suggests, the dynamics of contemporary
music-globalizing processes feed on universal pursuits of authenticity
and exaltations of locality,16 caution is needed to resist historicizing
approaches that essentialize uniqueness, nationality, and difference into

a historically deterministic cycle. Consequently, there is an urgent need
to rethink the newness of the contemporary globalized musical world, to
problematize popular music history, and to reassess our understanding of
what Erlmann described as “the historical space between compact disc,
MTV, Graceland, and everything that preceded them.”17
Aware of the historical dimension of the “world music” phenom-
enon, Philip Bohlman has provided an account of “past encounters with
music from outside our own world.”18 He points out that at the turn of
the twentieth century, internal conflicts of Self and Otherness in Europe
and the United States were staged at international fairs (Chicago,

St. Louis, Paris, Vienna), where audiences went in search of roots to
articulate their own contexts within an interconnected world dominated
by a powerful few.19 Bohlman’s focus on the politics of ethnic represen-
tation within Europe is of crucial importance to the understanding of
early processes of music globalization, one that will have repercussions
outside the European realm, as we will discuss later in this article.
Nevertheless, while Bohlman’s accounts of past musical encounters take
place within Europe and the United States, and therefore from the per-
spective of the centers of musical production, they leave the ideas of
authenticity, exoticism, and roots unquestioned. The complex nature of
the cultural interchanges fostered in great part by the circulation of
musics between Europe and the Americas at the turn of the twentieth
century involved exoticisms and representations, as Bohlman pointed
out, but also re-presentations and re-contextualizations, back and forth,
in a complex transnational dynamic in which “culture and commerce
fed imperial ideology with panoplies of available exotics.”20
To understand the political and cultural roles of popular musics in
turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro, one needs to consider that, like
today, the urban middle classes of emerging cities had more in common
with one another than with parts of their own local surroundings, and
that popular music was part of a consumer society from the start. One
needs also to contemplate the possibility that globalization of music in
the past, as today, permitted engaging and disengaging in a myriad of
cultural practices from near and far, and that it generated several layers
of group identities that flowed across boundaries of countries and
nations. The repertory discussed below, dances and songs of European
and US provenance disseminated in Rio de Janeiro through sheet-music
publications, in music-hall performances, and in early recordings, helps
us to investigate historically the potential of music to create collective
identity bonds that go beyond nationality; but more importantly, it
allows us to postulate that popular music—market-driven pieces
disseminated in massive numbers across cities and countries—was trans-

national and situated as cosmopolitan before it was used politically as a
tool for constructing twentieth-century national alliances; that it was
defined as a sonic experience of cities before it was touted for its poten-
tial to enforce nationalisms. And here the example of the Brazilian
capital is of particular relevance. Because popular music has served as a
most powerful tool in the construction and management of nationalistic
ideologies in Brazil throughout the twentieth century, its Brazilianness is
often understood as intrinsic and natural, devoid of social agency and
history. By evoking a history of Brazilian popular musics as cosmopolitan
and transnational, I attempt to offer fresh insights into the process of

constructing musical symbolisms of Brazilianness.
To be sure, the idea of a past cosmopolitan music culture is an
abstract concept no less politicized than the nationalistic approach.
Cosmopolitan cultures are often driven by issues of economic and cul-
tural power and, more often than not, permit one-way connections
between center and periphery—no matter where (or when) the center
or the periphery is located. At the turn of the twentieth century,
whether one was in Paris, London, Buenos Aires, or Rio, the imagined
cosmopolis did indeed have a specific locale of origin in Paris. At the
same time, a cosmopolitan cultural identity is one of a specific kind,
created among individuals living in large cities who have access to and
engage in a variety of shared musical practices that are delimited more
by temporal factors, social standing, and generational lines than by
national alliances—an identity that is historically shaped and re-shaped
by musical fashions more than by locality. In fact, as I explore the poten-
tial of music to be historically transnational, I also postulate that, before
local popular musics were coopted as political tools for creating national
alliances, early marketers saw in music a potential to congregate a “com-
munity of transnational feeling”21 that could be used as a tool to escape
and critique, rather than construct, locality—as Jacqueline Loss put, as
a tool “against the destiny of place.”22
If, as Scott contends, we can attribute the birth of popular music
as we understand it today—a commercially explored, market-driven, and
mass-disseminated production—to the rise of music halls, café concerts,
cabarets, and dance halls in mid-nineteenth-century European cities, it
is exactly its origin in an urban context that allowed for its marketability
in various contemporary cities outside of Europe. Even if early music
halls in England and France had connections to the audiences’ peasant
roots, the growth of the musics’ popularity and the shaping of their
styles were intertwined with an emerging metropolitan context—a
context dependent on new but shaky power relations and that involved
the mingling of large numbers of people from various backgrounds, who

were confronted with social, ethnic, racial, and gender (re)negotiations.
One should not be surprised, therefore, that the market for early
European popular musics was easily and quickly widened well beyond
borders and found fertile ground in cities throughout the Americas.23
Rio de Janeiro of the First Republic was one such city with a booming
market for what Scott calls the “revolutionary style” of emerging popular
musics.24 The Republican government’s investment in the idea of urban
modernity, civilization, and progress, combined with the growth of the
city’s population and advancements in technology, allowed for the full
participation of residents of the Brazilian capital in the international
circuit of music cosmopolitanism.25 But Rio de Janeiro’s participation in

the globalization of music started when there was already a delineated
urban musical culture and an established market for popular musics in
European cities. Rio de Janeiro audiences engaged with the new
popular musics after they had already been characterized as both urban
and cosmopolitan. For audiences and musicians in the Brazilian
capital, popular music was born as ready-made city music, as an
essential part of a cosmopolitan culture tailored to fulfill the needs of
those who shared the delights and the frustrations of the fin-de-siècle
metropolis.
Music Cosmopolitanism in Rio de Janeiro of

the Old Republic
While the new Republican government was not an ideal patron of elite
music, it fostered the growth of the entertainment business in the
Brazilian capital, a business that responded primarily to the demands of
the emergent middle class. Private entertainment enterprises in Rio de
Janeiro strove to catch up with those in European cities by making their
audiences feel as if they were part of the global music scene. Chronicling
the night life of the city at the turn of the twentieth century, Luiz
Edmundo noted that “in Rio we can be proud to have the highest
number of the best [music halls] available on the face of the earth . . .
we have here the companies and artists that perform in the most famous
music halls in Europe and North America . . . [such as] the Alhambra in
London, the Moulin Rouge in Paris, and the Winter Garden in
Berlin.”26 Native and immigrant entrepreneurs invested heavily in the
need of Rio de Janeiro’s well-to-do to participate in the Belle Époque’s
bohemian urban life and betted on the success of well-known foreign
formulas and musical practices that were central to European urban cul-
tural life. Music halls and cabarets named after elegant models, such as
Maison Moderne, Moulin Rouge, and High Life (later renamed Folies
Bergère),27 added to the already coveted Rio de Janeiro flamboyant café
concerts, the less refined casas de chope (beer houses), and the low-brow
chopes berrantes (noisy beer houses). Several of these venues, located on
and around the Rua do Lavradio, were equipped for showing movies and
included a stage for short theatrical shows, music presentations, and
dances. Music was usually performed by a small ensemble of five to six
performers, and in the less luxurious establishments sometimes by only
three instruments, like a flute, a guitar, and a cavaquinho; some,
however, could only offer live music on an “old rented Pleyel piano,”
Edmundo recalls, which also served to accompany the chanteuse interna-
tionales or to perform waltzes, schottische, and polkas.28 New and fash-

ionable music also entertained the public in waiting rooms constructed
specifically as movie theaters, like the Cine Parisiense, inaugurated in
1907 on the new Avenida Central. In the spacious waiting-room area
the owner, Italian Rosario Staffa, could entertain his audiences with live
music performances by a pianist, a small orchestra, a gramophone, and
later, in 1908, also with an electric pianola.29
It is hard to estimate precisely the range of musical styles available
to Rio de Janeiro’s residents early in the century. A glance at publication
lists on the covers of sheet music, catalogs of publishing houses, music
shops’ advertisements, and early catalogs of recordings shows a daunting
picture of what popular music meant in the Brazilian capital of the First
Republic. Thousands of waltzes, polkas, mazurkas, and schottische, as
well as songs in French, English, Italian, and Portuguese, written by
local composers, added to endless lists of foreign publications in the
same fashion. A closer look at these lists shows that the music by com-
posers such as Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944) and Emile Waldteufel
(1837– 1915), as well as older nineteenth-century champions of the
international music trade like the Strauss family, Oliver Métra (1830–
1889), and Émile Prudent (1817 –1863), were sure hits in the Brazilian
capital. Edmundo recalls that in Rio de Janeiro’s music halls the
Montmartre chanson, with its short and suave melodies, and sometimes
pornographic French lyrics, were popular enough to drive the old-
fashioned Italian lyric singers out of business.30 The French chansons
also inspired the local cançoneta phenomenon; several male intellectuals,
chroniclers, and writers took their shots at writing Portuguese cançoneta
lyrics, and local composers paralleled the craze, creating tunes by the
dozens, some of which made it big in comedy acts and theatrical
intermezzos.
Local performers kept themselves busy playing these songs and
dances in the waiting areas of theaters and movie theaters, on small

Figure 2. Advertisement for Nascimento Silva & Company. Above: “Without
having ever studied the instrument, any person can sit at the piano and play with the
perfection of the best pianists. This wonderful achievement is possible by the
Piano-Pianola, the most perfect and complete of pneumatic instruments.” Below:
“Reproducing the performance of the best pianists through an electric motor, the
Piano-autographico is an artistic wonder, perfect for music amateurs, hotels, restaurants,
cafés, etc.”
stages in café concerts, and in music halls; their popularity increased as

their pieces spilled over to dance halls and outdoor performances in
parks, where family socializing took place. A staggering number of these
pieces made available in sheet music also reached the female domain of
private living rooms. And if one could not play Waldteufel’s music at
home, or listen to it in music halls, they could enjoy it on the pianola,
which offered the composer’s hits at a modest price. The arrival of the
Gramophone, a “modern” machine “able to reproduce in Rio the voices
of singers and the music of bands and performers from all over the
world,” according to a newspaper advertisement,31 opened up a whole
new set of possibilities to enjoy music. Together, these songs and
dances, imported and local, formed a sort of sonic ambience that helped
define the urban context of Rio de Janeiro, and allowed people to
situate themselves in time and space—in a large, modern city at the
turn of the twentieth century. (See Figure 2.)
It was exactly the need to supply more new music for Rio de
Janeiro’s growing entertainment business that led to an explosion in
local musical production. As the impresarios replicated the models of
public entertainment from European capitals, so did local composers and

performers, who were quick to provide an enormous output aimed at
the local market. Thus, in cities like Rio de Janeiro, the music industry
was fed by both local and imported musics, but these were rather
intertwined—from the titles of pieces to melodic lines, from rhythmic
patterns in accompaniments to the language used in songs, the bound-
aries of authorship, originality, and origins were somewhat irrelevant.
The recycling of imported songs with added Portuguese lyrics and the
disguising of well-known melodies by new titles addressing familiar situ-
ations were all fair game. Thus, when in 1908 the pianist composer
Ernesto Nazareth (1863– 1934) started to perform his well-known
waltzes and polkas at the luxurious waiting room of the new movie
theater Odeon, he gained local notoriety exactly because of his ability to
provide his audiences with dances—waltzes, polkas, tangos, schottische,
and mazurkas—that were extraordinarily well crafted but, at the same
time, were in a style that was already fashionable and crystallized inter-
nationally. No less than rock music in today’s Rio de Janeiro, Nazareth’s
pieces were transnational works that fulfilled the cosmopolitan demands
of Rio de Janeiro audiences in the First Republic.
We may postulate, therefore, that engaging with early popular
musics allowed for a more worldly feel in places outside the original
centers of production. While those who provided songs and dances for
the music halls in England or the Parisian café concerts were profiting
from the foreign sales of their music, they were engaged primarily with
their own musics, while those in Rio de Janeiro had available to them a
wider spectrum of foreign productions. Audiences in the Brazilian
capital could enjoy at the same time—sometimes in the same night—
music from the music halls in London, from the Viennese dance halls,
and the Montmartre cabarets, music from Portugal, Spain, and the
United States, in addition to the output of local composers who repli-
cated those musics for local consumption. In Rio de Janeiro one could
listen to musics from Europe and the United States, pick and choose
from a variety of styles, engage in fashions from different places, hear and
sing about a gamut of political and social issues that were far from them as
well about things happening nearby, and in the end participate in a much
wider spectrum of the global cosmopolitan culture. This ironic paradox of
the center–periphery musical flow made for an important ingredient in the
local soundscape of Rio de Janeiro. Geographically far from the centers of
music production, Rio de Janeiro audiences were truly cosmopolitan; to
them, novelty and fashionable musics were surely important factors, but
variety and eclecticism were also vital in their popular-music scene.
The output of pianist and composer Aurélio Cavalcanti (active in
Rio de Janeiro during 1890–1920)32 provides a good example of this

complex interplay between cosmopolitanism and locality. Cavalcanti was
a prominent figure in Rio de Janeiro nightlife and one of the most
popular composers and performers in the city at the turn of the twentieth
century. With his skills as a pianist and his memorable pieces, Cavalcanti
lit up the local music halls and filled the chronicles of old-time commen-
tators, who describe him with an enthusiasm that can be compared to
that associated with twentieth-century pop stars. Cavalcanti’s pieces were
a must in the private salons of middle-class families, in the male-
dominated world of music halls, and in the chopes berrantes on the Rua
do Lavradio and surroundings; his music crossed social boundaries and
shared the devotion of the local public with works by international figures
like Waldteufel and the Strauss family. Cavalcanti was particularly
notable for the popularity of his waltzes and polkas which, according to
contemporary commentators, were an essential part of the soundscape of
Rio de Janeiro’s Belle Époque. Referred to by some of his contemporaries
as the “king of the waltz,” Cavalcanti’s dances reveal his awareness of the
latest popular musical styles of his time. He penned hundreds of them,
some of which reveal a breadth of invention hard to find in the compo-
sitions of the most well-known composers coming from overseas.
Cavalcanti’s music serves as an example of how composers (and by
extension, audiences) outside Paris, London, or New York aimed at
becoming cosmopolitan. His Bregeira, polka francesa (French polka;
1900) offers an idea of his musical style as well as the context for which
his pieces were composed (see Figure 3 and Ex. 1).
Bregeira is written in the usual dance format of three sections that
repeat (AABBAACCAA); each section is self-contained and, like the
majority of contemporary polkas, is constructed with regular pairs of
eight-bar phrases. Analyzing European dances of the second half of the
nineteenth century, Scott has shown that the marketing possibilities
opened up by the association of music with the entertainment business
in London, Paris, and Vienna began a musical revolution in terms of

Figure 3. Cover, Aurélio Cavalcanti, Bregeira, polka francesa. Biblioteca Nacional de
Rio de Janeiro, Divisão de Música e Arquivo Sonoro.
performance practices, new musical styles, and new aesthetical conven-

tions.33 Cavalcanti’s Bregeira is a typical example demonstrating that com-
posers outside European capitals understood well and adopted this musical
revolution. Although the structure of his polka does not add much to the
established compositions in the same vein, Bregeira’s descending melodic
lines followed by sudden leaps of up to an octave and endings on the
accented lower note easily demonstrate Cavalcanti’s use of the yodeling
Viennese motives so common in Strauss’s music and in Waldteufel’s
Parisian dances. Cavalcanti also makes wide use of the characteristic polka
rhythm in the melody, a combination of quarter, eighth, and two sixteenth
notes, to contrast the steady oom-pah, march-like rhythmic figure in the
bass and to create the lively “swing” realized in performance. Cavalcanti’s

Example 1a. Aurélio Cavalcanti, Bregeira, polka francesa (1901) (Rio de Janeiro:
A. Lavignasse Fillho & Cia.). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisão de
Música e Arquivo Sonoro.
D. C. al
Example 1b. Aurélio Cavalcanti, Bregeira, polka francesa (1901) (Rio de Janeiro:
A. Lavignasse Fillho & Cia.). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisão de
polka also reveals an awareness of the harmonic novelties that Strauss had
established in his dances, using the added-sixth note in the melody in the
second measure to create melodic interest and to contrast with the predict-
able move from B-flat to E-flat, and F. In sum, Bregeira shows Cavalcanti as
a composer of polka at its best, fulfilling perfectly the expectations of
dancers and listeners accustomed to the devices used by contemporary
composers in Europe. Bregeira is a “French” polka, a designation given by
Cavalcanti, who was also aware of the distinctions of tempo in polka per-
formances favored in specific cities; “French” here meant that Bregeira
should be a lively dance but performed in a slower tempo.
Cavalcanti’s waltz Buenos dias, valsa hespanhola (Spanish waltz)

offers another facet of the Brazilian composer’s versatile cosmopolitanism
(see Figure 4 and Ex. 2).
Figure 4. Cover, Cavalcanti, Buenos dias, valsa hespanhola. Biblioteca Nacional de

Rio de Janeiro, Divisão de Música e Arquivo Sonoro.
1. 2.

FIM
Example 2a. Arurélio Cavalcanti, Buenos dias, valsa hespanhola (ca. 1903) (Rio de
Janeiro: Arthur Napoleão e Co.). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisão de
D. C. al
Example 2b. Arurélio Cavalcanti, Buenos dias, valsa hespanhola (ca. 1903) (Rio de
Janeiro: Arthur Napoleão e Co.). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisão de
Like many in contemporary Paris, Cavalcanti and his audiences

were fascinated by Spanish music as a European internal Other, one
that was frequently evoked in European pieces of different genres and
styles by a well-defined musical syntax of Spanishness.34 Buenos dias,
one of several of Cavalcanti’s Valsas hespanholas, serves as a conspicuous

example of exoticism being recycled outside the European realm, for the
dance includes all the required musical elements marking the music’s
difference from his French Bregeira: the rhythmic displacements of the
melody accentuating the second beat in the first section, the use of the tri-
plets, and suggestions of Phrygian mode in the melody in the third section,
while at the same time using a harmonic progression that helps reiterate
the dance’s Frenchness. Cavalcanti’s knowledge of the syntax of
Spanishness à la Chaminade and Waldteufel is quite significant, for his
Valsa hespanhola is not a mere homage to a place by a suggestive title, but a
conscious use of musical codes of exoticism that was dependent on his and

his audiences’ familiarity with the European models to make sense.
Cavalcanti’s Buenos dias can be seen as more than an exotic piece that
characterized a Self/Other duality; it is a work that displays Cavalcanti’s
skills to replicate the French constructions of difference, a cosmopolitan
position that helped him articulate a variety of Others without focusing on
his own peripheral condition. Positioned as both insider and outsider,
Cavalcanti’s cosmopolitanism is marked by his ability to engage with the
musics of a variety of localities and ethnicities through his understanding of
a central musical language derived from urban centers in Europe. In this
way, his Valsa sertaneja (sertão [northeastern] waltz), in which he makes
reference to a Brazilian regional style, can be interpreted in the same way as
his polka Bregeira and his waltz Buenos dias, as an exploration of a cosmopo-
litan culture passed to him through European imaginaries of Otherness.
As a cosmopolitan on the periphery, Cavalcanti was able to offer his
audiences in Rio de Janeiro as broad a picture of the sonic world as poss-
ible, and that wide palette included nearby regions. In fact, a large
number of nineteenth-century dances and songs were linked to specific
localities, if not by musical codes then surely by suggestive titles such as
“Polka Madrid,” “La Parisienne,” “The Yankee,” or Valsa sertaneja. These
works show that “places,” near and far, were used as important marketing
tools to widen the interest in popular pieces, increasing circulation in
larger markets with the concomitant potential for larger profits—titles
and musical codes of Otherness functioned as a kind of ornamentation
that brought interest to the works as exotic pieces. However, locality
associated with these dances also involved an expectation of a common
style—the European metropolitan popular musical style. For these pieces
to make sense, they needed first to follow a common language accepted
as cosmopolitan—they needed to be easily recognizable as waltzes and
polkas, for example—and only then could they work as musical commod-
ities opened up for negotiations of individual identities. Cavalcanti’s skill
in writing waltzes and polkas highlights his position as a participant in the
international musical language shared by others in Buenos Aires,

New York, London, and Paris; it shows the Brazilian composer’s wide
awareness of a world of international musical connections.
This is not an exercise in model and derivatives, an aesthetic discus-
sion that praises the authentic and dismisses the replica, or that highlights
a process of reinventing European dances into originally Brazilian compo-
sitions. My argument here lies in the nature of Cavalcanti’s pieces, which
were written to fill a space that was local (Rio de Janeiro) but through a
musical language that was cosmopolitan. Thus, it would not be a mischar-
acterization to classify Cavalcanti’s polkas and waltzes as successful imita-
tions of Waldteufel’s dances in and for Rio de Janeiro. To be sure, the idea

of center versus periphery is evident in this case, since Waldteufel’s or
Strauss’s works were circulating in Rio de Janeiro, while Cavalcanti’s
dances did not follow a reciprocal path in Paris or Vienna. Nonetheless,
one cannot rule out the possibility that, had the Brazilian composer
settled in Paris, New York, or Buenos Aires, he would have succeeded as a
composer for the local dance halls in any of these cities. In this way, the
particular success of Cavalcanti’s work as a composer of polkas and waltzes
in Rio de Janeiro lies not in its particular uniqueness, but in his ability to
cater to the local audiences’ needs to locate themselves in a generic and
somewhat abstract growing city at the turn of the twentieth century.
Orientalism in Rio de Janeiro at the Turn of the

Twentieth Century
Similar to today’s music market, at the turn of the twentieth century,
novelty and variety were essential to the success of musical works mar-
keted to large numbers of people from different cities. London’s music
halls and Parisian café concerts and cabarets were ideal venues in this
regard, for they allowed for variety, intermingling, and experimentation
as impresarios depended on music to ornament variety and comedy acts,
circus, and theatrical presentations. Because their early commercial
success coincided with the height of European imperialism in the nine-
teenth century, these venues were also appealing as international sites.
On their small stages, musics and dances were used to represent a
variety of colonized places, to portray those places as exotic, and then to
present the exotic as fashionable; in the process, re-creation and adap-
tation of songs and dances from places near and far became a common
practice.35 At these venues, popular songs and dances fueled curiosity
about and interest in cultures outside the realm of the European white,
urban bourgeoisie, while helping to construct a complex dynamic of the
musical Self and Other in urban areas within and beyond Europe. These
dynamics involved not only the marketing of some popular musics as

fashionably exotic, but also the articulation of a musical syntax of
exotica that could in turn serve well to articulate local politics of class,
race, and gender. This syntax was a generic set of musical tools created
in Europe as representations of the exotic36 and more often than not
was presented in comedy acts, allowing for caricatures and open paro-
dies. By the fin-de-siècle, European composers and publishers had awa-
kened to the international appeal of the exotic in popular musics, an
appeal that rested as much in articulations of a common urban, cosmo-
politan identity translated into worldliness, as in the articulations of the
complimentary notion of “otherworldliness.”37 To some extent, the

phenomenon parallels the appeal that the “world music” marketing label
has in today’s popular music (in the United States and Western
Europe), fed as it has been on essentialist ideals of the Other’s authen-
ticity, recast as fashionable, urban, and cosmopolitan.
The interest in re-representing the music of “faraway lands,” and in
making it fashionable and marketable, was already in vogue in the world
of operatic music—a crucial agent in the imperialistic expansion of
Europe—when it was further explored in the early commercialization of
popular musics. However, it was the novelty of films that allowed for a
more international spread of “world music” beyond Europe. Saturated
with images of faraway lands, the early hits of French and US filmography
were widely available in Rio de Janeiro as early as 1896; and by 1905
they had already secured a solid place in the entertainment business of
the Brazilian capital. Advertised daily in Rio’s newspapers as “fashion-
able, new, and modern,”38 early movies with collections of vistas (images)
took Rio’s residents on an international visual tour of distant lands.39
These early films were cheaper to import than to produce locally, offered
no language barriers because they were silent, and served as an important
venue for the proliferation of songs and dances from exotic places, which
accompanied the images projected on the screen.
In the theatrical realm, Gilbert and Sullivan and Sidney Jones were
particularly successful in bringing the Orient as Other into the lives of
metropolitan audiences in Europe and the Americas. While Mikado
(1885) portrayed Japan as a desirable place through familiar songs, its
success was surpassed by Jones’s Geisha (1896), which became an
instant hit in theaters on both sides of the Atlantic. India and China
also served as excellent places from which European composers could
draw sources to construct “a musical syntax of the exotic Oriental,” as
Scott has demonstrated.40 Jones’s musical play San Toy: A Chinese
Musical Comedy (1899) was quite successful, but Howard Talbot’s
A Chinese Honeymoon (1899) is said to be the most performed and
disseminated of plays stereotyping Chinese nationals at the turn of the

twentieth century.41 The success of these works on both sides of the
Atlantic, William Hick has suggested, was not simply cultural “voyeur-
isms” but rather a time-specific fashion made possible exactly because
urban audiences perceived the Orient as both local and distant; these
works served as a safe haven from which to portray exotic problems that
were in fact nearby.42 In these theatrical works, “Eastern-sounding” music
could be created by any combination of musical tools that soon became
formulaic devices, a musical syntax of Otherness, as Derek Scott noted,
used by European composers in various cities to exoticize and criticize,
sometimes at the same time, both those near and those far away.43

Although Edward Said claimed that Orientalisms were created for
audiences in Europe and “only for Europe,”44 awareness and use of the
Oriental-exotica musical syntax did not stay in Europe. In fact, by the
turn of the twentieth century, the exotic Orient had entered the inter-
national music business with tremendous force. The phenomenon was
fueled by the idea of the fashionable “otherworldliness,” which, together
with the complementary worldliness of waltzes and polkas, provided urban
audiences a link to a common cosmopolitan culture. As could be
expected, following its success in London and on Broadway, in 1901
Jones’s San Toy also had a successful opening in Rio de Janeiro. At a time
when Brazilian politicians were discussing the possibility of using Chinese
laborers to substitute for Africans, and when “images of the Chinese
[floated] like an omnipresent specter through discussions of ethnicity in
Brazil,”45 the success of San Toy in the Brazilian capital was also fueled by
the fragile line between the distant and the local. It was also not a coinci-
dence that exotic popular songs and dances marked their presence in the
Brazilian capital at the same time when Brazilian intellectuals were busy
mapping the racial and ethnic profile of the country. And while musical
Orientalisms arrived in the city as a fashionable, cosmopolitan otherworld-
liness, Brazilian composers took on the task of providing the flourishing
music business of Rio de Janeiro with their own fantasies of the Orient.
Like Cavalcanti, the composer Nicolino Milano (1876– 1962)
made full use of the cosmopolitan musical tools available to him,
moving swiftly between locality, cosmopolitanism, and fashion through a
long list of songs and dances. A native of São Paulo, Milano studied and
lived most of his life in Rio de Janeiro, where he was active as a violinist
and composer. He studied at the National Institute of Music with pro-
minent musicians like Vicenzo Cernichiaro and Miguel Cardoso, and
later he also worked as a teacher in that institution. Like Cavalcanti,
Milano was an artist who functioned well in both the elite art-music
scene and the popular-music business; he performed with Barroso Netto
and Alberto Nepomuceno in concerts, while also playing at night at the

Café Java.46 As a composer, Milano was most successful writing music
for the theater, working with the most prestigious writers of musical
comedies in the Brazilian capital. Milano is mostly known for the music
he provided for Arthur de Azevedo’s famous musical review A capital
Federal (1897), but he also left a large number of polkas, waltzes,
Spanish dances, tangos, and other works that put him at the center of
the popular musical fashions of his day. His song “Ti-fá” (verses by
Orlando Teixeira), written for the “Chinese” operetta Ti-Fá, provides an
excellent example of how the idea of “world music” was recycled within
the perspective of a Latin American composer (see Figure 5 and Ex. 3).

The song shows Milano excelling in the manipulation of well-known
clichés, moving back and forth from worldliness and otherworldliness like
the best of his contemporaries. The work abounds in musical signifiers of
Otherness in its use of well-known formulas of Orientalism, like an
opening in unison, the use of parallel fourths and octaves, and the use of
trills in the manner of glissandos, with bare fifths functioning as drones in
the first section; in the second part, Milano explores the augmented
second as exotic by adding the C-sharp in the appoggiatura but moves
from minor to major, comfortably going back to the clear-cut tonal
cadence, a move that further displaces the “Oriental” beginning of his
Chinese song. On the one hand, Milano’s piece needed to articulate the
Orient as the exotic Other (and thus made sense within the current
internal political debates about Chinese labor, race, and nationality in
Brazil). On the other hand, Milano’s “Ti-fá” needed to be fashionable
and cosmopolitan, one among several other songs that belonged to his
time and his city. It is significant that Milano’s piece is not unique within
the Rio de Janeiro context, as examples of Orientalisms in popular songs
and dances by his contemporaries abounded in the Brazilian capital at this
time. A compelling example is provided by the famous pianist composer
Julio Reis (1870–1935), another luminary of Rio de Janeiro nightlife. Like
Cavalcanti and Milano, Reis was prolific in writing waltzes, polkas, and
schottische, but he also left a most intriguing piece entitled Scenas orientais
(Oriental Scenes), where a whole gamut of musical stereotypes is skillfully
blended together to locate not only the Orient as the Brazilian Other, but
the Brazilian composer as a cosmopolitan artist (see Ex. 4).
“Whitening” the Population and “Blackening” the

Music
On 7 July 1903, the Italian immigrant Paschoal Segreto presented in
Rio de Janeiro the French film Le cake-walk infernal (1903) by Georges
Figure 5. Cover, Nicolino Milano, “Ti-fá” from Ti-fá. Biblioteca Nacional de Rio de
Janeiro, Divisão de Música e Arquivo Sonoro.
Méliès (1868– 1938). The film included scenes of the cakewalk dance
that had become a craze in New York and Paris, and thereby added the
dance to the potpourri of musical choices available to residents in the
Brazilian capital. No more than a month later, the “famous” cakewalk
appeared alongside French chansons and pieces from Jones’s San Toy in
a local music hall as one more cosmopolitan product with international
appeal. Earlier in February of the same year, the first page of a promi-
nent local newspaper had already featured an article about the cakewalk

Example 3. Nicolino Milano, “Ti-fá,” Canção chineza (ca. 1908) (Rio de Janeiro:
Vieira Machado & Cia.) Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisão de Música e
Arquivo Sonoro.
craze in Europe, anticipating its success in Rio de Janeiro. According to

the article, the cakewalk “originated among the blacks from the United
States, [who] get together in bars, form a ring, and with the sound of
the banjo, perform the most eccentric jumps and leg movements around
a cake; [the cakewalk then spread] to café concerts . . . and ended up
becoming universal, thanks to what one calls the Americanization of the
World.”47 The commentator was not exaggerating, as the cakewalk and
ragtime spread quite easily via the international musical circuit from
New York to Paris, London, Rio de Janeiro, and other Latin American
cities like an epidemic.48 At a time when the economic and political
power of the United States was growing at a fast pace, the “universal”
status of the cakewalk and other dances and songs, such as ragtime and
the two-step, helped expand the imagined cosmopolitan urban cultural
circuit to include cities like New York and Chicago.
Example 4. Julio Reis, Scenas orientais (ca. 1908) (Rio de Janeiro: Casa Vieira
Machado). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisão de Música e Arquivo
Sonoro.
The appearance and the success of the cakewalk and ragtime songs
and dances in Rio de Janeiro reflected the continuation of a trend in
urban popular musics by Europeans to represent black culture and black
music. While examples of such representations appear in European
theater and music going back to the eighteenth century, the appeal of
the African element took an international turn with the success of min-
strel shows in the United States and Europe in the middle of the nine-
teenth century, and later with the success of John Philip Sousa’s
performances in Europe. Stephen Foster’s minstrel songs, for example,
were so popular in and outside the United States that his “Old Folks at
Home” served as inspiration for Johann Strauss Jr.’s Manhattan Waltzes
at the time of the Viennese composer’s visit to the United States.49 As

African Americans started to gain a hold on the business later in the
century, they opened new possibilities for the popularity of all-black
musicals in New York, like the Creole Show (1890), which included the
dance of the cakewalk, Oriental America (1896), and A Trip to
Coontown (1898). Minstrelsy music was particularly popular in London,
where as early as 1865 there was a permanent local minstrel troupe; the
British fascination with African American music as the new exotic
Other can also be seen in the minstrelsy scene in Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Utopia Unlimited (1893).50
It did not take long for London to become a center of minstrel
sheet-music production in Europe, ultimately competing with New York,
as the music became one more appealing cosmopolitan fashion that
crossed national boundaries. Minstrel songs and the cakewalks, already a
fad on Broadway in the 1890s, were presented repeatedly on the stages
of London and Paris early in the 1900s. The craze was further fostered
in Paris by John Philip Sousa’s concerts, which included minstrel and
ragtime songs, as well as the cakewalk. As the dance grew into an inter-
national craze, it inspired the Parisian production on the famous stage of
the Nouveau Cirque of Joyeux nègre, “Grand American nautical panto-
mime” (1902). The show inspired the composer Rodolphe Berger to
write his cakewalk “Joyeux nègres” (1903).51 The fad for African
American popular musics in Europe also fueled the avant-garde in Paris
at the turn of the twentieth century, from artworks, sculptures, and lit-
erature, to the elite musical world; Debussy’s Gollywog’s Cakewalk
(1906– 08) is a very well-known example of how the African element as
exotic, repositioned as African American, became entrenched within
Parisian culture.52
It was not a coincidence, therefore, that the idea of syncopation
presented in minstrel songs became a defining force in African
American popular musics in the second part of the nineteenth century.
As Scott has noted, alongside call and response in idiomatic instrumen-

tal music and suggestions of pentatonic melodies, a particular kind of
syncopation—with an accent on the note immediately before the synco-
pated note—would become one of the most important signifiers of
African American popular musics.53 Combined, these elements allowed
for the development of a syntax of Africanisms in popular music that
added to the already widespread syntax of Orientalisms. While these
Africanisms were part of the “popular music revolution” of the late nine-
teenth century, they need to be viewed within the parameters of the
cosmopolitan context that had European white bourgeoisie as a point of
reference. Before they became a fashionable city craze, they were pre-

sented in popular comedy acts and dismissed as parody. As Scott points
out, both African American and white musicians were refashioning each
other’s musics to meet their own aesthetic demands, but were doing so
“within a system of unequal power relations, in which the white musi-
cian was able to define the nature of black music and dominate its
reception, leaving the black musician with an identity at odds with his
or her subjectivity . . . African Americans were left dispossessed of a
means of representing themselves on stage.”54
If, on the one hand, the participation of black musicians in the
production and performance of such music gave them some authority
over a booming business, then on the other hand, their presence added,
ironically, the “authenticity” needed for the music to be displaced,
again, as the exotic Other. Therefore, one cannot overemphasize that
the celebration of Africanisms in early popular musics needs to be
understood historically as a direct outgrowth of European colonialism,
with its marked racial hierarchies and racist ideologies.55 Nonetheless,
the production, performance, and consumption of these musics operated
within larger complex systems of social, ethnic, and racial exchanges and
dynamic politics of representations on both sides of the Atlantic,
exchanges in which the lines between Self and Other became compli-
cated, blurred, and at times somewhat irrelevant. In fact, as one exam-
ines Orientalisms and Africanisms alongside Europeanisms as
cosmopolitan fads in early popular pieces, the similarities between syn-
taxes become as significant as their differences.
As cakewalk and ragtime started to make their way onto the Rio
de Janeiro musical scene, it was their status as international popular
musics representing black musical practices filtered through the white
music business that appealed to audiences in the Brazilian capital. Thus,
one would not be surprised to find local composers also writing minstrel
music, cakewalks, and ragtime in order to be part of the cosmopolitan
musical circuit. Foster’s “Old Folks at Home,” for example, reappears

Figure 6. Cover, Cavalcanti, Cake-walk. Biblioteca Nacional de Rio de Janeiro,
Divisão de Música e Arquivo Sonoro.
disguised in local instrumental arrangements, such as in the “Cake-

Walk, Georgia marcha” for bandolim and piano by Eugenio Orfeo
( published by E. Bevilacqua, Rio de Janeiro).
The novel cakewalk also occupied the experienced composer
Aurélio Cavalcanti, who saw in the dance another way to appeal to cos-
mopolitan audiences in Rio de Janeiro (see Figure 6 and Ex. 5).
Cavalcanti’s Cake-walk is a march with the same dance structure
as his polkas, three sections that repeat. The work, which shows an
unequivocal semblance to Berger’s cakewalk “Joyeus nègres,” includes
the already established trait of nonstop melodic syncopations that
Example 5. Aurélio Cavalcanti, Cake-Walk (ca. 1903) (Rio de Janeiro: Editor Downloaded from mq.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 14, 2011
Manoel Antonio Guimarães). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisão de
emphasize the first beat of the march, rather than the syncopated note,
with the added suggestion of pentatonicism in the melody; at the same
time, the composer makes use of the added sixth in the melody recalling
the fashionable Viennese waltzes. Cavalcanti’s use of accentuated, syn-
copated chords in the second section also recalls his use of the accented
chords in the second section of his Valsa hespanhola, both of which
served to highlight his middle section’s element of surprise. In his Cake-
walk, Cavalcanti was fully aware that syncopation was necessary to
define the piece’s Africanisms as an exotic element, but he was quick to

combine it with other Others, such as his French polkas or his Spanish
waltzes; Cavalcanti’s Africanisms, translated into syncopations, were
elements added to his tools of worldliness and otherwordliness that situ-
ated his musics, as well as his audiences, as part of a large urban sounds-
cape of fin-de-siècle cities.
While the appeal of the cakewalk and ragtime in a city like Rio de
Janeiro sheds light on a shared cosmopolitan culture at the beginning of
the twentieth century, it also points to cosmopolitanism à la Europe in a
city that had been dominated by African-derived musical traditions
since its colonial days. If, in Milano’s song “Ti-fá,” one can find a con-

nection between Orientalism and local political discussions of race, the
idea of Chinese immigration was only a temporary topic that soon lost
its force. It was overshadowed by a much larger discussion about
Brazilian nationality focusing specifically on the African element, an
element unmistakably present in and strongly intertwined with all facets
of Brazilian life. Very aware of contemporary European theories of race,
the local intelligentsia flirted with the idea of “whitening” the Brazilian
population through increasing subsidies for European immigration, and
thus avoiding the degeneration of the local culture perceived to result
from its intermingling with the African. Within this context, the spread
of musical Africanisms as fashionable and cosmopolitan was particularly
significant in Rio de Janeiro as both an engagement with and an escape
from the ongoing discussion of the black race’s role in the construction
of Brazilian nationality. Perceived as US eccentric dances of blacks, the
cakewalk and ragtime became a most desirable addition to Rio de
Janeiro’s urban soundscape in the comedy theater, musical reviews, and
during carnival season, when they shared the space not only with
waltzes, polkas, and marches but also with a local dance called maxixe—
a variant of the European polka and march, conspicuously ornamented
with syncopations in both the melodic line and accompaniment. In the
carnival season of 1909, for example, Paschoal Segreto offered in his
music hall a lively “Yankee ball with the delicious cakewalk and the not
less delicious maxixe.”56
The inclusion of both maxixe and cakewalk was one more pairing
of cosmopolitanisms with locality marked by exoticism, for the maxixe
had also been presented in Paris and had become part of the inter-
national circuit of musical exchanges. By locating the maxixe as both
cosmopolitan and exotic, the local dance could be celebrated in Rio de
Janeiro as part of a local urban culture.57 As Whiting rightly points
out, “A fashion has a thousand chances of catching on if it comes
from abroad.”58 The maxixe in this context could lose its potential for
self-exoticism and instead become a convenient tool in the local politics

of race representation. Micol Seigel has offered a compelling analysis of
the appearance and disappearance of the maxixe in the United States,
focusing on the dance’s relation to other Afro-diasporic cultural
exchanges in the second decade of the twentieth century.59 The story of
this exchange from the viewpoint of the burgeoning music business in
Rio de Janeiro offers similar examples, but can also provide another layer
to already complex transnational interactions; it highlights not only
Afro-diasporic musical expressions as transnational, but also shows their
relocation from “transnational” Afro-diasporic to cosmopolitan, and
then, finally, to local.

On the one hand, musical Africanisms in cakewalks and ragtime
disguised as the exotic Other served as a strong marketing tool for fash-
ionable dances coming from overseas. On the other hand, cakewalks
and ragtime dances and songs were particularly useful in validating the
local maxixe production by also highlighting local Africanisms as both
fashionable and desirable by all. Viewed first as one more element in the
wide array of possibilities offered by the international circulation of
music and widespread cultural cosmopolitanism, popular songs and
dances saturated with syncopations acquired a life of their own in the
Brazilian capital. Part of an international discourse of African and
African American expressions that had emerged as representations of
Otherness within “the confines of a well-defined and profitable conven-
tion of mass entertainment”60 set by white Europeans, they became dis-
tinctive and conspicuously celebrated signifiers of Rio de Janeiro’s
music—signifiers that effectively and conveniently blurred concepts of
race, cosmopolitanism, and local uniqueness into a singular discourse.61
In the 1930s, during the height of a dictatorship and within discourses
of ideological nationalisms in Brazil, syncopations in popular songs and
dances were no longer celebrated as exotic Africanisms, or represen-
tations of Otherness, but as a symbol of local authenticity. Desperately
sought after by musicologists within Brazil and abroad as an aesthetic
validation of local musical production, syncopations and other
Africanisms ultimately locked the musical expressions of Afro-Brazilians
in an essentialist box, marked by race and difference, from which there
was no escape—for it became the ultimate symbol, one that came to
shape not only imaginaries of Afro-Brazilian popular music, but also of
Brazilian music, and in the end of Brazilianness—an unquestionable
icon, for which authenticity was undeniable and history played no role.
In this way, Brazilian popular music became historically inseparable from
Afro-Brazilian musical expressions, creating a myth that continues to
this day.62
Still, one wonders how a society ruled by a white elite whose take
on race was modeled on European theories, and who invested in the
“whitening” of the population as a just cause for self-serving debates of
identity and representation, could see in black musics a potential for
local constructions of national identity; put simply, how could those in
charge of “whitening” the population favor “blackening” the music? This
paradox cannot be taken for granted as an inherent Brazilian mystery,
nor can it be simplified or justified by friendly meetings between blacks
and whites in the bohemia of Rio de Janeiro. Beyond the international
celebration of Africanisms as fashionable and desirable, popular music
making in the Brazilian capital was dominated by large numbers of

blacks, who sought and found work in Rio de Janeiro’s emergent music
industry. In the Brazilian capital, they became the frontrunners of the
production and performance of the new cosmopolitan musics, local and
foreign, just as had happened on Broadway late in the nineteenth
century. They understood well and made use of the exotic, of
Orientalisms, Africanisms, and Europeanisms, while positioning them-
selves as true cosmopolitans. As Seigel notes in relation to African
American performances, Afro-Brazilian musical production and perform-
ances within these transnational, cosmopolitan environments of many
exotics cannot be seen in a well-defined black/white racial scheme;
rather, they operated in multiple, competing racial schemas that worked
simultaneously.63
Like Aurélio Cavalcanti, who was described by Luiz Edmundo as a
mulatto, Afro-Brazilians (and mulattos) were successful composers and
performers in music halls, café concerts, and chopes berrantes. After a
French chanson, a Japanese song, and a German dance, Edmundo recalls,
they could satisfy the audiences with polkas and waltzes, and also with
other cosmopolitan musics including cakewalks, ragtimes, habaneras,
tangos, maxixes, etc. As true cosmopolitans in a white society dominated
by European culture, Afro-Brazilian and mulatto composers and perfor-
mers had to navigate a complex set of social dynamics that was marked by
the politics of race representations—as in the United States, Seigel notes,
“They navigated the riptides of internal colonialism.”64 Edmundo praised
the performances of blacks in Rio de Janeiro’s music halls for the “synco-
pated cadences of the African batuque” that they added to all musics, a
quality that showed them as “barbarians,” Edmundo continues, “So much
so that one could not accept any other type of performer during
Carnival.”65 Race, then, was crucial to add local “African authenticity” to
the cosmopolitan production and performances—an authenticity that
could then be presented and represented as parody in Carnival parades.
However, the participation of blacks in the musical production of early
popular musics was also convenient in another way: while blacks suc-
ceeded as cosmopolitan composers and performers, they also made invis-
ible the conspicuous presence of African traditions in the Brazilian
capital. Their contributions to the popular-music scene, with a gamut of
musical and performance innovations, provided a convenient escape from
the traditional sounds of the batuques, which continued to be outlawed
in the city.
The early scenario of popular musics in Rio de Janeiro thus pre-
sents a complex dynamic of identities, representations, and meanings
that were dependent on both an international circuit of music circula-
tion and on a local context marked by early politics of race. While this

unquestionably reveals a story of a magnitude that goes beyond the
scope of this article, these examples linking European and US popular
musics with local musical production offer a way to locate the local pro-
duction as dependant on previous representations that were already con-
textualized as fashionably exotic. In this way, the process in which
popular music was used to create symbols of Brazilianness later in the
twentieth century was far from intrinsic, natural, or local; rather it was a
process constructed by shared histories and transnational cultural
exchanges. Most importantly, these examples allow for an examination
of a local musical production in Rio de Janeiro that is not marked by a
local uniqueness and that instead can be understood as part of a larger
cosmopolitan culture shared by those living in cities on both sides of the
Atlantic. In Rio de Janeiro’s emergent musical industry, early popular
music produced locally simply added a new localized context to a set of
already familiar and unchallenging cosmopolitan cultural contexts.
Notes
Cristina Magaldi is associate professor at Towson University. She is the author of Music
in Imperial Rio de Janeiro: European Culture in a Musical Milieu (2004), a book that
received the Robert Stevenson award from the American Musicological Society in
2005. Her areas of interest include popular music, nineteenth-century music, Latin
American music, nationalism, and music and identity. Her publications appear (among
other places) in Popular Music, Latin American Music Review, and Inter-American Music
Review. Dr. Magaldi is completing a book on music and cosmopolitanism in
fin-de-siècle Rio de Janeiro. Email: cmagaldi@towson.edu
1. Several scholars have addressed Rio de Janeiro’s urban reforms; see Teresa
A. Meade, Civilizing Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889– 1930
(University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); Jeffrey D. Needell,
A Tropical Belle Époque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Jaime Larry
Benchimol, Pereira Passos: Um Haussman tropical: A renovação urbana no Rio de Janeiro
no inı́cio do século XX (Rio de Janeiro: Prefeitura do Rio e Janeiro, 1992).
2. Meade, Civilizing Rio, 43.

3. For the new postcards of Rio de Janeiro, see Cláudia Oliveira, “A representação da
grande Avenida e o sublime dos ‘melhoramentos urbanos’ nas ilustradas Fon-Fon! e Para
Todos,” Escritos: Revista da Casa Rui Barbosa 1, no. 1 (2007): 93; see also Evelyn
Furquim Werneck Lima, Arquitetura do espetáculo: Teatros e cinemas na formação da
Praça Tiradentes e da Cinelândia (Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 2000), 97.
4. For the transformations in Rio de Janeiro and other capitals in Latin America
during the same period, see Arturo Almandoz Marte, Planning Latin America’s Capital
Cities, 1850 –1950 (London and New York: Routledge, 2002); for a comparison
between the urban transformation of Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, see Jeffrey
D. Needell, “Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires: Public Space and Public Consciousness
in Fin-de-siècle Latin America,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 3

(July 1995): 519 –40.
5. Marite Conde explores this aspect of Rio de Janeiro’s culture through the crônicas
(chronicles) and the role of films in the description of the city; see “Film and the
Crônicas: Documenting the New Urban Spaces in Turn of the Century Rio de
Janeiro,” Luso-Brazilian Review 42, no. 2 (2005): 66 –68.
6. Olavo Bilac, “Moléstica da época,” Gazeta de Notı́cias, 3 November 1907; cited in
Conde, “Film and the Crônicas,” 69.
7. This idea was developed by Camilla Fojas in relation to Latin American literature;
see her Cosmopolitanism in the Americas (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press,
2005), 13.
8. These two views of globalization and their relations to Brazilian contemporary
popular music are summarized in Cristina Magaldi, “Adopting Imports: New Images
and Alliance in Brazilian Popular Music of the 1990s,” Popular Music 18, no. 2 (1999):
309 –29. For a further analysis of the problems encountered by theorists of world music
in the 1980s and 1990s, see Steven Feld’s “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music,” Public
Culture 12, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 145 –65.
9. Ignacio Corona’s and Alejandro L. Madrid’s recent compilation of essays on this
topic is a good example; see Postnational Musical Identities: Cultural Production,
Distribution, and Consumption in a Globalized Scenario (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2008).
10. Richard Middleton and Peter Manuel, “Popular music,” Grove Music Online,
Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/
43179pg2 (accessed 1 May 2009).
11. Two collections of essays are particularly useful in examining globalization and
cosmopolitanism today and in the past; see Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond
the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1998), and Cosmopolitanism, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge, et al. (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2002).
12. Nayan Chanda, Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors
Shaped Globalization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 246, 248, and 319.
13. Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 8.
14. Although thousands of copies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular

dances and songs are available for study in libraries and archives throughout Europe and
the Americas, this repertory continues to be easily dismissed as insignificant. Jody
Rosen has recently pointed out that early popular musics are not taken seriously
because songs and dances in this early era of popular music were presented in the
context of comic theater, saturated with ethnic pastiche, and bound up with the ques-
tions of racial representation. Recent projects in the US intending to rescue a huge
repertory of mechanical recordings of early popular songs and dances, as well as catalogs
of sheet-music publications, have begun to improve this situation. See Jody Rosen,
“How Pop Sounded Before it Popped,” New York Times, 19 March 2006. The emer-
gence of popular musics in Europe, in particular in music halls in England and in the
café concerts and cabarets in France, has been studied by cultural historians and sociol-
ogists, more so than by musicologists.

15. Juan Pablo González and Claudio Rolle, Historia social de la música popular en
Chile, 1890–1950 (Santiago, Chile: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 2005);
Derek Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in London,
New York, Paris, and Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
16. Veit Erlmann, “The Aesthetics of the Global Imagination: Reflections on World
Music in the 1990s,” Public Culture 8 (1996): 476.
17. Erlmann, “The Aesthetics of the Global Imagination,” 476.
18. Philip Bohlman, “World Music at the ‘End of History,’” Ethnomusicology 46, no. 1
(Winter 2002): 1.
19. Bohlman, “World Music,” 15.
20. Micol Seigel, “The Disappearing Dance: Maxixe’s Imperial Erasure,” Black Music
Research Journal 25 (Spring 2005): 98.
21. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 8.
22. Jacqueline Loss, Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America: Against the Destiny of Place
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
23. For the exchange and appropriation of songs between New York, London, and
Paris in 1880s, see Steven Moore Whiting’s Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert
Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 24.
24. Scott notes that the social changes in European cities and the incorporation of
music into a system of capitalist enterprise caused a new musical style and a new genre
to emerge in the middle of the nineteenth century. The new “language” of popular
music, with different dialects and different accents, also required new musical conven-
tions and new musical routines and performing practices. See Sounds of the Metropolis,
3–12.
25. For the musical connections between the Brazilian capital and Paris during the
monarchy, see Cristina Magaldi, Music in Imperial Rio de Janeiro: European Culture in a
Tropical Milieu (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004).
26. Luiz Edmundo, O Rio de Janeiro do meu tempo (Rio de Janeiro: Xenon Editora,
1987 [1938]), 173.
27. Several of these establishments were demolished or renovated as part of the archi-
tectural plan revitalizing Rio de Janeiro streets during the first decade of the twentieth
century. See Lima, Arquitetura do espetáculo, 107–10.
28. Edmundo, O Rio de Janeiro do meu tempo, 179–81.
29. Lima, Arquitetura do espetáculo, 239, 259.
30. Edmundo, O Rio de Janeiro do meu tempo, 174.
31. Jornal do Commercio (Rio de Janeiro), 5 and 19 May and 1 September 1910.
32. Even though Aurelio Cavalcanti was a prolific composer and a well-known figure
in Rio de Janeiro’s nightlife, his biography awaits further study. Luiz Edmundo includes
in his memoirs an illustration (by Calixto) of Aurélio Cavalcanti’s piano performance;
see O Rio de Janeiro do meu tempo, 174.

33. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 3 –12; see, in particular, page 7.
34. Derek Scott, “Orientalism and Musical Style,” Musical Quarterly 88, no. 2 (1998):
309 –35.
35. Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 24.
36. Scott, “Orientalism,” 320.
37. William L. Hick, “Social Discourse in the Savoy Theatre’s Productions of The
Nautch Girl (1891) and Utopia Limited (1893): Exoticism and Victorian Self-Reflection”
(Master’s Thesis, University of North Texas, 2003), 24. Available online at http://www.
library.unt.edu/theses/open/20032/hicks_william/thesis.pdf (accessed 1 May 2009).
38. Jornal do Commercio (Rio de Janeiro), 25 February 1901.
39. Conde, “Film and the Crônica,” 67.
40. Scott, “Orientalism,” 309 –35.
41. Hick, “Social Discourse,” 10. Jones’s San Toy ran for 768 performances in
London’s Daly’s Theater in 1899; British Musical Theater, http://math.boisestate.edu/
GaS/british/santoy/index.html (accessed 1 May 2009).
42. Hick, “Social Discourse,” 5.
43. Scott, “Orientalism,” 22, 27. Hick, “Social Discourse,” 5, 42, and 49.
44. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994 [1978]), 71 –72.
45. Jeffrey Lesser, Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle
for Ethnicity in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 14, 15, 23.
46. For more information on Milano, see Alexandre Bispo “Luso-Brasileirismo,
ı́talo-brasileiros e mecanismos performativos: Representações teatrais e revistas,
Nicolino Milano,” http://www.revista.brasil-europa.eu/107/Nicolino-Milano.htm
(accessed 1 May 2009). See also C. Carlos J. Wehrs, O Rio Antigo, Pitoresco & Musical:
Memórias e Diário (Rio de Janeiro: Carlos Wehers, 1980), 104–5.
47. Correio da Manhã (Rio de Janeiro), 3 January 1903.
48. According to González, the cakewalk also made it to Santiago (Chile) at the
beginning of the twentieth century. See Historia social de la música, 81.
49. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 52.

50. Hick, “Social Discourse,” 63– 70. See also Ann McKinley’s “Debussy and
American Minstrelsy,” The Black Perspective in Music (Autumn 1986), 252.
51. Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 297–98.
52. See Jody Blake, “Taking the Cake: The First Steps of Primitivism in Modernist
Art,” in Le tumulte noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris,
1900–1930 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 11 –36.
53. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 149–57.
54. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 154.
55. Kofi Agawu argues that the idea of Orientalisms as musical constructs can parallel
that of Africanisms, if one disregards Melville Herskovits’s use of the term Africanism

to refer specifically to African-derived musical practices in the New World; see
Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Position (New York and London:
Routledge, 2003), 95.
56. Jornal do Commercio (Rio de Janeiro), 19 February 1909.
57. See my discussion of the maxixe in this context in “Before and After Samba:
Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, and Popular Music in Rio de Janeiro at the Beginning
and End of the Twentieth Century,” in Postnational Musical Identities, 173–84.
58. Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 300.
59. Seigel, “The Disappearing Dance,” 98.
60. Hick, “Social Discourse,” 83.
61. Hick notes the blurring of discourses between exoticism, race, and social class in
late nineteenth-century Britain; see “Social Discourse,” 84.
62. For a recent study of the role of black musicians in Brazilian popular music, see
Darién Davis, White Face, Black Mask: Africaneity and the Early Social History of Popular
Music in Brazil (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009).
63. Micol Seigel, “Nation Drag: Uses of the Exotic,” Journal of Transnational American
Studies 1, no. 1 (2009). The online article is an excerpt of the author’s forthcoming
book Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming), http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/
viewcontent.cgi?article=1078&context=acgcc/jtas (accessed 3 May 2009).
64. Seigel, “Nation Drag.”
65. Edmundo, O Rio de Janeiro do meu tempo, 179.

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Cosmopolitanism and World Music

in Rio de Janeiro at the Turn

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doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdp021 92:329 –364

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The new Rio de Janeiro landscape was also part of a pattern of

pervaded Rio de Janeiro.5 Local writers left numerous accounts of the

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themselves and their Others. I am most interested, however, in an

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globalization is predominantly ahistorical, because it is linked too much

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approaches that essentialize uniqueness, nationality, and difference into

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disseminated in massive numbers across cities and countries—was trans-

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the mingling of large numbers of people from various backgrounds, who

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Music Cosmopolitanism in Rio de Janeiro of

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stages in café concerts, and in music halls; their popularity increased as

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performance practices, new musical styles, and new aesthetical conven-

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Figure 4. Cover, Cavalcanti, Buenos dias, valsa hespanhola. Biblioteca Nacional de

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Like many in contemporary Paris, Cavalcanti and his audiences

one of several of Cavalcanti’s Valsas hespanholas, serves as a conspicuous

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international musical language shared by others in Buenos Aires,

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Orientalism in Rio de Janeiro at the Turn of the

dynamics involved not only the marketing of some popular musics as

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disseminated of plays stereotyping Chinese nationals at the turn of the

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and Alberto Nepomuceno in concerts, while also playing at night at the

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“Whitening” the Population and “Blackening” the

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craze in Europe, anticipating its success in Rio de Janeiro. According to

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As Scott has noted, alongside call and response in idiomatic instrumen-

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disguised in local instrumental arrangements, such as in the “Cake-

define the piece’s Africanisms as an exotic element, but he was quick to

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self-exoticism and instead become a convenient tool in the local politics

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2. Meade, Civilizing Rio, 43.

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14. Although thousands of copies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular

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