Villa-Lobos and His People: The Brazilian Perspective A very distinguished French poet whose art criticism is somewhat excessively aes- thetic has said of [Heitor] Villa-Lobos'’s music that he could not accept it because he did not love brutality. But . .. can one demand, for example, of the Sacre [du Printemps; Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring] that it be pretty? Is it reasonable to want everyone to sing with the subtlety of [Claude] Debussy? A musician is not a music box that depends only upon the hand that turns the crank. He does not sing in the abstract. He is possessed. He is inspired. And the inspiration is as noble in its expres- sion of softness and subtlety as it is in expressing violence or savagery. Taste is not found at the source of poetry, it does not flow with inspiration. It comes afterward. One finds it only later, in aesthetics. Meaning that if one does not take Brazil into account, one cannot understand Villa-Lobos. It is as if one were to expect a wild rose to bloom from a cactus instead of its own wild red flower. Because an artist's art that is unconsciously marked by his people’s way of feeling—as deeply and inevitably sat- urated by the nature of his country as Villa's is—cannot be exquisite or fine, but must be like him: fiery and wild, sensual and sentimental, complex and solid. He has the naive and total sincerity of a mountain torrent. Nowadays Brazil continues to find itself at a primitive stage. But its primitivism is not a matter of fashion; nor is it due to this conscious, healthy search for renewal, for rejuvenation of sources for which European intelligence, too tired and too charged with culture, has felt such a deep need. Our primitivism is simpler and less refined; it is quite simply a historical period in our process of growth and development. Intelligence is not yet our affair, but sen- timent, or even sentimentality. The pathos of the Germans. Until now, itis the people who have been our only great ingenuous and unconscious creator, of which rudimen- tary and interested art is no more than the direct expression of their rough joys and sadness. As everywhere, it is the magnificent tree from which the power of fertility is always awakening. Villa-Lobos has had the predestined luck to be the first conscious thrust of this tree. His work is an extremely personal creation, yet one in which the materials were taken from there, He has built his hut with wood from the forest that surrounds him. Perhaps Brazilians are able to evoke at random whatever part of Brazil has entered the artist's imagination as nature, as a living thing, acting upon it and allow- ingit to help shape their sensibility: the popular dances and rondos beneath the palm trees and stars of the Northeastern beaches, the beat of the catéreté! at the forest's edge, the macumbas? and witchcraft of the blacks on the outskirts of cities, the ser estas [serenades] and choros* in the cities, the traditions and felicitous improvisa- tions of Carnival in the capitals, ete. ... Or even something more vague within the Brazilian vastness. .. . Things from deep in the woods: the mysterious Brazilian for- est, filled with familiar legends and demons, where the wildcat lives with the Great ‘Snake and the legendary descendants of tribal hero Macunaima,* and the great rivers, majestic and deep, these great, fantastic beings that have always inspired childhood fear, attraction, and worship in Brazilians, from the depths of which rise enchanted palaces, dwellings of “Tara”*—the mother of the waters, with her green hair, our god- mother, ete. . .. Throughout Villa’s body of work—above all in his symphonies—one feels the reflection of these things. I believe it is only that which he ultimately calls the ambiance of the “Choros.” And it is upon this vague and undefined ambiance that the rhythms come crashing down, literally, as if moved by the evident and imperious will to give it a precise form, of shaping almost everything in their image. Thus, one can easily understand the predominance of rhythm in this work, and it is from this 230)that it draws its form, For here it is the typical element, the concrete expression of race. This rhythmics is specific to the national popular music, One need not seek out external cultural or social causes in order to explain it, as has been done so often. The “Choros,” for example, have never needed Stravinsky, jazz, or other foreign influences in order to exist. Everything that was necessary to their creation existed in Brazil. V. Lobos did nothing but obey the imposition of his environment and his race. Its form is born from the fusion of primordial rhythmic elements that are embryonic or already extant in our popular music—for example, from Brazil's unique syncopation thats spontaneously born from the soft, gentle national prosody, the maxixe,* rogue ofcoastal cities, from the choro oblivious of its Spanish nobility, bastard of civilization in the wild land where the guitar was replaced by the cavaquinho’ (viol), ete. ....A profound interpreter of his people, his rhythmics is nothing but the brilliant, albeit unintentional, development of popular expression. Incertain parts of Brazil, we remain so close to nature that we can see (so to speak) the act of birth, the concrete source of many of our collective popular creations. One can almost see the moving work of anonymous creation in action. Such is the case with some of our legends, poetry, and music. One is able to feel how, for us, music and poetry are still enmeshed. One must think of Greece or of early Christianity. “This intimate connection with the spoken language that characterizes Greek music,” according to [German music critic] Paul Bekker,’ may also be found among us. Like the Greeks, our (mostly illiterate) popular singers “do not know measured rhythm in today’s sense, and they stress their singing generally in accord with the laws of their language.” Medieval music was also decisively marked by the historical pro- cess of the people’s growing individualization that was seen in Europe and that gave birth to several national cultures that had come to replace the unique culture of the period—the international culture of the Church. From the universal, sacred form of music that it had been, as sung in church, it became profane and national, “depen- dent now only on the physiological conformation of peoples and the language that they speak.” With us, things happened conversely. No growing individualization of the peoples; more of a growing mixture of peoples. Several totally different races from opposite meridians met at a given moment upon the virgin soil of Brazil: the free Indian, the Portuguese conqueror, and later, the African slave. These diverse peoples have nothing in common, nothing approximate, nothing similar: races, customs, lan- guage, foreign—almost inimical—civilizations. Nothing but the earth beneath them as a common denominator. Each with its totally opposite linguistic and musical ways.t In the end, because of the superiority of their culture and their civilization, * See “Ensaio sobre a musica brasileira” [Essay on Brazilian music], by Mario de Andrade. According to this Author, whose authority among us becomes greater with each passing day, there was aconilict between the directly musical eurhythmies ofthe Portuguese and the prosody of Indo-American songs found also among the transplanted Africans. The characteristic Brazilian rhythm emerges from this conflict, the Brazilian hav Ingan entirely fantasist way of giving rhythm and producing somewhat freer and more varied rhythm. To him, ehythm is, above all else, an element of racial expression, + To the Indian, musics never profane in Bekker’ sense. Itis never lyrical in nature, never ofa purely indi- Vidual psychological order. It is always sacred, religious, inthe sociological sense; commemorative and, ritual music. It does not know exclusively musical rhythm. While the black man, foreibly torn from his environment and his tribe, was transplanted to Brazil, there to live oppressed by a social institution—slav- ery—his music is not religious or sacred, iLevinces no commemorative nature, ete. But perhaps, because of the miserable and painful conditions ofits existence, it has already taken root in motifs of psychological order. Except that its cultural and social state is too primitive and its individuality still to rudimentary for this to bring about the blossoming of any such manifestation of ytieism—of a purely personal music. On the other hand, this very state of primitivism, its sharply defined ethnic type and the terrible identity of its living conditions, gave this musi if not an organically collective character, then atleast a formidable unanimous force, expressed by rhythm. However, for the Indian, the character of his music—if not expressly collective Dut above all impersonal and a-psychological, sacred and ritual—is given, one could say, by the strangely rt ris 2athe Portuguese got the upper hand and imposed their language. But in the clash of the two other opposing prosodies (the Indian and the African), Portuguese laws of pros- ody were transformed, giving birth to our current Brazilian prosody—completely different from that of Portugal. We can still feel the evident signs of this prosodic struggle in our very free popular way of singing in which only tempo counts, but not the measure framed in the European style—a way that, transposed to accompa- nying instruments, has become over time a specific element of Brazilian music. Also, among us, the evolution of our music always moved in tandem with the evolution of language; it did not follow it, as was the case in Europe. It was, rather, the mirror that reflected, in a large image, in slow motion, the whole of the formative process of our national prosody so that once this process was fixed, it saw itself fixed as well. But from this moment on, their destinies parted: Music now goes its own way, alone, fully independent of language. And soon, it moves from being sung to being played, frees itself completely from poetry, ete.; and this process continues until the emergence of artistic music and personal creation, of which Villa{-Lobos] represents the summit, Meanwhile, language has quite another destiny. The process of its individualization, of its nationalization, has not overtaken the framework of its prosodic evolution, of its physiological transformation. Butall of its theoretical structure, all of what makes its spirit and its cultural tradition, was preserved, and its aesthetic obstinately resists all change. This is understandable, for it is a well-known phenomenon that every cul- ture must, by definition, preserve itself, persist in conservation. And what does this mean? In the long run, it resulted in an ever-growing separation between our spo- ‘ken language and the Portuguese we write. The literati wrote one language and the people spoke another. The two did not understand one another; they did not have a. common means of communication. They did not know one another, and—with a few rare exceptions— intellectuals and men of letters felt like strangers in their own country, exiles in their own culture. Under these conditions, one can easily see that music—in its essence farther removed from any form of intellectuality, more inde- pendent from cultural necessity—should have taken precedence over language. For ina country made up of different races, each with its particular linguistic traditions, it was only natural that music should then have more easily become a more indetermi- nate means of communication, to be certain, albeit one that is also a good deal more universal and suggestive than the word. It came about without anyone's realizing it, the great collective voice of the people, the expression of its joy and its sadness, of the entire subjective life of the race. Thus, that which, in other countries, generally falls at first to language, to poetry, was here the mission of music. If the refined liter- ature of the cities did not understand the uncultured and ungrammatical poetry of the people, and if they, in turn, could neither love nor understand or even recognize their literature, then at least music—with all of its formidable faculty of suggestion and its less intellectual and more instinctual character—could have a chance to move city folk, including intellectuals and artists. This is what happened. Nowadays, of all the intellectuals of the last generations, there is not one who is unaware of the crucial role of music in the making of our national culture and in the spiritual awakening of melancholy, mysteriously vague melody, without the slightest formal frame... What is certain is that forthe black man, rhythm did not come as directly from the prosody, as with the Indian. It isalready more musically individualized and translated into another social state, The personal lyrical note, psychological individu- alityonly with the European, Portuguese, or Spanish does one find an already more complex sensibility, ‘marked by an entire cultural tradition, expressed by language and by music, already totally separated from. the former. + Butall ofthese romantic subtleties of song are not always prosodic. Occasionally they even contradict the laws of prosody. Yet they are always purely physiologieal—even choreographic—in essence, They are free ‘movements determined by fatigue and developed from fatigue. Bte. (See Mario de Andrade: Ensaio, ete) 232\the collective soul. Can one now imagine the importance that an oeuvre like that of [Villa-]Lobos might have in such a country? This importance spills out beyond the framework of the art of music. A higher echelon of culture has been achieved. The path has now been cleared for personal creation—a dangerous path among all oth- ers, leading from the collective to the individual. In the drama of our culture, it is the individual spirit’s turn to play the starring role. Instead of a poet or a thinker, it was a musician that succeeded in expressing himself before the others. He was the first individual manifestation of Brazilian consciousness to express itself globally. This is a recognized fact that already implies a certain definition of our spirit and of the direction that our culture will take. In its future investigations, our critical and speculative thinking must forcibly take this fact into account. For it seems that fate has committed us to music—that is to say, we will never do anything other than see life but we will also listen to it, and the world will always be less of an image than a chord—a melody before a drawing; a process more than a definition. So, what is there to say? Will our culture be musical or will it not? . . . In any event, the work of Villa- Lobos is an already resounding confirmation of the soundness of the orientation and thought of the modern Brazilian generations. ~ Originally published as “Villa-Lobos et son peuple: Le Point de wue brésilien” La Revue musicale Paris), November 1929, tes 1. A Brazilian dance of Amerindian origin also known as Catira in which two guitar players sing and direct the progress of hand-clapping and foot-stomping dancers, 2, Generic designation given to various Afro-Brazilian synereti cults, generally strongly influenced by reli- sions such as Candomblé, Umbanda, and Espiritismo (or Spiritualism), amongothers. 3. genre of Brazilian popular and instrumental music. Choro compositions are virtuosic and feature impro- visation. The emblematic instruments ofthe genre include seven-string guitar, piano, flute, cavaguinho (a four-stringed guitar), and mandolin, The *Chotos” eyele is considered an important group of compositions inthe work of Heitor Villa-Lobos. 4. The central character of the eponymous book by Mrio de Andrade, published in 1928, Macunaima was an ntihero who embodied the various traits and stereotypes of Brazilian folklore and culture. 5.Also known as lemanjé or Janaina, Ian is the queen of the oceans, according to the mythology of syneretie ‘Afro-Brazilian religions, 6. musieal genre and type of ballroom dance of accelerated rhythm, brought overby slaves from ‘Mozambique during the 1870s, It was influenced by the tango of Argentina and Uruguay. 7-Asmall, four-stringed guitar. The instrument originated inthe Minho region of northern Portugal and was ‘widely introduced in Brazilian culture, especially in samba and choro, 8, Paul Bekker, La musique: Les transformations des formes musicales depuis Vantiquitéjusqu a nos jours Paris: Payot, 1928), originally published as Musikgeschichte als Geschichte der musikalischen Formwandlungen (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1926). Pedrosa's quotations from Bekker may be paraphrases from the French edition or his French translations from the German edition, The Social Tendencies of Art and Kathe Kollwitz In the present social state, with society divided into two irreducibly antagonistic classes, with the means of production needing once again to be socialized and the technical-industrial apparatus enabling man to impose his rational will upon nature, the decadence of past mythologies finds itself in various stages of ruin, according to the social group in question. With the bourgeoisie’s advent as the dominant class, the scientific concept of nature was finally constructed. A new general concept of the world is now needed, one in which both society and nature are scientifically and har- moniously integrated. This concept can only be the work of the proletariat. ‘tris 233