ai tempi in cui il Brasile era una colonia(*), ognuna delle etnie che lo popolavano (amerindî,

portoghesi e africani) aveva una propria tradizione musicale; col secolo XIX apparvero le prime
tracce di una produzione nazionale, ancora priva, però, di una sua originalità; soltanto nell’ultimo
quarto dell’Ottocento, fissando elementi sino ad allora instabili o indeterminati, la musica
popolare brasiliana iniziò a delinearsi come creazione originale rappresentativa di tutto un popolo.
Dalla sovrapposizione e integrazione di elementi della musica amerindia e africana con la
tradizione musicale portoghese si formò la musica popolare brasiliana e, da quest’ ultima, poi,
anche la musica colta del Brasile che la prese a modello per acquisire delle peculiarità
specificamente nazionali.

È considerato il maggior musicista brasiliano del XIX secolo, il primo compositore del Nuovo
Mondo la cui musica fu accettata dall'Europa e l'unico non-europeo che ebbe successo come
compositore di opere in Italia, durante l'"età d'oro dell'opera", contemporaneo di Verdi e Puccini
Il Guarany

Choro (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈʃoɾu], "cry" or "lament"), popularly called chorinho ("little cry"
or "little lament"), is an instrumental Brazilian popular music genre which originated in 19th
century Rio de Janeiro. Despite its name, the music often has a fast and happy rhythm. It is
characterized by virtuosity, improvisation and subtle modulations, and is full of syncopation and
counterpoint. Choro is considered the first characteristically Brazilian genre of urban popular
music. The serenaders who play choros are known as chorões.[1]

Heitor Villa-Lobos was born in Rio de Janeiro. His father, Raul, was a civil servant, an educated man
of Spanish extraction, a librarian, an amateur astronomer and musician. In Villa-Lobos's early
childhood, Brazil underwent a period of social revolution and modernisation, abolishing slavery in
1888 and overthrowing the Empire of Brazil in 1889. The changes in Brazil were reflected in its
musical life: previously European music had been the dominant influence, and the courses at the
Conservatório de Música were grounded in traditional counterpoint and harmony. Villa-Lobos
underwent very little of this formal training. After a few abortive harmony lessons, he learnt music
by illicit observation from the top of the stairs of the regular musical evenings at his house
arranged by his father. He learned to play the cello, the guitar and the clarinet.

Around 1905 Villa-Lobos started explorations of Brazil's "dark interior", absorbing the native
Brazilian musical culture. Serious doubt has been cast on some of Villa-Lobos's tales of the decade
or so he spent on these expeditions, and about his capture and near escape from cannibals, with
some believing them to be fabrications or wildly embellished romanticism. [4] After this period, he
gave up any idea of conventional training and instead absorbed the musical influences of Brazil's
indigenous cultures, themselves based on Portuguese and African, as well as American Indian
elements. His earliest compositions were the result of improvisations on the guitar from this
period.

Villa-Lobos played with many local Brazilian street-music bands; he was also influenced by the
cinema and Ernesto Nazareth's improvised tangos and polkas.[5] For a time Villa-Lobos became a
cellist in a Rio opera company, and his early compositions include attempts at Grand Opera.
Encouraged by Arthur Napoleão, a pianist and music publisher, he decided to compose seriously. [6]
In 1912, Villa-Lobos married the pianist Lucília Guimarães, ended his travels, and began his career
as a serious musician. His music began to be published in 1913. He introduced some of his
compositions in a series of occasional chamber concerts (later also orchestral concerts) from
1915–1921, mainly in Rio de Janeiro's Salão Nobre do Jornal do Comércio.

The music presented at these concerts shows his coming to terms with the conflicting elements in
his experience, and overcoming a crisis of identity, as to whether European or Brazilian music
would dominate his style. This was decided by 1916, the year in which he composed the
symphonic poems Amazonas and Uirapurú (although Amazonas was not performed until 1929,
and Uirapurú was first performed in 1935). These works drew from native Brazilian legends and
the use of "primitive" folk material.[7]

European influences did still inspire Villa-Lobos. In 1917 Sergei Diaghilev made an impact on tour
in Brazil with his Ballets Russes. That year Villa-Lobos also met the French composer Darius
Milhaud, who was in Rio as secretary to Paul Claudel at the French Legation. Milhaud brought the
music of Debussy, Satie, and possibly Stravinsky; in return Villa-Lobos introduced Milhaud to
Brazilian street music. In 1918, he also met the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who became a lifelong
friend and champion; this meeting prompted Villa-Lobos to write more piano music. [8]

In about 1918 Villa-Lobos abandoned the use of opus numbers for his compositions as a constraint
to his pioneering spirit. With the piano suite Carnaval das crianças (Children's carnival) of 1919–
20, Villa-Lobos liberated his style altogether from European Romanticism: [9] the suite, in eight
movements with the finale written for piano duet, depicts eight characters or scenes from Rio's
Lent Carnival.

In February 1922, a festival of modern art took place in São Paulo and Villa-Lobos contributed
performances of his own works. The press were unsympathetic and the audience were not
appreciative; their mockery was encouraged by Villa-Lobos's being forced by a foot infection to
wear one carpet slipper.[10] The festival ended with Villa-Lobos's Quarteto simbólico, composed as
an impression of Brazilian urban life.

In July 1922, Rubinstein gave the first performance of the piano suite A Prole do Bebê (The Baby's
Family), composed in 1918. There had recently been an attempted military coup on Copacabana
Beach, and places of entertainment had been closed for days; the public possibly wanted
something less intellectually demanding, and the piece was booed. Villa-Lobos was philosophical
about it, and Rubinstein later reminisced that the composer said, "I am still too good for them."
The piece has been called "the first enduring work of Brazilian modernism". [11]

Rubinstein suggested that Villa-Lobos tour abroad, and in 1923 he set out for Paris. His avowed
aim was to exhibit his exotic sound world rather than to study. Just before he left he completed his
Nonet (for ten players and chorus) which was first performed after his arrival in the French capital.
He stayed in Paris in 1923–24 and 1927–30, and there he met such luminaries as Edgard Varèse,
Pablo Picasso, Leopold Stokowski and Aaron Copland. Parisian concerts of his music made a strong
impression.[12]
In the 1920s, Villa-Lobos also met the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia, who commissioned a
guitar study: the composer responded by writing a set of twelve such pieces, each based on a tiny
detail or figure played by Brazilian itinerant street musicians (chorões), transformed into a étude
that is not merely didactic. The music of chorões also provided the initial inspiration for his Chôros,
a series of compositions written between 1924–29. The first European performance of Chôros No.
10, in Paris, caused a storm: L. Chevallier wrote of it in Le Monde musical, "[…it is] an art […] to
which we must now give a new name."[13]

In 1930, Villa-Lobos, who was in Brazil to conduct, planned to return to Paris. One of the
consequences of the revolution of that year was that money could no longer be taken out of the
country, and so he had no means of paying any rents abroad. Thus forced to stay in Brazil, he
arranged concerts instead around São Paulo, and composed patriotic and educational music. In
1932, he became director of the Superindendência de Educação Musical e Artistica (SEMA), and
his duties included arranging concerts including the Brazilian premieres of Ludwig van Beethoven's
Missa Solemnis and Johann Sebastian Bach's Mass in B minor as well as Brazilian compositions. His
position at SEMA led him to compose mainly patriotic and propagandist works. His series of
Bachianas Brasileiras were a notable exception.

In 1936, at the age of forty-nine, Villa-Lobos left his wife, and became romantically involved with
Arminda Neves d’Almeida, who remained his companion until death. Arminda eventually took on
the name Villa-Lobos, though Villa-Lobos never divorced his first wife. After Villa-Lobos' death,
Arminda became the Director of the Museu Villa-Lobos in 1960, until her death in 1985. Arminda
was herself a musician and a significant influence on Villa-Lobos. He also dedicated a good number
of works to her, including the Ciclo brasileiro and many of the Chôros.

Villa-Lobos's writings of the Vargas era include propaganda for Brazilian nationhood
("brasilidade"),[14] and teaching and theoretical works. His Guia Prático ran to 11 volumes, Solfejos
(two volumes, 1942 and 1946) contained vocal exercises, and Canto Orfeônico (1940 and 1950)
contained patriotic songs for schools and for civic occasions. His music for the film O
Descobrimento do Brasil (The Discovery of Brazil) of 1936, which included versions of earlier
compositions, was arranged into orchestral suites, and includes a depiction of the first mass in
Brazil in a setting for double choir.

Villa-Lobos published A Música Nacionalista no Govêrno Getúlio Vargas ca. 1941, in which he
characterised the nation as a sacred entity whose symbols (including its flag, motto and national
anthem) were inviolable. Villa-Lobos was the chair of a committee whose task was to define a
definitive version of the Brazilian national anthem.[15]

After 1937, during the Estado Novo period when Vargas seized power by decree, Villa-Lobos
continued producing patriotic works directly accessible to mass audiences. Independence Day on
September 7, 1939 involved 30 000 children singing the national anthem and items arranged by
Villa-Lobos. For the 1943 celebrations he also composed the ballet Dança da terra, which the
authorities deemed unsuitable until it was revised. The 1943 celebrations did include Villa-Lobos's
hymn Invocação em defesa da pátria shortly after Brazil's declaring war on Germany and its allies.
[16]
Villa-Lobos's demagogue status damaged his reputation among certain schools of musicians,
among them disciples of new European trends such as serialism— which was effectively off limits
in Brazil until the 1960s. This crisis was, in part, due to some Brazilian composers finding it
necessary to reconcile Villa-Lobos's own liberation of Brazilian music from European models in the
1920s with a style of music they felt to be more universal. [17]

He also composed between 1930 and 1945 nine pieces he called Bachianas Brasileiras (Brazilian
Bachian pieces). These take the forms and nationalism of the Chôros, and add the composer's love
of Bach. Villa-Lobos's use of archaisms was not new (an early example is his Pequena suíte for cello
and piano, of 1913). The pieces evolved over the period rather than being conceived as a whole,
some of them being revised or added to. They contain some of his most popular music, such as
No. 5 for soprano and eight cellos (1938–1945), and No. 2 for orchestra of 1930 (the Tocata
movement of which is O trenzinho do caipira, "The little train of the Caipira"). They also show the
composer's love for the tonal qualities of the cello, both No. 1 and No. 5 being scored for no other
instruments. In these works the often harsh dissonances of his earlier music are less evident: or, as
Simon Wright puts it, they are "sweetened". The transformation of Chôros into Bachianas
Brasileiras is demonstrated clearly by the comparison of No. 6 for flute and bassoon with the
earlier Chôros No. 2 for flute and clarinet. The dissonances of the later piece are more controlled,
the forward direction of the music easier to discern. Bachianas Brasileiras No. 9 takes the concept
so far as to be an abstract Prelude and Fugue, a complete distillation of the composer's national
influences.[38] Villa-Lobos eventually recorded all nine of these works for EMI in Paris, mostly with
the musicians of the French National Orchestra; these were originally issued on LPs and later
reissued on CDs.[39] He also recorded the first section of Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 with Bidu
Sayão and a group of cellists for Columbia.[40

La bossa nova è un genere musicale, nato in Brasile alla fine degli anni '50, che trae origine dal
samba, in particolare nella forma detta samba canção e, in genere, dalla tradizione musicale
brasiliana. È ispirato culturalmente dalla "rive gauche" francese, dalle atmosfere minimaliste di
certa musica europea e statunitense dell'epoca, ma soprattutto, dalla atmosfera di rinascita
economica e nazionalista del Brasile di Juscelino Kubitschek.

Considerata -come si è detto- una nuova maniera di eseguire il samba, la Bossa Nova viene
inizialmente criticata a causa dell’influenza culturale nordamericana, percepita, negli accordi,
molto simile al jazz. I testi delle canzoni trattano temi leggeri e disimpegnati e raccontano la vita
carioca a Rio de Janeiro. I primi vagiti del nuovo sound si avvertiranno con il grande Antônio Carlos
Jobim e la sua Sinfonia de Rio de Janeiro, del 1955.[1]

I padri e co-inventori della bossa nova sono comunemente considerati il compositore e musicista
Antonio Carlos Jobim, il poeta Vinicius de Moraes e il cantante e chitarrista João Gilberto. I
precedenti però si trovano in Dorival Caymmi e nel tipo di samba-cançao da lui elaborato e, più
indietro ancora nel tempo, in alcune composizioni originali di Ernesto Nazareth.

La bossa nova è un samba suonato in modo generalmente minimalista, spesso soffuso, senza
particolare enfasi vocale e senza vibrato, su ritmo lento, se non lentissimo (difficilmente supera gli
80 battiti per minuto), ma con un incedere incalzante dovuto, normalmente, al caratteristico stile
chitarristico attribuito, principalmente, a João Gilberto.
La "batida", così fu soprannominato lo stile tipico di Gilberto e dei suoi seguaci, è un modo
particolare di usare la mano destra sulle corde della chitarra: senza arpeggio, ma alternando il
pollice sui bassi al contemporaneo pizzicare le corde delle altre dita (al modo già usato dai
brasiliani come Dorival Caymmi), spesso con il tapping della mano sinistra. La particolarità è però
di natura soprattutto ritmico-armonica.

La data ufficiale di nascita della bossa nova è generalmente fatta coincidere con l'uscita, nel 1958,
del disco Canção do amor demais della cantante Elizete Cardoso, su musiche di Antonio Carlos
Jobim e testi di Vinicius de Moraes, che conteneva la canzone Chega de saudade nella quale
suonava proprio João Gilberto.