Regional and National Trends in Afro-Brazilian Religious Musics: A Case of Cultural Pluralism

One may wonder how music can be considered a reflection of cultural values and of worldviews in general. Ethnomusicology has taught us for some time now that musical styles are frequently the result of specific cultural determinants emanating from social and ethnohistorical factors of various kinds. Ethnomusicology concerns itself essentially with non-written musical traditions and attempts to integrate musical expressions of a given culture or community group with the whole cultural complex of that group. It relies consequently on both musicological and anthropological perspectives in its analytic approach. It seeks to explain not only the structure of the musical product of a given society but also all elements—ethnic, social, historical, economic—that combine to establish the uniqueness of that product. To use Charles Seeger's terminology (1977), the field of ethnomusicology is concerned with the analytical study of the process of variation of a musical text, on the one hand, and the social context for music making, on the other. The context is related to questions of musical behavior which reflect the complexities of the social organization of a given group or community. Because we have learned from cultural anthropologists that any substantial change in the organization of a society (or segment of it) is eventually reflected in the inheritance, cultivation and transmission of such traditions as folk music, we can assume that a folk or traditional music is, in essence, a synthesis of the worldview of a culture community, and in particular of the cultural values of that community. We firmly believe that because of its internally redundant nature, music is perhaps the most highly structured expressive behavior of mankind. As a means of non-verbal communication, it is one of the most powerful tools of human self-expression, self-assertion and self-awareness in relationship to a given social group's cosmovision. Music also operates as a strong agent of social cohesion, whether in terms of social classes, cultural or ethnic identity. Indeed, music has been shown to act as one of the main factors in the construction of identity. In the specific case of Brazil with which I am concerned here, I believe that its musical reality can only be understood in relation to Brazil's social and ethnic stratification, which correspond to various corpora of music fulfilling various functions and acquiring various meanings in the numerous contexts of music making.

If we believe along with Clifford Geertz that religion is "a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic" (1973, 90), we soon realize that musical performance in religious ritual contexts represents a forceful expression of that symbolic system. It is well known that music and religion are closely related in many cultures. But, while music may appear simply as an ornamental, complementary yet essentially reinforcing element of certain religious practices, it in fact has an organic functionality in most traditional cultures. In certain religious rituals, music and dance become the main vehicle of religious fulfillment and, therefore, are fully integrated within the social organization of those religions. As a natural expressive means, music seems essential in order to bring forth a given culture's ethos. In Northeast Brazil, and particularly in Bahia (Salvador and the Reconcavo), the conceptions of a general order of existence clearly owe a great deal to the African cultural presence in that area.

The historical and cultural dimensions of the presence of Africans on the Brazilian northeast coast and territory have had such an impact on the configuration of contemporary culture that it is common to assert that the current Bahian society is African or neo-African. At the most general level this may be so, but the facts relating to the history of the slave trade in Brazil point to a lack of a homogeneous black African population. The slaves came from many...