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Reviewed by:
  • Palavra cantada: Ensaios sobre poesia, música e voz
  • Charles A. Perrone
Matos, Cláudia Neiva de, Elizabeth Travassos and Fernanda Teixeira de Medeiros, eds. Palavra cantada: Ensaios sobre poesia, música e voz. Rio de Janeiro: FAPERJ-7 Letras, 2008. 346 pp.

With the rise of cultural studies and interdisciplinarity in the last twenty years, there has been a sharp increase in academic interest in song, as aesthetic object, as a medium of expressive culture, as performance practice. While the expansion of research agendas in different fields has favored inquiry into vocal music worldwide, growth in related investigation in Brazil, and in Brazilian studies outside of Brazil, has been exceptionally large, equal in some ways to the prominence that analysts often attribute to musical phenomena within the Brazilian cultural complex. The volume under review here attests to the variety, quantity and quality of current endeavors in the investigation of song in Brazil. The essays assembled by the contributing co-editors comprise conference proceedings from a 2006 event sponsored by the Programa Avançado de Cultura Contemporânea, UFRJ, and the graduate school of music, UERJ. To the benefit of all, several authors edited their segments after the congress, allowing for some interplay and dialogue between participants. Some speakers had previously participated in an earlier meeting organized by the same trio of academics, who subsequently published the collection Ao encontro da palavra cantada: Poesia, música e voz (2001), of which the present editorial undertaking is a welcome [End Page 242] expansion and continuation. There is a natural urge to compare the two edited volumes, and to say that the second one has more substantial and focused writings takes nothing away from the first; scholars of song in Brazil will want to have both volumes.

Counting the introduction, Palavra cantada: Ensaios sobre poesia, música e voz comprises twenty-four segments. The title refers to the sung word in general, though in practice the bulk of the work here concerns Brazilian cases. Few actually touch on "poetry," while all necessarily reference "music" and above all "voice." With an impressive lineup of academics and specialists, the volume contains studies that cover a wide gamut of manifestations from tribal chant and folklore to urban-popular and chamber vocal music. They are not grouped thematically or by any context-based criterion but rather in alphabetical order (by first name), which elides tricky situational difficulties of classification but unavoidably leads to some peculiar leaps in perspective from one segment to the next. One-third of the pieces-notably those by the organizers themselves- could be considered under a more universalizing rubric of theory, method, or overarching conceptualization of approach to song as target of hermeneutic scrutiny. The co-editors stress in their opening remarks the diverse provenance of the colleagues gathered, from departments of literature, music, anthropology, history, linguistics, communication (including semiotics), and performance arts. More recent specializations such as cultural studies and ethnopoetics are also underlined. Of particular note is the inclusion of three professional testimonies, those of a singer-songwriter, a voice coach, and a master musician-producer, who provide fresh real-world perspective and help to balance the occasionally somewhat removed speculations on popular music. Overall, the volume's achievement can indeed be considered to be multi, trans-, or interdisciplinary. The back matter does not include a general bibliography, and the works cited of most studies is somewhat curt, likely due to the conference-paper structure. It is useful to consult the thumbnail academic biographies to get a good idea of the range of backgrounds and disciplinary interests of the contributors.

The keynote address-final written version of which benefited from access to the whole sequence of presentations- was delivered by a British anthropologist specialized in oral poetry, Ruth Finnegan, whose title poses a very general question that seems to have a false premise of possibility: "O que vem primeiro: o texto, a música ou a performance?" The interrogation is not literal or temporal (all three occur simultaneously once "song" per se begins as enunciation of word + music). Finnegan's burden is to explain how scholars have come to surpass the bias of literacy, the assumption that written...

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