Choro: A Social History of a Brazilian Popular Music (review)

While Brazilian popular music has been the subject of a number of recent studies in English, few have dealt with instrumental music in more than a cursory fashion. This oversight has now been addressed. Choro is a virtuoso instrumental music dating back to the late nineteenth century and this book, based on the combined dissertations of both authors, represents the most detailed study of this musical genre in any language. For this reason alone, the book represents an invaluable contribution to the current literature on Latin American music.

As is evident from its title, the bulk of the book consists of a historical narrative linking the musical development of choro to shifting ideas of race, nationality identity, and modernity in Brazil society. Choro emerged out of the cosmopolitan environment of nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, created by local musicians (chorões) who, by mixing musical styles previously associated with elite (the modinha), Afro-Brazilian (the lundu), and working-class (the maxixe) cultures, created a musical synthesis that eventually came to be known as choro. The authors trace the music's rise in the early decades of the twentieth century, its gradual professionalization through the emergence of the conjunto regional (a term referring to the groups that provided the musical accompaniment for live radio and in the recording studios in the 1920s and 30s), and its gradual decline in popularity after 1940. The genre experienced periodic revivals in the 1950s and 1970s but today remains a somewhat underground music, kept alive by a dedicated core of musicians and fans who see choro as an embodiment of authentic Brazilian culture.

While much of the book is essentially descriptive in nature, two chapters emerge as the work's strongest and most theoretically sound. Chapter 3 explores the roda de choro (literally, choro circle), a type of informal jam session or gathering in a local bar, restaurant, or private home that is the most common performance context for choro. Choro, the authors argue, is at its core a participatory music in which the ethos of universal participation is viewed as more important than the quest for musical precision. My own experience confirms this thesis—at the majority of rodas that I have attended in Rio, participation was usually open to anyone, regardless of experience. If you played an instrument, your were expected to participate. This chapter is supported by extended excerpts from the authors' own ethnographic field notes, a strategy that gives this section a sense of immediacy and reflexivity missing from much of the rest of the text. Chapter 7 looks at the choro revival of the 1970s, which the authors situate within a general theory of revivals in which core revivalists and participants seek out and promote iconic performers, recordings, and archival materials as a way of preserving tradition and maintaining cultural authenticity and continuity. The 1970's revival, the authors argue, promoted choro as "a alternative lifeway," a vision of a nostalgic past to "fill a void in the expressive culture . . . of the middle class" and "restore a sense of optimism and national pride" (p. 150).

Written in a style that is for the most part jargon-free, Livingston-Isenhour and Garcia have produced a book that is accessible to a general audience interested in Latin American music while still retaining enough theoretical grounding to appeal to an academic readership. While this reviewer would have preferred a bit more ethnographic and interpretive emphasis, overall this is an excellent and highly informative study of a heretofore neglected musical style.