Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse: Popular Music and the Staging of Brazil by Daniel B. Sharp (review)

Apocalypse is a more appropriate context for musical studies in general, and of Brazil in particular, than the author Daniel Sharp might have imagined when writing or publishing this study, Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse, given the political, demographic, and cultural upheavals we have already seen in 2016 (and who knows what else may have happened by the time these words are in print). Brazil has undergone a regime change that part of the population regards as a coup d’état and the other part as the reasonable legal removal of a demonstrably corrupt government. The Brazilian Northeast is presently, and has been for most of the past century, both the most underdeveloped part of the nation and the focus of recurring movements of insurrection, including the banditry of the folk hero Virgulino Ferreira da Silva, known as Lampião, who was killed, along with his wife, Maria Bonita, and other gang members, by the police, using machine guns, in 1938, as well as the War of Canudos (1896–1897), preserved in literary form as Os sertões (1902), by Euclydes da Cunha (1866–1909). The music of the Northeast, like the samba of the state of Bahia, has been transformed into a nationally recognized genre or genres (usually known as forró, now with subgenres such as forró universitario and more) by its emigration, along with many migrants, from the states of the Northeast (especially Pernambuco, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Norte, and Ceará) to the metropolitan cities of the Southeast, especially São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (personified by the late Luiz Gonzaga, from Exu, Pernambuco, who became a national figure through recordings and radio beginning in the 1940s). Brazilian classical music also drew on the musical traditions of the Northeast when wanting to signify Brazilian roots.

More recently, nationally successful artists such as Lenine have created popular music that draws on genres of the Northeast while blending them with other popular musics, including international rock and pop. Usually large-scale national success has required artists to relocate to Rio or São Paulo. An exception was the short-lived group Mestre Ambrosio (first recording in 1996) based in Recife, Pernambuco, and presenting a music with relatively little pop mixed in.

Daniel Sharp is an ethnomusicologist presently on the faculty of Tulane, where his teaching focuses on Latin American music. He holds a degree in music from Grinnell College and degrees in Latin American studies and ethnomusicology from the University of Texas at Austin. Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse is the revision of his 2006 PhD dissertation, “Saudades de Arcoverde: Nostalgia and the Performance of Origin.” The first part of the title, in English, “Longing for Arcoverde,” is perhaps more illuminating about both the musical scene that Sharp examines and his approach to that scene.

Sharp focuses on a small town in the outback of the state of Pernambuco, Arcoverde, about 250 kilometers more or less directly west from the capital of the state, Recife. Arcoverde has a population of seventy-two thousand, but despite its remoteness, has one of the seven campuses of the University of Pernambuco. He compares the approach to traditional music of two ensembles with roots in Arcoverde, the Cordel do Fogo Encantado (confusingly referred to as Cordel—it would have been clearer had he used an abbreviation) and the group Coco Raizes. Neither of these groups has a significant presence nationally, with no CDs available at present, for example, but both can be viewed on YouTube. Briefly, Cordel do Fogo Encantado (which left Arcoverde for the big city) has a style that is heavily influenced by a variety of youth-pop styles, and not surprisingly has no problem appealing to a large and young audience in São Paulo in a performance recorded for DVD. Coco Raizes, as one might assume from the name (raizes means “roots”), is more oriented toward preserving tradition than creating...