Voices of Drought: The Politics of Music and Environment in Northeastern Brazil by Michael B. Silvers (review)

This engaging title, Voices of Drought: The Politics of Music and Environment in Northeastern Brazil, concerns popular music in the distinctive region of the Northeast, the subject of many works of Brazilian studies in the humanities and social sciences. Silvers primarily focuses on the state of Ceará, more specifically on the drought-stricken sertão (backlands). His critical support spans ethnomusicology, anthropology, historiography, cultural studies, journalism, and to some extent, the other arts. The bibliography is considerable, but a few pertinent observations are warranted. The freshest approach is ecomusicology: the enduring endemic issue of drought is the crucial environmental factor that arches across the six chapters, each a case study with a particular point of departure.

The introduction mixes personal and situational information (that some might have preferred to read in a separate preface) with disciplinary and methodological explanations. The central argument is previewed—"environmental crisis affects music and music making via politics and social difference" (6)—with substantiating analytical orientations: vulnerability (environmental justice), materiality (dynamic of drought and music), listening (reception and the laboring soundscape), nostalgia (longings, Portuguese saudades), and public policy (cultural sustainability). The "brief history" (16) of drought in the state is truly short and may suggest a bit of authorial eagerness to get to more current events, as some significant items are hardly more than mentioned—for example, modinha, the Brazilian song genre par excellence for almost a hundred years, about which there is a well-known though uncited study on the very state of Ceará, and Euclides da Cunha's seminal study Os sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands). The section "On Forró" is key, as that is the type of music, in its evolving manifestations, under scrutiny in most of the book. The name is an umbrella term for the usual repertory of forms played by accordion-based ensembles of the Northeast, the most recent of which is forró itself. The cluster is first said to include three genres (rhythms defined by underlying drum patterns), but subsequent discussion includes, correctly, five. Some further elaboration (including discography) could aid listeners or readers not yet conversant with this practice. A main point emerges: the larger meaning of the word forró is complicated; it involves multiple genres, instrumentations, lyrical options, histories, and locales, as migration is a recurring concern.

The chronologically ordered chapters all examine drought's relationship to popular music "as it pertains to social inequality and structural hierarchies" (23). The first chapter is the most singular, as it concerns not music making per se but a material enabler of sound transmission: the carnauba wax of northeastern Brazil that was used in the fabrication of cylinders and discs in the infancy of the record industry. The absorbing account interlaces local botany, commerce, international trade, and the production and consumption of music. Chapter 2 is exciting; it examines the "protest" side of forró. Drought drove workers of all kinds, including musicians, to cities in the south in search of work. Writers in the nineteenth century already noted the theme of drought in folk song and verse. The rich corpora of violeiros and cantadores are hardly tapped. The 1920s scholarship of Leonardo Mota—two tomes on the poetry and language of the bards of the backlands of Ceará—is notably absent. The late 1940s' emergence of the seminal form baião is an important chapter of the history of Brazilian popular music, and among its defining characteristics are socially and historically aware songs (as defined by lyrics) sung by the "king" Luiz Gonzaga and others. A relational curiosity that could have been included here is that he purportedly said that the dance-genre designation baião was taken from folk poets who use the term to refer to an instrumental drone between their performed strophes. Gonzaga's revival by the post–bossa nova singer-songwriters of MPB (an acronym that, along with the term tropicalistas...