For the Construction of a Historico-anthropological Model of Musical Relationships between Brazil, Portugal, and Africa

Abstract

The text postulates a model of a historico-anthropological nature for understanding the musical relationships from Brazil, Portugal, and Atlantic lusophone Africa during the XVII and XIX centuries. The model stars from the constitution of the Atlantic lusophone space as one of continual sociocultural relationships in general and musical in particular up to the first decades of the XIX century and even before. Those musical relationships are based on the existence of vast transatlantic system of musical and dance genres connected through historic and structural transformations. Because it belongs to that system, the lundu-modinha-fado transformation system will be studied, with emphasis on Bazilian dance and Portuguese song. The article elaborates the concept of “musical genre” from the notions of Mikhail Bakhtin´s “discursive genre” and Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marshall Sahlins’s “transformation”.