JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Wed, 30 Dec 2015 17:51:08 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Reviews MARIZ, VASCO. Historia da musica no Brasil. 2a ed. Rio de Janeiro: Civilizaqao Brasileira, 1983. 352 pp. 53 illus. (Colecao Retratos do Brasil, vol. 150). Vasco Mariz, the versatile Brazilian diplomat and author of more than a dozen books on music, recently brought out the second edition of this Historia da musica no Brasil and it is a work of prime importance. Not surprisingly, this panoramic study was awarded the Premio Jose Verissimo by the Academia Brasileira de Letras. Ambassador Mariz's skill indescribing the evolution of Brazilian music in simple terms and in a language which the intelligent layman can understand should not be underestimated. Indeed, his ability to summarize, to sort out a wide variety of styles, and to explain the currents which have shaped Brazil's art-music composers both during and since Colonial times deserves applause. The book is particularly useful as the author devotes more than a hundred pages to the post Villa-Lobos, Mignone, Guarnieri heyday and gives informative short sketches of over forty composers who have been active during the past twenty-five years. A supporter of his contemporaries and juniors, the musical diplomat makes a convincing plea for giving Brazil's present-day composers a fair hearing. Since the whole subject is little known to most people I believe readers of this review will appreciate paraphrases and quotations from the book itself and will be glad to learn the titles of pieces most prized by the author. Following an informative and perceptive preface about Vasco Mariz by Luiz Heitor Correa de Azevedo, there is an introduction (chapter 1) in which the problems of nationalism, Europeanism, and universalism are discussed with the conclusion that there is plenty of room in Brazil for all sorts of isms so long as the music is good. A fraction over ten pages is devoted to the country's eighteenth-century religious composers (chapter 3) and above all the School of Minas Gerais during the goldand diamond-mining era. In my opinion Vasco Mariz could have ex-This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Wed, 30 Dec 2015 17:51:08 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Music Library Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Notes.to have consisted chiefly in substituting third person for first person pronouns. There is a unity amid the diversity of these accounts. All were geniuses who exhibited the signs of extraordinary talent at an early age. So we read of George Guest, born in 1771:When no more than two years old, he began to practise the diatonic scale; at three he could sing "God Save the King"; at five he sung in public at St. James's church, Bury, Handel's song, "He shall feed his flock", accompanied by a full band. But this was nothing compared to Miss Elizabeth Randles, who made her debut in public playing the "Downfall of Paris" before she was two years old! (italics not mine). Then there was John Purkis, the blind organist, who accomplished prodigious feats of memory before his sight was restored by surgery at the age of thirty; Thomas Powell, who composed an overture for full orchestra on a four-note theme suggested by the creaking of a steam crane; and John Parry, who astonished the audience at a concert at Roch-to have consisted chiefly in substituting third person for first person pronouns. There is a unity amid the diversity of these accounts. All were geniuses who exhibited the signs of extraordinary talent at an early age. So we read of George Guest, born in 1771:When no more than two years old, he began to practise the diatonic scale; at three he could sing "God Save the King"; at five he sung in public at St. James's church, Bury, Handel's song, "He shall feed his flock", accompanied by a full band. But this was nothing compared to Miss Elizabeth Randles, who made her debut in public playing the "Downfall of Paris" before she was two years old! (italics not mine). Then there was John Purkis, the blind organist, who accomplished prodigious feats of memory before his sight was restored by surgery at the age of thirty; Thomas Powell, who composed an overture for full orchestra on a four-note theme suggested by the creaking of a steam crane; and John Parry, who astonished the audience at a concert at Roch-
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