Luiz Heitor Corrêa de Azevedo, amerindian music and Brazilian musical thought: a brief note

Abstract

This almost forgotten book -defended originally as a doctoral dissertation in Musical Folklore at the then National Music School of the University of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro -is the foundation text for modern studies of the musical systems of Amerindian societies in Brazil. Although, as with any text, it paying its due to its time -through a diffuse evolutionism and ethnocentrism -, it reports on the significant literature until then produced with mastery, elegance and creativity, making advances on important issues. Originating in different fields of knowledge, this literature extends from comparative musicology -I remember that the expression "ethnomusicology" was born only in 1954 -, through history, ethnography, folklore and more. Quite differently from the hegemonic studies at the time, it treats indigenous musical systems without any trace of exoticism and at the same time a vital presence in Brazil.The book has two notable traits -among many that the reader will soon find -that I would like to stress here, because I see them paradoxically as responsible for its having been forgotten: it defends ideas about Amerindian music and the Indians in general which are totally contrary to those present in the works of two of Azevedo´s great contemporaries, Luciano Gallet and Mário de Andrade. At the same time it couples musicological analysis with its socio-cultural contextualization as a fundamental mark of its construction. It is worth noting that Andrade, along with Joanídia Sodré, Assuero Garritano, Brasílio Itiberê and Renato Almeida, was a member of the committee which examined and approved the dissertation, later confessing however that he had serious restrictions to the work (Aragão 2005: 54-55).In my text of 2006, I argued that Brazilian musical thought which was being built in the 1930´s reduces the famous fable of three races to but two. Thus, the Brazilian racial triangle -formed by "whites", "blacks" and "Indians" -, becomes a simple line, defined only by the first two vertices of the triangle. The "Indian" is here dispatched to remoteness, a kind of non-Brazil inside itself, and not really part of the country nor even situated 455