French classical music and Brazil: Beyond Franco-German rivalry

The first interchanges between France and Brazil

The first signs of national musical styles in Europe date back to the fourteenth century. ¹ French classical music cannot be understood outside the European framework, although France was responsible for seven centuries of hegemony as the ‘musical centre of the world’, before its ‘difficulté d’être’ at the beginning of the seventeenth century. As Philippot says:

It becomes a surprise to hear that it is possible to speak of a difficulty in being French music since, for almost seven hundred years, France and Flanders represented the musical centre of the world. In fact, the difficulty of being did not arise until the beginning of the 17th century … Perhaps we will succeed in distinguishing better what was lacking in French music for it to have been supplanted by German music over almost three centuries. Was it lacking in genius or in science? Whatever the case, we should realise that these three centuries of difficulty in being are short compared to the seven centuries of splendour that preceded them. And why not become also aware of the fact that in France today an extraordinary potential exists which may be the normal continuation of Western musical thought? (Philippot, 1990: 93)

On the other side of the Atlantic, Brazilian scholars have tried to establish the history of Brazilian classical music from the influences brought by Portuguese colonisation: that is to say, the circulation of Iberian music by Niccolò Jommelli (1714–74) and David Perez (1711–78), since in Brazil there was no trace of Bach and Mozart before 1808, when the royal family settled in Rio de Janeiro and founded the first capital of a European empire in the tropics (see Ricciardi, 2000). ²

After the decree opening Brazilian ports to friendly nations – the immediate consequence of the installation of João VI’s court in Rio – the music of Bach, Mozart and others became familiar to Brazilian musicians like Father José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767–1830). ³ João VI invited the composer Marcos Portugal (1762–1830) to Rio de Janeiro to be Kapellmeister of the court, sharing his functions with the mulatto Father Garcia, who suffered discrimination from the imported Italian castrati who did not want to sing under the direction of an ‘inferior human being’. ⁴ In 1816, João VI also invited a French mission to develop the arts, but music stayed under German influence, since the emperor was, above all, a devoted Wagnerian.

In February 1917, during the hustle and bustle of Rio’s carnival, Paul Claudel (1868–1955) came to Brazil as the French ambassador, accompanied by his private secretary Darius Milhaud (1892–1974) (Fléchet, 2013: 51–61). His presence enabled a greater musical exchange between Brazil and France and finally the situation started to change. In 1923 Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959) was the first Brazilian musician to perform in Paris, together with popular musicians such as the dancer known as Duque and the Batutas orchestra, all sponsored by the brothers and entrepreneurs Carlos and Arnaldo Guinle (Fléchet, 2013: 66). The belle époque and ‘les années folles’ legitimated Brazilian music that had a strong French influence, and some composers, like Fructuoso Vianna (1896–1976) and Camargo Guarnieiri (1907–93), went to France, following the example of Villa-Lobos.

In 1922, some journalists were concerned about the image of Brazil, because of the black musicians who had gone to work in Paris. This prejudice on the part of the elite meant that Brazilian culture as represented by black musicians was disapproved of, and white music and musicians were preferred, such as Villa-Lobos, and later, in the 1950s, the bossa-nova.

An out-of-place idea expressed as a project

The Brazilian modernist movement – symbolised by the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week), in 1922 (see Fléchet, 2013: 30–1) – grew out of a curious mixture of nationalism and modernism in Europe. On the one hand, music was nationalised in a search of the ‘unique national essence’ (Francfort, 2004: 369); on the other hand, the search for a national music in Brazil could not come from the same source as European modernism, since all popular music – to which Brazilian ‘modernists’ were committed – has its basis on diatonicism, and chromaticism and atonalism are just the opposites of all popular music:

In the aftermath of the Second World War, aided by Schoenberg’s substantial influence and pedagogic writings, it was the serialist lineage of musical modernism that became dominant in the institutions and the teaching of new music. The earlier modernist (or proto-postmodernist) experiments with representations of others – whether exotic, nationalistic, or populist – gave way to an increasingly abstract, scientistic, and rationalist formalism based still on the near or total negation of tonality. (Born and Hesmondalgh, 2000: 15)

Considering this dated European movement as a cultural project (see Ortiz, 1994) and ignoring the particularities of European history, using its theories out of context and recreating dogmas, the imprudence of taking European modernism as a project revealed the contradictions between the modernist project in Brazil (linked to the search for identity through popular music) and the European modernist movement, based upon a rationalisation of culture as a whole, which is in essence the avant-garde project (see Born, 1995).

Most of the concepts that Brazil has absorbed from Europe reveal the traditional rivalry between French and Germanic cultures (Germany and Austria). As is always the case when developing countries strive to gain their own identity, contextual aspects are ignored in favour of essential concepts, without experiencing the same European problems. At the turn of the twentieth century we can see in Debussy’s and Ravel’s writings a true opposition between poetry and drama, symbolised by French diatonicism and German chromaticism. The corpus of recent French criticism is at this point enlightened. First, there is Bourdieu’s revelation of all the snobbery that underlies aesthetic taste, according to social class and subclass (1979). Second, there are the recent publications by Didier Francfort (2004, 2007) and Anaïs Fléchet (2004, 2013) that help us to understand music from the point of view of cultural history, with its almost iconoclastic methods, and make it possible to see great composers mixed with unknown conductors of fanfares, put together in an approach to music as both a living and social practice. Last but not least is the social critique of subsidised high culture by Pierre-Michel Menger, who adds some principles of uncertainty in creative work, introducing his concepts of the reputational market (marché reputationnel) and the notoriety pyramid (pyramide de notoriété) (see Menger, 2001; 2002; 2009).

Thus, we can see how French criticism, from the early twentieth century to the present day, can be useful in comprehending the odyssey of Brazilian classical music.

The sacred scriptures of the Frankfurt School

Brazilian musical production has been, above all, the fruit of creative spontaneity. The urgency to participate in intellectual universalism, as desired by Bourdieu (2002), has been the result of a cultural chasm in the international circulation of aesthetic ideas, from Europe to Brazil.

The adoption of the US cultural paradigm by Brazilian elites in the aftermath of the Second World War – thanks to President Roosevelt’s good neighbour policy towards Latin American countries (see Fléchet, 2013: 156–7) – corresponds to the abandonment of the French model of clarity and elegance and the acceptance of the criticism of mass culture and the entertainment industry undertaken by the Frankfurt School, inspired by German idealism in favour of high culture, rather than the French poetics of music advocated by Debussy and Ravel.

In Brazil, the most important reaction against the avant-garde was undoubtedly the carta aberta aos músicos brasileiros (open letter to Brazilian musicians), written by Camargo Guarnieri in 1950, in which the composer argued that all these European modernist principles had nothing to do with Brazilian reality and called on everybody to fight against it. His argument was not unfounded if we take a look at all that has been published since the 1970s, by postmodern critics, whose anthropological, sociological and historical methods decrypt the conscious strategies of occupation of a cultural field and the canonical logic, with a view to renewing musical studies (see Francfort, 2007; Cook, 2008).

That deviation has called the attention of Brazilian composers to the aristocratic German problems as the ‘great divide’ between modernism and mass culture. As Andreas Huyssen says:

What I am calling the Great Divide is the kind of discourse which insists on the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture. In my view, this divide is much more important for a theoretical and historical understanding of modernism and its aftermath than the alleged historical break which, in the eyes of so many critics, separates postmodernism from modernism.

The discourse of the Great Divide has been dominant primarily in two periods, first in the last decades of the 19th century and the first few years of the 20th, and then again in the two decades or so following World War II. The belief in the Great Divide, with its aesthetic, moral, and political implications, is still dominant in the academy today (witness the almost total institutional separation of literary studies, including the new literary theory, from mass culture research, or the widespread insistence on excluding ethical or political questions from the discourse on literature and art). (Huyssen, 1986: viii)

After the wave of nationalism in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Brazilian construction of the musical canon passed over the music of Indians, black slaves and the Portuguese who built the nation, in favour to a scholastic and sacred reading of the sociology and philosophy of music, founded by the Frankfurt School, accepting all its homologies in the arbitrary association between music and social structure, ignoring the fact that it was a social structure foreign to our 300-year history of slavery.

This conservative ideology that identifies the traditional with the natural is, in fact, an Austrian tradition from which derives the main part of the criticism of mass culture, ignoring the fact that the aristocratic art of the past corresponds to a low consumption society, perpetuating the permanence of an aristocratic aesthetics conceived at the heart of a mass society. This theory – ‘a commonplace among German-speaking aestheticians and music theorists of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth’ – considers music not as the cultural product of a particular time and place, but rather deriving from the belief in a higher unity of classical structures created by the composers (Cook, 2007: 12).

German hegemony of musical thought, founded in the writings of Hanslick and Schenker, has contaminated the ensemble of European conception of music to the detriment of French ideas by Debussy and Ravel – both composers with a considerable output in texts and letters – and has been exported to Brazil in a pure state to serve the snobbery of the elites, whose discourse seemed to be the more profound, the more obscure it was. All these German interpretations ‘are present to a lesser or greater degree in the works of Kant, Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, and often inextricably linked, since the philosophers influenced one another’ (Cook, 2007: 46).

Let us be ourselves, not nationalists

In Vanguarda e subdesenvolvimento (Avant-garde and Underdevelopment) (1978), the Brazilian poet Ferreira Gullar searched for an aesthetic that considers our reality as a bottom line to the construction of our artistic patrimony, without ignoring either the social or the political conditions that built the avant-garde movement in Europe, or falling into a two-edged nationalism that can be regarded either as a search for identity – like the European context from 1870 to 1914 (see Francfort, 2004) – or as a public manifestation of tyranny, like National Socialism and fascism:

It is not, of course, a Brazilian culture. It is not, of course, a very specifically national culture, but Brazilian culture in the sense of a dynamic assemblage of reworked elements which, through the decades, remain connected and active in an interaction able to respond to this and help in their formulation. (Gullar, 1978: 46) ⁵

Maybe we should be coherent with our own history; maybe Villa-Lobos knew the way forward when he was engaged in the national programme of musical education (SEMA), ⁶ in 1932 (see Fléchet, 2013: 112), under President Vargas’ dictatorship (1937–45). Although he was above all a composer, he felt the need for musical education as a solution to the calamitous situation in this area in Brazil, which began after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1759. His musical practices were an example of social mobility, with its porous boundaries and absence of prejudice, dealing with the ensemble of genres and styles presented to him by all the different cultures still alive in his day.

Maurice Ravel wrote an article named Il faut prendre le jazz au sérieux (1928), in which he criticises the Americans who take their music trop à la légère, and saying that, in his view, it would be jazz that would give birth to the national music of the United States:

La plupart de vos compositeurs trahissent des influences européennes – espagnoles, russes, françaises ou allemandes – plutôt qu’une personnalité américaine. Je ne crois pas non plus ceux qui prétendent que cela soit dû au mélange de peuples étrangers qui composent l’Amérique. Pas du tout. C’est ridicule ça. Regardez le mélange que nous avons en France. Dans telle région vous verrez des Français qui ressemblent à des Allemands, dans telle autre des hommes qui ressemblent plus à des Italiens qu’à des Français. En outre nous avons des Arabes, des Algériens, des Américains, expatriés ou mariés à des Françaises. Qui oserait cependant nier que notre musique soit typiquement française?

Mais non. Les deux influences les plus importantes sur l’art sont le climat et la langue. La première est peut-être plus facile à saisir que la seconde, que je crois cependant pouvoir expliquer. Regardez les auteurs Anglais. Par exemple, Joseph Conrad et Michel Arlen, l’un Polonais l’autre Arménien, et qui sont pourtant des grands noms des belles-lettres anglaises. Et pourquoi? Parce que leur moyen d’expression était la langueur anglaise. (Orenstein, 1989: 326)

Another example comes from Debussy, speaking as ‘Monsieur Croche’, who commented in 1910, ‘Je n’ai jamais pu comprendre pourquoi tous les gens qui étudient la musique, tous les pays qui cherchent à créer des écoles originales devraient avoir une base allemande’ (Lesure, 1987: 283). Or when he said in 1913:

Au vrai, la musique devient ‘difficile’ toutes les fois qu’elle n’existe pas, difficile n’étant là qu’un mot-paravent pour cacher sa pauvreté. Il n’y a qu’une musique, et celle-là prend en elle-même le droit d’exister, qu’elle emprunte le rythme d’une valse – voire même de café-concert – ou le cadre imposant d’une symphonie. (Lesure, 1987: 230)

Or again in 1909: ‘Les Français oublient trop volontiers les qualités de clarté et d’élégance qui leur sont propres pour se laisser influencer par les longueurs et les lourdeurs germaniques’ (Lesure, 1987: 295). And in 1910, Monsieur Croche says:

Nous aimons tout ce qui vient du dehors. Comme des enfants, nous battons des mains devant une œuvre qui vient de loin: Scandinavie, de Germaine ou des Pays Latins, sans nous rendre compte de la valeur réelle et de la solidité of cette œuvre, sans nous demander si nous pouvons éprouver une éprouver émotion sincère au frisson d’âmes étrangères aux nôtres. (Lesure, 1987: 305)

If these comments by the two main precursors of the ‘eclectic modernists of the early century’ tell us about the situation of French-German rivalry, they also reveal how wrong we Brazilians were in taking the German examples to construct our own recent tradition, instead of French influences which we received at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Georgina Born,

Postwar high modernism composition powerfully asserted musical autonomy, refusing the representation of ethnic or popular musics in the name of formal innovation and rigor; and the modernisms of Bartók and Stravinsky, which engaged with folk and ethnic musics, failed to achieve hegemony in face of the systematic serialisms. (Born and Hesmondalgh, 2000: 15)

Due to the elitist way culture was institutionalised in Brazil, people remained isolated from decisions and just watched the rationalisation of culture made by the dominant class, replacing the artisanal and pragmatic use of technology by a scientistic and analytical approach (Born, 1995: 59). As Born says:

like the eclectic modernists of the early century, experimentalists had an interest in, and made reference to nonwestern and popular musics. Unlike serialism, with its genealogy centered on the Schoenberg school, experimentalism elected a range of musical ancestors, including Debussy, Satie, Varèse, and the Americans Ives and Cowell, most of whom had drawn in some way on the influence of nonwestern or popular urban musics. Like their forefathers, experimental composers drew on popular musics for their modes, their rhythmic, repetitive, or structural forms, or treated them as pastiche or parody, or created musical montage by overlaying one music upon another (as with Ives). These techniques are now considered central to postmodern aesthetics; yet as I have shown, they go back to certain early modernists, while they are largely absent from serialist modernism. (Born, 1995: 57–8)

Abandoning French criticism, the Brazilian academic milieu has adopted a German-inspired ideology which has nothing to do with our history of musical practices. If some contemporary composers still work up black or Indian themes, the product is always a discourse which aims to accord with the avant-garde way of making music, and the heirs of Brazilian national modernism have become more and more isolated. The ars gratia artis project is in fact a reaction to Romanticism and has nothing to do with Brazil. If we have something to do with Europe, it is with the music and writings of Debussy and Ravel, the vocation to mélange and internationalism that was the spirit of the French belle époque, and the cultural history approach of Fléchet and Francfort, or Menger’s economic and sociological studies.

Unlike ‘American orchestras [which] are rooted firmly in the base of their communities, supported by local resources friendly to their own concert halls’, Europe has stuck to its own tradition from its origins in the opera and the courts (Ayer, 2005: 4), to construct a classical music history. Under our own Brazilian logic it will be necessary to establish steps to reach something like el sistema in Venezuela, defeating the snobbery – a consequence of our colonisation process – and looking at ourselves, in a strategy of social inclusion. ⁷ As Gustavo Dudamel says:

in the Sistema everything is connected; the musical and the social aspects of playing music together is connected with being a better citizen, with caring about other people, with working together. The orchestra, you know, it’s a community. It’s a little world, where you can create harmony. And of course, when you have this, connected with artistic sensibility anything is possible. Everything is possible. (quoted in Tunstall, 2012: 24)