Critical Brass: The Alternative Brass Movement and Street Carnival Revival of Olympic Rio de Janeiro

This dissertation examines relationships between public festivity and articulations of power through investigation of alternative carnival practices in Rio de Janeiro. I explore the musical and cultural knowledge of Rio’s instrumental street musicians as cultural repertoires enacted in and circulating between a variety of scenarios—from carnival to protest and the stage. Through embracing the “alternative carnivalesque,” they seek to critique and expand the dominant repertoires available to them. Rather than viewing music as a “resource” of social movements, I argue for a model of “socio-musical movements” that considers such movements’ musical and social, as well as aesthetic and ethical, elements as dynamically intertwined./nEmerging during Rio de Janeiro’s spectacular rise in the first decades of the twenty-first century to hosting the 2016 Olympics, a contemporary brass movement (neofanfarrismo) has articulated itself as an alternative to the neoliberal governance of a global city heavily invested in particular forms of cultural representation. I view the term “alternative” as the movement’s theoretical framework, rather than a generic term. It generates a dynamic debate within the community through which participants theorize relations of power, tradition, innovation, and politicization. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic research, I examine the processes of consolidation of neofanfarrismo as it transformed from a culturally nationalist revival of carnival traditions in post-dictatorship Brazil into an internationalist, musically eclectic, and activist movement. Grounding my analysis on my collaborators’ rejection of generic theoretical terms, I argue for the exploration of frames used by musicians themselves, such as the local concepts of “cultural rescue” and “cannibalism” in examining musical circulation./nThis dissertation moves away from the typical focus on lyrical content in studies of musical activism to address instead the instrumental force of loud, mobile, and participatory ensembles in the public commons, reframing sound studies by asking what role acoustic sound plays in shaping senses of the public and private. Embracing an instrumental form of musical activism that promotes social inclusion, occupation of public space, and participation in protest, these musicians theorize carnival as an ethical guide to action and view public festivity as itself a mode of governance. Resisting celebratory narratives, however, this study probes the possibilities, limits, and contradictions of the articulation of alternatives by a middle-class demographic entangled in the privileges of a capitalist city, and I foreground the implications of “alternative whiteness” in the study of Brazilian music. Through examination of feminist, class, and racial critiques of neofanfarrismo, I ask how diversification of the movement has altered its internal hierarchies and expressive practices. Lastly, in discussing the rise of the Honk Rio! Festival of Activist Brass Bands, I explore how this carnivalesque movement has been consolidated as a politically engaged socio-musical movement in global conversation with an international, “rhizomatic” street band network.

Advisor: Guilbault, Jocelyne