Music of Brazil

The music of Brazil encompasses various regional musical styles influenced by European, American, African and Amerindian forms. Brazilian music developed some unique and original styles such as forró, axé, sertanejo, samba, bossa nova, MPB, gaucho music, pagode, tropicália, choro, maracatu, frevo, brega, modinha, capoeira, and Brazilian versions of foreign musical styles, such as rock, pop music, soul, hip-hop, disco music, country music, ambient, industrial and psychedelic music, rap, classical music, fado, and gospel.
The first four winners of the Shell Brazilian Music prize have each left a legacy on Brazilian music and are among the representatives of Brazilian popular music: Pixinguinha (choro), Antônio Carlos Jobim (bossa nova), Dorival Caymmi (samba and samba-canção), and Luiz Gonzaga (forró).
Little is known of the music of Brazil before the area's first encounter with Portuguese explorers on 22 April 1500. During the colonial period, documents detail the musical activities of the major Roman Catholic cathedrals and the parlors of the upper classes, but data about musical life outside these domains are sparse. Some information is available in writings left by such travellers as Jean de Léry, who lived in Brazil from 1557 to 1558 and produced the first known transcriptions of native American music: two chants of the Tupinambá, near Rio de Janeiro.
Further registration of musical activity in Brazil came from the activities of two Jesuit priests in 1549. Ten years later, they had already founded settlements for indigenous people (the Reduções), with a musical-educational structure.
One century later, the Reduções of the southern Brazil, which were founded by Spaniard Jesuits, had a strong cultural development, where some music schools were founded. Some of the reports of that time show the fascination of the indigenous people for European music.
In the 18th century, there was intense musical activity in all the more developed regions of Brazil, with their moderately stable institutional and educational structures. The previously few private orchestras became more common and the churches presented a great variety of music.
In the first half of this century, the most outstanding works were composed by Luís Álvares Pinto, Caetano de Mello de Jesus and Antônio José da Silva ("the Jew"), who became successful in Lisbon writing librettos for comedies, which were performed also in Brazil with music by António Teixeira.
In the second part of the 18th century, there was a great flourishing in Minas Gerais, mostly in the regions of Vila Rica (currently Ouro Preto), Mariana and Arraial do Tejuco (currently Diamantina), where the mining of gold and diamonds for the Portuguese metropolis attracted a sizable population. At this time, the first outstanding Brazilian composers were revealed, most of them mulattoes. The musical pieces were mostly sacred music. Some of the noteworthy composers of this period were Lobo de Mesquita, Manoel Dias de Oliveira, Francisco Gomes da Rocha, Marcos Coelho Neto and Marcos Coelho Neto Filho. All of them were very active, but in many cases few pieces have survived until the present day. Some of the most famous pieces of this period are the Magnificat by Manoel Dias de Oliveira and the Our Lady's Antiphon by Lobo de Mesquita. In the city of Arraial do Tejuco, nowadays Diamantina, there were ten conductors in activity. In Ouro Preto about 250 musicians were active, and in all of the territory of Minas Gerais almost a thousand musicians were active.
A important composer of this period is Gabriel Fernandes da Trindade, who composed the only Brazilian chamber music from the 19th century which has survived to the present times,
In the beginning of the 20th century, there was a movement for creating an authentically Brazilian music, with less influences of the European culture. In this sense, the folklore was the major font of inspiration for the composers. Some composers like Brasílio Itiberê da Cunha, Luciano Gallet and Alexandre Levy, despite having a European formation, included some typically Brazilian elements in their works. This trend reached the highest point with Alberto Nepomuceno, who used largely the rhythms and melodies from the Brazilian folklore. There were local cultural movements to consolidate regional identities through music as for example, José Brazilício de Souza, who wrote the state anthem of Santa Catarina and his son Álvaro Sousa, who was a noticeable musician, music educator, and composer there.
The native peoples of the Brazilian rainforest play instruments including whistles, flutes, horns, drums and rattles. Much of the area's folk music imitates the sounds of the Amazon Rainforest. When the Portuguese arrived in Brazil, the first natives they met played an array of reed flutes and other wind and percussion instruments.
The Jesuit missionaries introduced songs which used the Tupi language with Christian lyrics, an attempt to convert the people to Christianity.
Choro (literally "cry" in Portuguese, but in context a more appropriate translation would be "lament"), traditionally called chorinho ("little cry" or "little lament"). Instrumental, its origins are in 19th century Rio de Janeiro. Originally choro was played by a trio of flute, guitar and cavaquinho (a small chordophone with four strings). The young pianist Ernesto Nazareth published his first choro (Não Caio Noutra) in 1878 at the age of 14. Nazareth's choros are often listed as polkas; he also composed waltzes, schottisches, milongas and Brazilian Tangos. (He resisted the popular term maxixe to represent Brazilian tango.) Chiquinha Gonzaga was another important composer of choros and started shortly after Nazareth. Chiquinha Gonzaga composed her first success, the polka-choro "Atraente", in 1877. In the beginning, the success of choro came from informal groups of friends which played in parties, pubs (botecos), streets, home balls (forrobodós), and also the musical scores published by print houses.
In 1929, prompted by the opening of the first radio station in Rio de Janeiro, the so-called radio era began spreading songs – especially the novelty Samba in its current format – to larger masses. This period was dominated by few male interpreters – notably Almirante, Braguinha, Mário Reis, Sílvio Caldas, Francisco Alves and singer/composer Noel Rosa and even fewer chanteuses such as Aracy de Almeida and sisters Aurora Miranda and Carmen Miranda, who eventually came to Hollywood becoming a movie star.
MPB's early stage (from World War II to the mid-1960s) was populated by male singers such as Orlando Silva, Nelson Gonçalves, Jamelão, Agostinho dos Santos, Anísio Silva, Ataulfo Alves, Carlos Galhardo, Ciro Monteiro, Ismael Silva, João Dias, Jorge Goulart, Miltinho, Jorge Veiga and Francisco Egídio and female singers started to mushroom: Nora Ney, Dolores Duran, Ângela Maria, Emilinha Borba, Marlene, Dalva de Oliveira, Maysa Matarazzo, sisters Linda Batista and Dircinha Batista, among others.
Brega is widely used to refer to popular romantic music with dramatic exaggeration or ingenuity, usually dealing with topics such as declarations of love, infidelity and love delusions. Historically, the greatest singers of the genre are from northeastern and northern Brazil; three of its biggest icons historically were Waldick Soriano, Reginaldo Rossi and Falcão, the latter following a part of a tradition of humorous brega. Paulo Sérgio stood out for his dramatic and romantic music. some precursors of the style in singers of the 1940s and 1950s, who followed, through bolero and samba-canção, a more "romantic" theme. Among them Orlando Dias, Carlos Alberto, Alcides Gerardi and Cauby Peixoto.
Axé originated in Salvador, Bahia in the 1980s, fusing different Afro-Caribbean genres, such as marcha, reggae, and calypso. It also includes influences of Brazilian music such as frevo, forró and carixada. The word Axé comes from the Yoruba term àṣẹ, meaning "soul, light, spirit or good vibrations". Axé is also present in the Candomblé religion, as "the imagined spiritual power and energy bestowed upon practitioners by the pantheon of orixás". It also has ties with the Roman Catholic Church and the Lenten season, which represents the roots of Bahian Carnival.
Gospel music emerged in Brazil before the 1960s with hymnals that were brought and translated into Portuguese by American missionaries. From the late 1960s the first singers of Christian music groups emerged in Brazil, but the songs were not highly valued. Gospel music became popular in Brazil in the late 1990s, with the emergence of congregational singing and bands such as Diante do Trono, led by Ana Paula Valadão. Diante do Trono has become the largest contemporary worship music ministry in Latin America.
The musical style known in Brazil as "Brazilian rock n' roll" dates back to Nora Ney's "Ronda Das Horas", a Portuguese version of "Rock Around the Clock" in 1954. The band Pato Fu was considered by Time magazine one of the ten best bands in the world outside the United States.
Brazilian metal originated in the mid 1980s with three prominent scenes: Belo Horizonte, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The most famous Brazilian metal bands are Sepultura, Angra, Krisiun and the singer Andre Matos. Sepultura is considered an influential thrash metal band, influencing the development of death metal.
Famous bands of the 1980s include Korzus, Sarcófago, Overdose, Dorsal Atlântica, Viper, MX, PUS, Mutilator, Chakal, Vulcano and Attomica.
There's also Massacration, a Brazilian satirical heavy metal band, self-proclaimed the "greatest band in the world".
As well as thrash metal, Brazil is also a reference in death metal, the main bands in the scene include Krisiun, Torture Squad, Claustrofobia, Rebaelliun, Visceral Leishmaniasis (Brazil), Obskure, Vulcano, Mental Horror and the precursors Sepultura and Sarcófago. There is a growth in the appearance of Brazilian death metal bands with women in formation, especially Nervosa, who gained a lot of prestige after their performance at Rock in Rio in 2019. The female trio were invited to participate in the Wacken Open Air festival in 2020, but the event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Brazilian Death Metal scene is spread across all regions in the country, especially in the Northeast region where it is represented by bands like Headhunter D.C., Escarnium, Decomposed God, Infested Blood, Heavenless, Torment the Skies, Pandemmy, Burning Torment, Infectos, Krenak and especially Cangaço which is a band that mixes Death metal with elements of Baião (regional rhythm of Northeast Brazil) and on 2010 was the winner of W.O.A Metal Battle Brazil and went to the finals of the Wacken Open Air festival.
Funk carioca is a type of dance music from Rio de Janeiro, derived from and was until the late 1990s, superficially similar to Miami bass. In Rio it is most often simply known as funk, although it is very different musically from what funk means in most other places and contexts. Like other types of hip-hop, funk carioca lifts heavily from samples such as international rips or from previous funk music. Many popular funk songs sampled music from the film Rocky. Funk was popularized in Rio's favelas in the 1980s, with songs like Feira de Acari by Mc Batata, with Furacão 2000, Mc Marlboro and Brazilian versions of freestyle songs by the singer Latino, later turning more aggressive in the 1990s, with precarious lyrics and several MCs with direct links with drug trafficking.
In São Paulo and other places in the south of Brazil, in more urban areas, hip-hop music is very popular. They dress similarly to American rappers.
Brazilian hip-hop is heavily associated with racial and economic issues in the country, where a lot of Afro-Brazilians live in economically disadvantaged communities, known in Brazil as favelas. São Paulo is where hip-hop began in the country, but it soon spread all over Brazil, and today, almost every big Brazilian city, including Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Curitiba, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, Recife and Brasília, has a hip hop scene. São Paulo has gained a strong, underground Brazilian rap scene since its emergence in the late 1980s with many independent labels forming for young rappers to establish themselves on.
Brazilian bass is a subgenre of house that originated as a derivation of mainstream deep house music of early 2010s, fused with tech house elements and some minimalistic influences from bass house. The tempo typically range from 120 to 125 bpm. The genre is characterized by distinguishable deep punchy basslines, often making use of low-pitched and filtering effects. The genre was created in Brasília around the mid-2010s, but its national and international repercussion only happened in 2016 with DJs Alok, Bruno Martini and Sevenn.
Electronic music in Brazil started in the 1980s, when the genre of music was getting popular in the world. The first event involving the genre of music in Brazil was in 1988 in São Paulo, with DJ Mau Mau. In the 1990s, the genre was getting bigger in Brazil and world, some of the most famous disk jockeys were DJ Marky and DJ Patife. In the 2000s, dubstep started getting famous in Brazil. Brazil has a lot of famous electronic music musicians, like Alok, Kasino, and Vintage Culture.
B-pop (short for the English Brazilian pop) or Brazilian pop music is a musical genre originating in Brazil, sung in Portuguese and sometimes English. The term B-pop first appeared in the Brazilian press to refer to groups such as Champs, one of the B-pop groups that was inspired by K-pop (Korean pop music).
However, the existence of Brazilian pop precedes the existence of groups inspired by K-pop, as there have already been artists and groups in the country who defined the genre of their music as pop (in this case inspired more by pop in several generations, such as As Frenéticas, Lulu Santos, Fernanda Abreu, Kelly Key, KLB, Rouge, Br'oz, Sandy & Junior.