Cristina Magaldi - Cosmopolitanism and World Music

Cosmopolitanism and World Music in Rio de Janeiro at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Cristina Magaldi
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The urban reforms in Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of the twentieth century were central to the new Republican governments motto of Civilization and Progress. From sanitation and electrical lighting of streets and parks to the construction of neoclassical buildings and large boulevards comparable to those of contemporary Paris, urban renovations marked important moments of both political afrmation and cultural transition in the Brazilian capital. On the one hand, the urbanization projects emptied public coffers, and the bota abaixo (demolitions) forced thousands of residents to relocate to poor conditions in suburban areas;1 on the other hand, the revamping of old Rio de Janeiro provided much-needed infrastructure to a city that had grown continually in the previous decades, doubling its 1890 population to almost a million people by 1910.2 The new landscape also came to symbolize the dream of a growing (mostly white) middle class, as new architectural fac ades and public spaces changed fashions and behavioral patterns, giving Rios residents the feeling of being at the center of their country. The new capital became an icon of urban transformation and modernity to be followed by the rest of an agrarian Brazil viewed by the political and intellectual elite as backward. Mayor Pereira Passoss plan to reinvigorate the Brazilian capital also highlighted the governments attempt to put the country at the center of the Western world, showcasing Brazils embrace of European ideals of civilization and progress that associated modernization with urbanization. Having Hausmanns Paris as a model, the urban transformation of Rio de Janeiro was accompanied by carefully designed postcards that helped project new images of the country abroad and attract foreign investors and visitors.3 Most importantly, the new urban landscape poque and allowed the Brazilian capital entrance to the European Belle E turned the city into a cosmopolitan center in the Americas (Figure 1).
doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdp021 92:329 364 Advance Access publication December 13, 2009. # The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
330 The Musical Quarterly
Figure 1. Avenida Central, Rio de Janeiro, rst decade of the 20th century. Photo by o Museu da Imagem e do Som, Rio de Janeiro. Augusto Malta. Fundac a
The new Rio de Janeiro landscape was also part of a pattern of urban growth and transformation that went beyond Brazilian politics and that reected an international historical moment of political and social transition and globalization.4 In fact, besides a new urban landscape, at the beginning of the century Rio de Janeiro shared several other features with emerging cities in Europe and the Americas as follows: (1) it housed a large number of immigrants; (2) it provided the stage for the introduction of new technologies and became a magnet for foreign visitors and investors; and (3) the city saw an unprecedented growth of its population, a diversication of its ethnic fabric and cultural expressions, and the empowerment of a growing middle class. Cities in Europe and the Americas were also linked by a set of shared images, as emerging technologies in photography and lm helped Western European ideas, ideologies, and fashions travel faster and farther. Furthermore, as the growth and spread of a capitalist economy opened new markets for cultural goods in cities worldwide, it also set in motion a cosmopolitan cultural fabric of unprecedented outreachan early globalized world culture that anticipates our own time. Even if the idea of globalization was daunting, this early sense of global connection became an essential part of a new urban culture that
Cosmopolitanism and World Music in Rio de Janeiro 331
pervaded Rio de Janeiro.5 Local writers left numerous accounts of the feeling of being part of the world. Olavo Bilac told his readers in 1907, for instance, that while walking from one Rio de Janeiro neighborhood to the next, and from one movie theater to the next, he could easily and quickly also travel to Paris, Rome, New York, and Milan.6 Bilac and his contemporaries were puzzled by the new sounds of the busy, modern city and often described Rio de Janeiros soundscapes by highlighting the noise of cars and electric bondes (cable cars), the rhythmic clicks of typewriters, and the parroting sounds of gramophones. Although hardly studied systematically, popular music played a key role in strengthening this cultural connection among emerging cities and in shaping the new urban culture of the Brazilian capital. The international circulation of music driven by the growing music-publication business, the alliance between the music and entertainment industries in urban areas, and the introduction of new technologies like movies and the gramophone, permitted an unprecedented sharing of repertories and musical practices between Rio de Janeiros emerging middle class and those of contemporary cities in the Americas and Europe. This temporal-sonic experience not only paralleled but also intensied the global connections fostered by large boulevards, architectural fac ades, photographic images, and early movies. If transforming the urban landscape can be viewed as a tangible example of the Republican governments attempt to connect Rio de Janeiro to an international circuit of cosmopolitan culture, then a cosmopolitan state of mind7 was also achieved by a soundscaperepertories, performance practices, and listening experiencesthat fostered strong links between residents in the Brazilian capital and those in other contemporary cities. In this essay, I focus on the international circulation of music as a globalizing force that allowed for the creation of a cosmopolitan culture in the early 1900s. My main goal is to offer insights into issues of cosmopolitan identities and popular musics in general, and in the Brazilian capital in particular. Rather than presenting early popular musics in Rio de Janeiro in their potential to display early signs of Brazilianness, I show the emergence of popular music in the city as part of a larger context of international urban culture. One aspect of the early globalization of music is of special signicance: the availability, in early twentiethcentury Rio de Janeiro, of dances and songs from far away places, a phenomenon that can be understood as an early stage of the world music trend so familiar at the turn of the twenty-rst century. These songs and dances, both imported and reproduced locally, serve as examples of how the new middle class of Rio de Janeiro imagined
themselves and their Others. I am most interested, however, in an emergent musical cosmopolitanism and in early examples of world music as ephemeral international fashions that can offer an alternative to the often historicized understandings of the role of music in identity politics of early twentieth-century Brazil. By seeing the emergence of popular musics in the Brazilian capital as an outgrowth of an international circuit of music production, circulation, and consumption, rather than as a localized phenomenon, I offer ways to de-essentialize Brazilian popular music history and revisit general assumptions about race, nationalism, and musical identity in the rst part of the twentieth century.
Globalization and Music in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro

The globalization of cultural production, and of music in particular, so real and prevalent at the turn of the twenty-rst century, has received a great deal of attention from scholars in a variety of disciplines. Some writers have been skeptical of the panorama of music dissemination en masse and see as a result a homogenization of musical cultures and the universalization of the mundane as the music industry in central areas indiscriminately explores and/or imposes musics on markets worldwide. Others have addressed the wide circulation of music as an enrichment of music making through artistic cross-pollination and as an opportunity for empowerment of musicians and audiences in peripheral areas.8 As the acceleration and intensication of globalization continues to challenge our understanding of the relations between music and group identities on local, national, and international levels, scholars have turned their attention to musical repertories and practices that have crossed national boundaries to create transnational and transcultural bonds.9 If present-day processes of music distribution and sharing have caused the spread of rock and hip-hop to be viewed as an international phenomenon, these processes have also challenged essentialist views of music and group identities outside centers of musical production. Richard Middleton has pointed out that, during the 1990s, the globalization of music led large and small, global and local musical systems to reach an uneasy but mutually advantageous coexistence.10 Thus, there is a trend in recent scholarship toward reconsidering and (re)theorizing contemporary relationships between music, nationalisms, and universalisms, while rethinking relationships of gender, race, and sociocultural identities within the politics of nationalisms and globalization.11 Attempts to shed light on earlier globalizing eras have been limited, however. Nayan Chanda has noted that our understanding of
globalization is predominantly ahistorical, because it is linked too much to recent socioeconomic and cultural history. He points out that massive economic integration, and with it cultural globalization, has far outpaced our global mindset, which is still rooted in nationalist terms.12 Nonetheless, social scientists have offered case-specic examples of how globalization and cultural cosmopolitanism have historically worked concomitantly with a range of contrasting nationalisms, postulating that the very idea of nation building, within and beyond the nation-state, is historically intertwined with globalization.13 Thus, the assumptions we make about globalization, nationalisms, and cosmopolitanisms, and the resultant cultural articulations of belonging and detachment, of Self and Otherness, need to be understood not only within uid geographical boundaries but also across historical contexts. The dynamics of music and globalization have yet to be systematically approached from a historical perspective. Musicologists have examined European art-music repertories and practices as ways of exoticizing the European Other, but less so as powerful political tools in the imperialistic expansion of Western European countries. In the eld of popular music and globalization, studies often portray a contemporary globalized world that has altered, positively or negatively, a set of previous cultural and musical systems that are axiomatically dened as static or undisrupted by cultural interactions. Because scholars of popular music tend to situate their object of study in the middle and later part of the twentieth century, our understanding of popular music as a global commodity is dened essentially by an absence of history: the newness element in the contemporary globalization of music is often key to analytical arguments about issues of identity politics. This, of course, is an issue that spills beyond globalization, for popular musics and their history in Europe and the Americas have themselves been approached as caricatures and presented as an Other that cannot be understood through the same lens used to assess recent musical systems and are therefore left out of mainstream historical narratives.14 Musicological studies dealing with popular music before the 1920s are indeed scarce, although the lez (2005) and Derek Scott (2008) recent books by Juan Pablo Gonza might invite others to investigate this largely unexplored area.15 The few studies that touch on the history of the globalization of popular music have generated essentialist views of the music of the past, ones that validate popular musical practices outside the center of musical production by mythical associations with local authenticity, roots, and folk cultural purity. If, as Veit Erlmann suggests, the dynamics of contemporary music-globalizing processes feed on universal pursuits of authenticity and exaltations of locality,16 caution is needed to resist historicizing
approaches that essentialize uniqueness, nationality, and difference into a historically deterministic cycle. Consequently, there is an urgent need to rethink the newness of the contemporary globalized musical world, to problematize popular music history, and to reassess our understanding of what Erlmann described as the historical space between compact disc, MTV, Graceland, and everything that preceded them.17 Aware of the historical dimension of the world music phenomenon, Philip Bohlman has provided an account of past encounters with music from outside our own world.18 He points out that at the turn of the twentieth century, internal conicts of Self and Otherness in Europe and the United States were staged at international fairs (Chicago, St. Louis, Paris, Vienna), where audiences went in search of roots to articulate their own contexts within an interconnected world dominated by a powerful few.19 Bohlmans focus on the politics of ethnic representation within Europe is of crucial importance to the understanding of early processes of music globalization, one that will have repercussions outside the European realm, as we will discuss later in this article. Nevertheless, while Bohlmans accounts of past musical encounters take place within Europe and the United States, and therefore from the perspective of the centers of musical production, they leave the ideas of authenticity, exoticism, and roots unquestioned. The complex nature of the cultural interchanges fostered in great part by the circulation of musics between Europe and the Americas at the turn of the twentieth century involved exoticisms and representations, as Bohlman pointed out, but also re-presentations and re-contextualizations, back and forth, in a complex transnational dynamic in which culture and commerce fed imperial ideology with panoplies of available exotics.20 To understand the political and cultural roles of popular musics in turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro, one needs to consider that, like today, the urban middle classes of emerging cities had more in common with one another than with parts of their own local surroundings, and that popular music was part of a consumer society from the start. One needs also to contemplate the possibility that globalization of music in the past, as today, permitted engaging and disengaging in a myriad of cultural practices from near and far, and that it generated several layers of group identities that owed across boundaries of countries and nations. The repertory discussed below, dances and songs of European and US provenance disseminated in Rio de Janeiro through sheet-music publications, in music-hall performances, and in early recordings, helps us to investigate historically the potential of music to create collective identity bonds that go beyond nationality; but more importantly, it allows us to postulate that popular musicmarket-driven pieces
disseminated in massive numbers across cities and countrieswas transnational and situated as cosmopolitan before it was used politically as a tool for constructing twentieth-century national alliances; that it was dened as a sonic experience of cities before it was touted for its potential to enforce nationalisms. And here the example of the Brazilian capital is of particular relevance. Because popular music has served as a most powerful tool in the construction and management of nationalistic ideologies in Brazil throughout the twentieth century, its Brazilianness is often understood as intrinsic and natural, devoid of social agency and history. By evoking a history of Brazilian popular musics as cosmopolitan and transnational, I attempt to offer fresh insights into the process of constructing musical symbolisms of Brazilianness. To be sure, the idea of a past cosmopolitan music culture is an abstract concept no less politicized than the nationalistic approach. Cosmopolitan cultures are often driven by issues of economic and cultural power and, more often than not, permit one-way connections between center and peripheryno matter where (or when) the center or the periphery is located. At the turn of the twentieth century, whether one was in Paris, London, Buenos Aires, or Rio, the imagined cosmopolis did indeed have a specic locale of origin in Paris. At the same time, a cosmopolitan cultural identity is one of a specic kind, created among individuals living in large cities who have access to and engage in a variety of shared musical practices that are delimited more by temporal factors, social standing, and generational lines than by national alliancesan identity that is historically shaped and re-shaped by musical fashions more than by locality. In fact, as I explore the potential of music to be historically transnational, I also postulate that, before local popular musics were coopted as political tools for creating national alliances, early marketers saw in music a potential to congregate a community of transnational feeling21 that could be used as a tool to escape and critique, rather than construct, localityas Jacqueline Loss put, as a tool against the destiny of place.22 If, as Scott contends, we can attribute the birth of popular music as we understand it todaya commercially explored, market-driven, and concerts, mass-disseminated productionto the rise of music halls, cafe cabarets, and dance halls in mid-nineteenth-century European cities, it is exactly its origin in an urban context that allowed for its marketability in various contemporary cities outside of Europe. Even if early music halls in England and France had connections to the audiences peasant roots, the growth of the musics popularity and the shaping of their styles were intertwined with an emerging metropolitan contexta context dependent on new but shaky power relations and that involved
the mingling of large numbers of people from various backgrounds, who were confronted with social, ethnic, racial, and gender (re)negotiations. One should not be surprised, therefore, that the market for early European popular musics was easily and quickly widened well beyond borders and found fertile ground in cities throughout the Americas.23 Rio de Janeiro of the First Republic was one such city with a booming market for what Scott calls the revolutionary style of emerging popular musics.24 The Republican governments investment in the idea of urban modernity, civilization, and progress, combined with the growth of the citys population and advancements in technology, allowed for the full participation of residents of the Brazilian capital in the international circuit of music cosmopolitanism.25 But Rio de Janeiros participation in the globalization of music started when there was already a delineated urban musical culture and an established market for popular musics in European cities. Rio de Janeiro audiences engaged with the new popular musics after they had already been characterized as both urban and cosmopolitan. For audiences and musicians in the Brazilian capital, popular music was born as ready-made city music, as an essential part of a cosmopolitan culture tailored to fulll the needs of `cle those who shared the delights and the frustrations of the n-de-sie metropolis.
Music Cosmopolitanism in Rio de Janeiro of the Old Republic

While the new Republican government was not an ideal patron of elite music, it fostered the growth of the entertainment business in the Brazilian capital, a business that responded primarily to the demands of the emergent middle class. Private entertainment enterprises in Rio de Janeiro strove to catch up with those in European cities by making their audiences feel as if they were part of the global music scene. Chronicling the night life of the city at the turn of the twentieth century, Luiz Edmundo noted that in Rio we can be proud to have the highest number of the best [music halls] available on the face of the earth . . . we have here the companies and artists that perform in the most famous music halls in Europe and North America . . . [such as] the Alhambra in London, the Moulin Rouge in Paris, and the Winter Garden in Berlin.26 Native and immigrant entrepreneurs invested heavily in the poques need of Rio de Janeiros well-to-do to participate in the Belle E bohemian urban life and betted on the success of well-known foreign formulas and musical practices that were central to European urban cultural life. Music halls and cabarets named after elegant models, such as
Maison Moderne, Moulin Rouge, and High Life (later renamed Folies `re),27 added to the already coveted Rio de Janeiro amboyant cafe Berge concerts, the less rened casas de chope (beer houses), and the low-brow chopes berrantes (noisy beer houses). Several of these venues, located on and around the Rua do Lavradio, were equipped for showing movies and included a stage for short theatrical shows, music presentations, and dances. Music was usually performed by a small ensemble of ve to six performers, and in the less luxurious establishments sometimes by only three instruments, like a ute, a guitar, and a cavaquinho; some, however, could only offer live music on an old rented Pleyel piano, Edmundo recalls, which also served to accompany the chanteuse internationales or to perform waltzes, schottische, and polkas.28 New and fashionable music also entertained the public in waiting rooms constructed specically as movie theaters, like the Cine Parisiense, inaugurated in 1907 on the new Avenida Central. In the spacious waiting-room area the owner, Italian Rosario Staffa, could entertain his audiences with live music performances by a pianist, a small orchestra, a gramophone, and later, in 1908, also with an electric pianola.29 It is hard to estimate precisely the range of musical styles available to Rio de Janeiros residents early in the century. A glance at publication lists on the covers of sheet music, catalogs of publishing houses, music shops advertisements, and early catalogs of recordings shows a daunting picture of what popular music meant in the Brazilian capital of the First Republic. Thousands of waltzes, polkas, mazurkas, and schottische, as well as songs in French, English, Italian, and Portuguese, written by local composers, added to endless lists of foreign publications in the same fashion. A closer look at these lists shows that the music by comcile Chaminade (18571944) and Emile Waldteufel posers such as Ce (1837 1915), as well as older nineteenth-century champions of the tra (1830 international music trade like the Strauss family, Oliver Me mile Prudent (1817 1863), were sure hits in the Brazilian 1889), and E capital. Edmundo recalls that in Rio de Janeiros music halls the Montmartre chanson, with its short and suave melodies, and sometimes pornographic French lyrics, were popular enough to drive the oldfashioned Italian lyric singers out of business.30 The French chansons also inspired the local canc oneta phenomenon; several male intellectuals, chroniclers, and writers took their shots at writing Portuguese canc oneta lyrics, and local composers paralleled the craze, creating tunes by the dozens, some of which made it big in comedy acts and theatrical intermezzos. Local performers kept themselves busy playing these songs and dances in the waiting areas of theaters and movie theaters, on small
Figure 2. Advertisement for Nascimento Silva & Company. Above: Without having ever studied the instrument, any person can sit at the piano and play with the perfection of the best pianists. This wonderful achievement is possible by the Piano-Pianola, the most perfect and complete of pneumatic instruments. Below: Reproducing the performance of the best pianists through an electric motor, the Piano-autographico is an artistic wonder, perfect for music amateurs, hotels, restaurants, s, etc. cafe
concerts, and in music halls; their popularity increased as stages in cafe their pieces spilled over to dance halls and outdoor performances in parks, where family socializing took place. A staggering number of these pieces made available in sheet music also reached the female domain of private living rooms. And if one could not play Waldteufels music at home, or listen to it in music halls, they could enjoy it on the pianola, which offered the composers hits at a modest price. The arrival of the Gramophone, a modern machine able to reproduce in Rio the voices
of singers and the music of bands and performers from all over the world, according to a newspaper advertisement,31 opened up a whole new set of possibilities to enjoy music. Together, these songs and dances, imported and local, formed a sort of sonic ambience that helped dene the urban context of Rio de Janeiro, and allowed people to situate themselves in time and spacein a large, modern city at the turn of the twentieth century. (See Figure 2.) It was exactly the need to supply more new music for Rio de Janeiros growing entertainment business that led to an explosion in local musical production. As the impresarios replicated the models of public entertainment from European capitals, so did local composers and performers, who were quick to provide an enormous output aimed at the local market. Thus, in cities like Rio de Janeiro, the music industry was fed by both local and imported musics, but these were rather intertwinedfrom the titles of pieces to melodic lines, from rhythmic patterns in accompaniments to the language used in songs, the boundaries of authorship, originality, and origins were somewhat irrelevant. The recycling of imported songs with added Portuguese lyrics and the disguising of well-known melodies by new titles addressing familiar situations were all fair game. Thus, when in 1908 the pianist composer Ernesto Nazareth (1863 1934) started to perform his well-known waltzes and polkas at the luxurious waiting room of the new movie theater Odeon, he gained local notoriety exactly because of his ability to provide his audiences with danceswaltzes, polkas, tangos, schottische, and mazurkasthat were extraordinarily well crafted but, at the same time, were in a style that was already fashionable and crystallized internationally. No less than rock music in todays Rio de Janeiro, Nazareths pieces were transnational works that fullled the cosmopolitan demands of Rio de Janeiro audiences in the First Republic. We may postulate, therefore, that engaging with early popular musics allowed for a more worldly feel in places outside the original centers of production. While those who provided songs and dances for concerts were proting the music halls in England or the Parisian cafe from the foreign sales of their music, they were engaged primarily with their own musics, while those in Rio de Janeiro had available to them a wider spectrum of foreign productions. Audiences in the Brazilian capital could enjoy at the same timesometimes in the same night music from the music halls in London, from the Viennese dance halls, and the Montmartre cabarets, music from Portugal, Spain, and the United States, in addition to the output of local composers who replicated those musics for local consumption. In Rio de Janeiro one could listen to musics from Europe and the United States, pick and choose
from a variety of styles, engage in fashions from different places, hear and sing about a gamut of political and social issues that were far from them as well about things happening nearby, and in the end participate in a much wider spectrum of the global cosmopolitan culture. This ironic paradox of the centerperiphery musical ow made for an important ingredient in the local soundscape of Rio de Janeiro. Geographically far from the centers of music production, Rio de Janeiro audiences were truly cosmopolitan; to them, novelty and fashionable musics were surely important factors, but variety and eclecticism were also vital in their popular-music scene. lio Cavalcanti (active in The output of pianist and composer Aure Rio de Janeiro during 18901920)32 provides a good example of this complex interplay between cosmopolitanism and locality. Cavalcanti was a prominent gure in Rio de Janeiro nightlife and one of the most popular composers and performers in the city at the turn of the twentieth century. With his skills as a pianist and his memorable pieces, Cavalcanti lit up the local music halls and lled the chronicles of old-time commentators, who describe him with an enthusiasm that can be compared to that associated with twentieth-century pop stars. Cavalcantis pieces were a must in the private salons of middle-class families, in the maledominated world of music halls, and in the chopes berrantes on the Rua do Lavradio and surroundings; his music crossed social boundaries and shared the devotion of the local public with works by international gures like Waldteufel and the Strauss family. Cavalcanti was particularly notable for the popularity of his waltzes and polkas which, according to contemporary commentators, were an essential part of the soundscape of poque. Referred to by some of his contemporaries Rio de Janeiros Belle E as the king of the waltz, Cavalcantis dances reveal his awareness of the latest popular musical styles of his time. He penned hundreds of them, some of which reveal a breadth of invention hard to nd in the compositions of the most well-known composers coming from overseas. Cavalcantis music serves as an example of how composers (and by extension, audiences) outside Paris, London, or New York aimed at becoming cosmopolitan. His Bregeira, polka francesa (French polka; 1900) offers an idea of his musical style as well as the context for which his pieces were composed (see Figure 3 and Ex. 1). Bregeira is written in the usual dance format of three sections that repeat (AABBAACCAA); each section is self-contained and, like the majority of contemporary polkas, is constructed with regular pairs of eight-bar phrases. Analyzing European dances of the second half of the nineteenth century, Scott has shown that the marketing possibilities opened up by the association of music with the entertainment business in London, Paris, and Vienna began a musical revolution in terms of
lio Cavalcanti, Bregeira, polka francesa. Biblioteca Nacional de Figure 3. Cover, Aure sica e Arquivo Sonoro. o de Mu Rio de Janeiro, Divisa
performance practices, new musical styles, and new aesthetical conventions.33 Cavalcantis Bregeira is a typical example demonstrating that composers outside European capitals understood well and adopted this musical revolution. Although the structure of his polka does not add much to the established compositions in the same vein, Bregeiras descending melodic lines followed by sudden leaps of up to an octave and endings on the accented lower note easily demonstrate Cavalcantis use of the yodeling Viennese motives so common in Strausss music and in Waldteufels Parisian dances. Cavalcanti also makes wide use of the characteristic polka rhythm in the melody, a combination of quarter, eighth, and two sixteenth notes, to contrast the steady oom-pah, march-like rhythmic gure in the bass and to create the lively swing realized in performance. Cavalcantis
lio Cavalcanti, Bregeira, polka francesa (1901) (Rio de Janeiro: Example 1a. Aure o de A. Lavignasse Fillho & Cia.). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisa sica e Arquivo Sonoro. Mu
D. C. al
lio Cavalcanti, Bregeira, polka francesa (1901) (Rio de Janeiro: Example 1b. Aure o de A. Lavignasse Fillho & Cia.). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisa sica e Arquivo Sonoro. Mu
polka also reveals an awareness of the harmonic novelties that Strauss had established in his dances, using the added-sixth note in the melody in the second measure to create melodic interest and to contrast with the predictable move from B-at to E-at, and F. In sum, Bregeira shows Cavalcanti as a composer of polka at its best, fullling perfectly the expectations of dancers and listeners accustomed to the devices used by contemporary composers in Europe. Bregeira is a French polka, a designation given by Cavalcanti, who was also aware of the distinctions of tempo in polka performances favored in specic cities; French here meant that Bregeira should be a lively dance but performed in a slower tempo. Cavalcantis waltz Buenos dias, valsa hespanhola (Spanish waltz) offers another facet of the Brazilian composers versatile cosmopolitanism (see Figure 4 and Ex. 2).
Figure 4. Cover, Cavalcanti, Buenos dias, valsa hespanhola. Biblioteca Nacional de sica e Arquivo Sonoro. o de Mu Rio de Janeiro, Divisa
1.
2.
FIM
lio Cavalcanti, Buenos dias, valsa hespanhola (ca. 1903) (Rio de Example 2a. Arure o e Co.). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisa o de Janeiro: Arthur Napolea sica e Arquivo Sonoro. Mu
D. C. al
lio Cavalcanti, Buenos dias, valsa hespanhola (ca. 1903) (Rio de Example 2b. Arure o e Co.). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisa o de Janeiro: Arthur Napolea sica e Arquivo Sonoro. Mu
Like many in contemporary Paris, Cavalcanti and his audiences were fascinated by Spanish music as a European internal Other, one that was frequently evoked in European pieces of different genres and styles by a well-dened musical syntax of Spanishness.34 Buenos dias,
one of several of Cavalcantis Valsas hespanholas, serves as a conspicuous example of exoticism being recycled outside the European realm, for the dance includes all the required musical elements marking the musics difference from his French Bregeira: the rhythmic displacements of the melody accentuating the second beat in the rst section, the use of the triplets, and suggestions of Phrygian mode in the melody in the third section, while at the same time using a harmonic progression that helps reiterate the dances Frenchness. Cavalcantis knowledge of the syntax of Spanishness ` a la Chaminade and Waldteufel is quite signicant, for his Valsa hespanhola is not a mere homage to a place by a suggestive title, but a conscious use of musical codes of exoticism that was dependent on his and his audiences familiarity with the European models to make sense. Cavalcantis Buenos dias can be seen as more than an exotic piece that characterized a Self/Other duality; it is a work that displays Cavalcantis skills to replicate the French constructions of difference, a cosmopolitan position that helped him articulate a variety of Others without focusing on his own peripheral condition. Positioned as both insider and outsider, Cavalcantis cosmopolitanism is marked by his ability to engage with the musics of a variety of localities and ethnicities through his understanding of a central musical language derived from urban centers in Europe. In this o [northeastern] waltz), in which he makes way, his Valsa sertaneja (serta reference to a Brazilian regional style, can be interpreted in the same way as his polka Bregeira and his waltz Buenos dias, as an exploration of a cosmopolitan culture passed to him through European imaginaries of Otherness. As a cosmopolitan on the periphery, Cavalcanti was able to offer his audiences in Rio de Janeiro as broad a picture of the sonic world as possible, and that wide palette included nearby regions. In fact, a large number of nineteenth-century dances and songs were linked to specic localities, if not by musical codes then surely by suggestive titles such as Polka Madrid, La Parisienne, The Yankee, or Valsa sertaneja. These works show that places, near and far, were used as important marketing tools to widen the interest in popular pieces, increasing circulation in larger markets with the concomitant potential for larger protstitles and musical codes of Otherness functioned as a kind of ornamentation that brought interest to the works as exotic pieces. However, locality associated with these dances also involved an expectation of a common stylethe European metropolitan popular musical style. For these pieces to make sense, they needed rst to follow a common language accepted as cosmopolitanthey needed to be easily recognizable as waltzes and polkas, for exampleand only then could they work as musical commodities opened up for negotiations of individual identities. Cavalcantis skill in writing waltzes and polkas highlights his position as a participant in the
international musical language shared by others in Buenos Aires, New York, London, and Paris; it shows the Brazilian composers wide awareness of a world of international musical connections. This is not an exercise in model and derivatives, an aesthetic discussion that praises the authentic and dismisses the replica, or that highlights a process of reinventing European dances into originally Brazilian compositions. My argument here lies in the nature of Cavalcantis pieces, which were written to ll a space that was local (Rio de Janeiro) but through a musical language that was cosmopolitan. Thus, it would not be a mischaracterization to classify Cavalcantis polkas and waltzes as successful imitations of Waldteufels dances in and for Rio de Janeiro. To be sure, the idea of center versus periphery is evident in this case, since Waldteufels or Strausss works were circulating in Rio de Janeiro, while Cavalcantis dances did not follow a reciprocal path in Paris or Vienna. Nonetheless, one cannot rule out the possibility that, had the Brazilian composer settled in Paris, New York, or Buenos Aires, he would have succeeded as a composer for the local dance halls in any of these cities. In this way, the particular success of Cavalcantis work as a composer of polkas and waltzes in Rio de Janeiro lies not in its particular uniqueness, but in his ability to cater to the local audiences needs to locate themselves in a generic and somewhat abstract growing city at the turn of the twentieth century.
Orientalism in Rio de Janeiro at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Similar to todays music market, at the turn of the twentieth century, novelty and variety were essential to the success of musical works marketed to large numbers of people from different cities. Londons music concerts and cabarets were ideal venues in this halls and Parisian cafe regard, for they allowed for variety, intermingling, and experimentation as impresarios depended on music to ornament variety and comedy acts, circus, and theatrical presentations. Because their early commercial success coincided with the height of European imperialism in the nineteenth century, these venues were also appealing as international sites. On their small stages, musics and dances were used to represent a variety of colonized places, to portray those places as exotic, and then to present the exotic as fashionable; in the process, re-creation and adaptation of songs and dances from places near and far became a common practice.35 At these venues, popular songs and dances fueled curiosity about and interest in cultures outside the realm of the European white, urban bourgeoisie, while helping to construct a complex dynamic of the musical Self and Other in urban areas within and beyond Europe. These
dynamics involved not only the marketing of some popular musics as fashionably exotic, but also the articulation of a musical syntax of exotica that could in turn serve well to articulate local politics of class, race, and gender. This syntax was a generic set of musical tools created in Europe as representations of the exotic36 and more often than not was presented in comedy acts, allowing for caricatures and open paro`cle, European composers and publishers had awadies. By the n-de-sie kened to the international appeal of the exotic in popular musics, an appeal that rested as much in articulations of a common urban, cosmopolitan identity translated into worldliness, as in the articulations of the complimentary notion of otherworldliness.37 To some extent, the phenomenon parallels the appeal that the world music marketing label has in todays popular music (in the United States and Western Europe), fed as it has been on essentialist ideals of the Others authenticity, recast as fashionable, urban, and cosmopolitan. The interest in re-representing the music of faraway lands, and in making it fashionable and marketable, was already in vogue in the world of operatic musica crucial agent in the imperialistic expansion of Europewhen it was further explored in the early commercialization of popular musics. However, it was the novelty of lms that allowed for a more international spread of world music beyond Europe. Saturated with images of faraway lands, the early hits of French and US lmography were widely available in Rio de Janeiro as early as 1896; and by 1905 they had already secured a solid place in the entertainment business of the Brazilian capital. Advertised daily in Rios newspapers as fashionable, new, and modern,38 early movies with collections of vistas (images) took Rios residents on an international visual tour of distant lands.39 These early lms were cheaper to import than to produce locally, offered no language barriers because they were silent, and served as an important venue for the proliferation of songs and dances from exotic places, which accompanied the images projected on the screen. In the theatrical realm, Gilbert and Sullivan and Sidney Jones were particularly successful in bringing the Orient as Other into the lives of metropolitan audiences in Europe and the Americas. While Mikado (1885) portrayed Japan as a desirable place through familiar songs, its success was surpassed by Joness Geisha (1896), which became an instant hit in theaters on both sides of the Atlantic. India and China also served as excellent places from which European composers could draw sources to construct a musical syntax of the exotic Oriental, as Scott has demonstrated.40 Joness musical play San Toy: A Chinese Musical Comedy (1899) was quite successful, but Howard Talbots A Chinese Honeymoon (1899) is said to be the most performed and
disseminated of plays stereotyping Chinese nationals at the turn of the twentieth century.41 The success of these works on both sides of the Atlantic, William Hick has suggested, was not simply cultural voyeurisms but rather a time-specic fashion made possible exactly because urban audiences perceived the Orient as both local and distant; these works served as a safe haven from which to portray exotic problems that were in fact nearby.42 In these theatrical works, Eastern-sounding music could be created by any combination of musical tools that soon became formulaic devices, a musical syntax of Otherness, as Derek Scott noted, used by European composers in various cities to exoticize and criticize, sometimes at the same time, both those near and those far away.43 Although Edward Said claimed that Orientalisms were created for audiences in Europe and only for Europe,44 awareness and use of the Oriental-exotica musical syntax did not stay in Europe. In fact, by the turn of the twentieth century, the exotic Orient had entered the international music business with tremendous force. The phenomenon was fueled by the idea of the fashionable otherworldliness, which, together with the complementary worldliness of waltzes and polkas, provided urban audiences a link to a common cosmopolitan culture. As could be expected, following its success in London and on Broadway, in 1901 Joness San Toy also had a successful opening in Rio de Janeiro. At a time when Brazilian politicians were discussing the possibility of using Chinese laborers to substitute for Africans, and when images of the Chinese [oated] like an omnipresent specter through discussions of ethnicity in Brazil,45 the success of San Toy in the Brazilian capital was also fueled by the fragile line between the distant and the local. It was also not a coincidence that exotic popular songs and dances marked their presence in the Brazilian capital at the same time when Brazilian intellectuals were busy mapping the racial and ethnic prole of the country. And while musical Orientalisms arrived in the city as a fashionable, cosmopolitan otherworldliness, Brazilian composers took on the task of providing the ourishing music business of Rio de Janeiro with their own fantasies of the Orient. Like Cavalcanti, the composer Nicolino Milano (1876 1962) made full use of the cosmopolitan musical tools available to him, moving swiftly between locality, cosmopolitanism, and fashion through a o Paulo, Milano studied and long list of songs and dances. A native of Sa lived most of his life in Rio de Janeiro, where he was active as a violinist and composer. He studied at the National Institute of Music with prominent musicians like Vicenzo Cernichiaro and Miguel Cardoso, and later he also worked as a teacher in that institution. Like Cavalcanti, Milano was an artist who functioned well in both the elite art-music scene and the popular-music business; he performed with Barroso Netto
and Alberto Nepomuceno in concerts, while also playing at night at the Java.46 As a composer, Milano was most successful writing music Cafe for the theater, working with the most prestigious writers of musical comedies in the Brazilian capital. Milano is mostly known for the music he provided for Arthur de Azevedos famous musical review A capital Federal (1897), but he also left a large number of polkas, waltzes, Spanish dances, tangos, and other works that put him at the center of (verses by the popular musical fashions of his day. His song Ti-fa , provides an Orlando Teixeira), written for the Chinese operetta Ti-Fa excellent example of how the idea of world music was recycled within the perspective of a Latin American composer (see Figure 5 and Ex. 3). The song shows Milano excelling in the manipulation of well-known s, moving back and forth from worldliness and otherworldliness like cliche the best of his contemporaries. The work abounds in musical signiers of Otherness in its use of well-known formulas of Orientalism, like an opening in unison, the use of parallel fourths and octaves, and the use of trills in the manner of glissandos, with bare fths functioning as drones in the rst section; in the second part, Milano explores the augmented second as exotic by adding the C-sharp in the appoggiatura but moves from minor to major, comfortably going back to the clear-cut tonal cadence, a move that further displaces the Oriental beginning of his Chinese song. On the one hand, Milanos piece needed to articulate the Orient as the exotic Other (and thus made sense within the current internal political debates about Chinese labor, race, and nationality in needed to be fashionable Brazil). On the other hand, Milanos Ti-fa and cosmopolitan, one among several other songs that belonged to his time and his city. It is signicant that Milanos piece is not unique within the Rio de Janeiro context, as examples of Orientalisms in popular songs and dances by his contemporaries abounded in the Brazilian capital at this time. A compelling example is provided by the famous pianist composer Julio Reis (18701935), another luminary of Rio de Janeiro nightlife. Like Cavalcanti and Milano, Reis was prolic in writing waltzes, polkas, and schottische, but he also left a most intriguing piece entitled Scenas orientais (Oriental Scenes), where a whole gamut of musical stereotypes is skillfully blended together to locate not only the Orient as the Brazilian Other, but the Brazilian composer as a cosmopolitan artist (see Ex. 4).
Whitening the Population and Blackening the Music

On 7 July 1903, the Italian immigrant Paschoal Segreto presented in Rio de Janeiro the French lm Le cake-walk infernal (1903) by Georges
Figure 5.
. Biblioteca Nacional de Rio de from Ti-fa Cover, Nicolino Milano, Ti-fa sica e Arquivo Sonoro. o de Mu Janeiro, Divisa
lie `s (1868 1938). The lm included scenes of the cakewalk dance Me that had become a craze in New York and Paris, and thereby added the dance to the potpourri of musical choices available to residents in the Brazilian capital. No more than a month later, the famous cakewalk appeared alongside French chansons and pieces from Joness San Toy in a local music hall as one more cosmopolitan product with international appeal. Earlier in February of the same year, the rst page of a prominent local newspaper had already featured an article about the cakewalk
Example 3.
o chineza (ca. 1908) (Rio de Janeiro: , Canc Nicolino Milano, Ti-fa a sica e o de Mu Vieira Machado & Cia.) Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisa Arquivo Sonoro.
craze in Europe, anticipating its success in Rio de Janeiro. According to the article, the cakewalk originated among the blacks from the United States, [who] get together in bars, form a ring, and with the sound of the banjo, perform the most eccentric jumps and leg movements around concerts . . . and ended up a cake; [the cakewalk then spread] to cafe becoming universal, thanks to what one calls the Americanization of the World.47 The commentator was not exaggerating, as the cakewalk and ragtime spread quite easily via the international musical circuit from New York to Paris, London, Rio de Janeiro, and other Latin American cities like an epidemic.48 At a time when the economic and political power of the United States was growing at a fast pace, the universal status of the cakewalk and other dances and songs, such as ragtime and the two-step, helped expand the imagined cosmopolitan urban cultural circuit to include cities like New York and Chicago.
Example 4. Julio Reis, Scenas orientais (ca. 1908) (Rio de Janeiro: Casa Vieira sica e Arquivo o de Mu Machado). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisa Sonoro.
The appearance and the success of the cakewalk and ragtime songs and dances in Rio de Janeiro reected the continuation of a trend in urban popular musics by Europeans to represent black culture and black music. While examples of such representations appear in European theater and music going back to the eighteenth century, the appeal of the African element took an international turn with the success of minstrel shows in the United States and Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, and later with the success of John Philip Sousas performances in Europe. Stephen Fosters minstrel songs, for example, were so popular in and outside the United States that his Old Folks at Home served as inspiration for Johann Strauss Jr.s Manhattan Waltzes at the time of the Viennese composers visit to the United States.49 As African Americans started to gain a hold on the business later in the century, they opened new possibilities for the popularity of all-black musicals in New York, like the Creole Show (1890), which included the dance of the cakewalk, Oriental America (1896), and A Trip to Coontown (1898). Minstrelsy music was particularly popular in London, where as early as 1865 there was a permanent local minstrel troupe; the British fascination with African American music as the new exotic Other can also be seen in the minstrelsy scene in Gilbert and Sullivans Utopia Unlimited (1893).50 It did not take long for London to become a center of minstrel sheet-music production in Europe, ultimately competing with New York, as the music became one more appealing cosmopolitan fashion that crossed national boundaries. Minstrel songs and the cakewalks, already a fad on Broadway in the 1890s, were presented repeatedly on the stages of London and Paris early in the 1900s. The craze was further fostered in Paris by John Philip Sousas concerts, which included minstrel and ragtime songs, as well as the cakewalk. As the dance grew into an international craze, it inspired the Parisian production on the famous stage of `gre, Grand American nautical pantothe Nouveau Cirque of Joyeux ne mime (1902). The show inspired the composer Rodolphe Berger to `gres (1903).51 The fad for African write his cakewalk Joyeux ne American popular musics in Europe also fueled the avant-garde in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century, from artworks, sculptures, and literature, to the elite musical world; Debussys Gollywogs Cakewalk (1906 08) is a very well-known example of how the African element as exotic, repositioned as African American, became entrenched within Parisian culture.52 It was not a coincidence, therefore, that the idea of syncopation presented in minstrel songs became a dening force in African American popular musics in the second part of the nineteenth century.
As Scott has noted, alongside call and response in idiomatic instrumental music and suggestions of pentatonic melodies, a particular kind of syncopationwith an accent on the note immediately before the syncopated notewould become one of the most important signiers of African American popular musics.53 Combined, these elements allowed for the development of a syntax of Africanisms in popular music that added to the already widespread syntax of Orientalisms. While these Africanisms were part of the popular music revolution of the late nineteenth century, they need to be viewed within the parameters of the cosmopolitan context that had European white bourgeoisie as a point of reference. Before they became a fashionable city craze, they were presented in popular comedy acts and dismissed as parody. As Scott points out, both African American and white musicians were refashioning each others musics to meet their own aesthetic demands, but were doing so within a system of unequal power relations, in which the white musician was able to dene the nature of black music and dominate its reception, leaving the black musician with an identity at odds with his or her subjectivity . . . African Americans were left dispossessed of a means of representing themselves on stage.54 If, on the one hand, the participation of black musicians in the production and performance of such music gave them some authority over a booming business, then on the other hand, their presence added, ironically, the authenticity needed for the music to be displaced, again, as the exotic Other. Therefore, one cannot overemphasize that the celebration of Africanisms in early popular musics needs to be understood historically as a direct outgrowth of European colonialism, with its marked racial hierarchies and racist ideologies.55 Nonetheless, the production, performance, and consumption of these musics operated within larger complex systems of social, ethnic, and racial exchanges and dynamic politics of representations on both sides of the Atlantic, exchanges in which the lines between Self and Other became complicated, blurred, and at times somewhat irrelevant. In fact, as one examines Orientalisms and Africanisms alongside Europeanisms as cosmopolitan fads in early popular pieces, the similarities between syntaxes become as signicant as their differences. As cakewalk and ragtime started to make their way onto the Rio de Janeiro musical scene, it was their status as international popular musics representing black musical practices ltered through the white music business that appealed to audiences in the Brazilian capital. Thus, one would not be surprised to nd local composers also writing minstrel music, cakewalks, and ragtime in order to be part of the cosmopolitan musical circuit. Fosters Old Folks at Home, for example, reappears
Figure 6. Cover, Cavalcanti, Cake-walk. Biblioteca Nacional de Rio de Janeiro, sica e Arquivo Sonoro. o de Mu Divisa
disguised in local instrumental arrangements, such as in the CakeWalk, Georgia marcha for bandolim and piano by Eugenio Orfeo ( published by E. Bevilacqua, Rio de Janeiro). The novel cakewalk also occupied the experienced composer lio Cavalcanti, who saw in the dance another way to appeal to cosAure mopolitan audiences in Rio de Janeiro (see Figure 6 and Ex. 5). Cavalcantis Cake-walk is a march with the same dance structure as his polkas, three sections that repeat. The work, which shows an `gres, includes unequivocal semblance to Bergers cakewalk Joyeus ne the already established trait of nonstop melodic syncopations that
lio Cavalcanti, Cake-Walk (ca. 1903) (Rio de Janeiro: Editor Example 5. Aure es). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisa o de Manoel Antonio Guimara sica e Arquivo Sonoro. Mu
emphasize the rst beat of the march, rather than the syncopated note, with the added suggestion of pentatonicism in the melody; at the same time, the composer makes use of the added sixth in the melody recalling the fashionable Viennese waltzes. Cavalcantis use of accentuated, syncopated chords in the second section also recalls his use of the accented chords in the second section of his Valsa hespanhola, both of which served to highlight his middle sections element of surprise. In his Cakewalk, Cavalcanti was fully aware that syncopation was necessary to
dene the pieces Africanisms as an exotic element, but he was quick to combine it with other Others, such as his French polkas or his Spanish waltzes; Cavalcantis Africanisms, translated into syncopations, were elements added to his tools of worldliness and otherwordliness that situated his musics, as well as his audiences, as part of a large urban sounds`cle cities. cape of n-de-sie While the appeal of the cakewalk and ragtime in a city like Rio de Janeiro sheds light on a shared cosmopolitan culture at the beginning of the twentieth century, it also points to cosmopolitanism ` a la Europe in a city that had been dominated by African-derived musical traditions , one can nd a consince its colonial days. If, in Milanos song Ti-fa nection between Orientalism and local political discussions of race, the idea of Chinese immigration was only a temporary topic that soon lost its force. It was overshadowed by a much larger discussion about Brazilian nationality focusing specically on the African element, an element unmistakably present in and strongly intertwined with all facets of Brazilian life. Very aware of contemporary European theories of race, the local intelligentsia irted with the idea of whitening the Brazilian population through increasing subsidies for European immigration, and thus avoiding the degeneration of the local culture perceived to result from its intermingling with the African. Within this context, the spread of musical Africanisms as fashionable and cosmopolitan was particularly signicant in Rio de Janeiro as both an engagement with and an escape from the ongoing discussion of the black races role in the construction of Brazilian nationality. Perceived as US eccentric dances of blacks, the cakewalk and ragtime became a most desirable addition to Rio de Janeiros urban soundscape in the comedy theater, musical reviews, and during carnival season, when they shared the space not only with waltzes, polkas, and marches but also with a local dance called maxixe a variant of the European polka and march, conspicuously ornamented with syncopations in both the melodic line and accompaniment. In the carnival season of 1909, for example, Paschoal Segreto offered in his music hall a lively Yankee ball with the delicious cakewalk and the not less delicious maxixe.56 The inclusion of both maxixe and cakewalk was one more pairing of cosmopolitanisms with locality marked by exoticism, for the maxixe had also been presented in Paris and had become part of the international circuit of musical exchanges. By locating the maxixe as both cosmopolitan and exotic, the local dance could be celebrated in Rio de Janeiro as part of a local urban culture.57 As Whiting rightly points out, A fashion has a thousand chances of catching on if it comes from abroad.58 The maxixe in this context could lose its potential for
self-exoticism and instead become a convenient tool in the local politics of race representation. Micol Seigel has offered a compelling analysis of the appearance and disappearance of the maxixe in the United States, focusing on the dances relation to other Afro-diasporic cultural exchanges in the second decade of the twentieth century.59 The story of this exchange from the viewpoint of the burgeoning music business in Rio de Janeiro offers similar examples, but can also provide another layer to already complex transnational interactions; it highlights not only Afro-diasporic musical expressions as transnational, but also shows their relocation from transnational Afro-diasporic to cosmopolitan, and then, nally, to local. On the one hand, musical Africanisms in cakewalks and ragtime disguised as the exotic Other served as a strong marketing tool for fashionable dances coming from overseas. On the other hand, cakewalks and ragtime dances and songs were particularly useful in validating the local maxixe production by also highlighting local Africanisms as both fashionable and desirable by all. Viewed rst as one more element in the wide array of possibilities offered by the international circulation of music and widespread cultural cosmopolitanism, popular songs and dances saturated with syncopations acquired a life of their own in the Brazilian capital. Part of an international discourse of African and African American expressions that had emerged as representations of Otherness within the connes of a well-dened and protable convention of mass entertainment60 set by white Europeans, they became distinctive and conspicuously celebrated signiers of Rio de Janeiros musicsigniers that effectively and conveniently blurred concepts of race, cosmopolitanism, and local uniqueness into a singular discourse.61 In the 1930s, during the height of a dictatorship and within discourses of ideological nationalisms in Brazil, syncopations in popular songs and dances were no longer celebrated as exotic Africanisms, or representations of Otherness, but as a symbol of local authenticity. Desperately sought after by musicologists within Brazil and abroad as an aesthetic validation of local musical production, syncopations and other Africanisms ultimately locked the musical expressions of Afro-Brazilians in an essentialist box, marked by race and difference, from which there was no escapefor it became the ultimate symbol, one that came to shape not only imaginaries of Afro-Brazilian popular music, but also of Brazilian music, and in the end of Braziliannessan unquestionable icon, for which authenticity was undeniable and history played no role. In this way, Brazilian popular music became historically inseparable from Afro-Brazilian musical expressions, creating a myth that continues to this day.62
Still, one wonders how a society ruled by a white elite whose take on race was modeled on European theories, and who invested in the whitening of the population as a just cause for self-serving debates of identity and representation, could see in black musics a potential for local constructions of national identity; put simply, how could those in charge of whitening the population favor blackening the music? This paradox cannot be taken for granted as an inherent Brazilian mystery, nor can it be simplied or justied by friendly meetings between blacks and whites in the bohemia of Rio de Janeiro. Beyond the international celebration of Africanisms as fashionable and desirable, popular music making in the Brazilian capital was dominated by large numbers of blacks, who sought and found work in Rio de Janeiros emergent music industry. In the Brazilian capital, they became the frontrunners of the production and performance of the new cosmopolitan musics, local and foreign, just as had happened on Broadway late in the nineteenth century. They understood well and made use of the exotic, of Orientalisms, Africanisms, and Europeanisms, while positioning themselves as true cosmopolitans. As Seigel notes in relation to African American performances, Afro-Brazilian musical production and performances within these transnational, cosmopolitan environments of many exotics cannot be seen in a well-dened black/white racial scheme; rather, they operated in multiple, competing racial schemas that worked simultaneously.63 lio Cavalcanti, who was described by Luiz Edmundo as a Like Aure mulatto, Afro-Brazilians (and mulattos) were successful composers and concerts, and chopes berrantes. After a performers in music halls, cafe French chanson, a Japanese song, and a German dance, Edmundo recalls, they could satisfy the audiences with polkas and waltzes, and also with other cosmopolitan musics including cakewalks, ragtimes, habaneras, tangos, maxixes, etc. As true cosmopolitans in a white society dominated by European culture, Afro-Brazilian and mulatto composers and performers had to navigate a complex set of social dynamics that was marked by the politics of race representationsas in the United States, Seigel notes, They navigated the riptides of internal colonialism.64 Edmundo praised the performances of blacks in Rio de Janeiros music halls for the syncopated cadences of the African batuque that they added to all musics, a quality that showed them as barbarians, Edmundo continues, So much so that one could not accept any other type of performer during Carnival.65 Race, then, was crucial to add local African authenticity to the cosmopolitan production and performancesan authenticity that could then be presented and represented as parody in Carnival parades. However, the participation of blacks in the musical production of early
popular musics was also convenient in another way: while blacks succeeded as cosmopolitan composers and performers, they also made invisible the conspicuous presence of African traditions in the Brazilian capital. Their contributions to the popular-music scene, with a gamut of musical and performance innovations, provided a convenient escape from the traditional sounds of the batuques, which continued to be outlawed in the city. The early scenario of popular musics in Rio de Janeiro thus presents a complex dynamic of identities, representations, and meanings that were dependent on both an international circuit of music circulation and on a local context marked by early politics of race. While this unquestionably reveals a story of a magnitude that goes beyond the scope of this article, these examples linking European and US popular musics with local musical production offer a way to locate the local production as dependant on previous representations that were already contextualized as fashionably exotic. In this way, the process in which popular music was used to create symbols of Brazilianness later in the twentieth century was far from intrinsic, natural, or local; rather it was a process constructed by shared histories and transnational cultural exchanges. Most importantly, these examples allow for an examination of a local musical production in Rio de Janeiro that is not marked by a local uniqueness and that instead can be understood as part of a larger cosmopolitan culture shared by those living in cities on both sides of the Atlantic. In Rio de Janeiros emergent musical industry, early popular music produced locally simply added a new localized context to a set of already familiar and unchallenging cosmopolitan cultural contexts. Notes
Cristina Magaldi is associate professor at Towson University. She is the author of Music in Imperial Rio de Janeiro: European Culture in a Musical Milieu (2004), a book that received the Robert Stevenson award from the American Musicological Society in 2005. Her areas of interest include popular music, nineteenth-century music, Latin American music, nationalism, and music and identity. Her publications appear (among other places) in Popular Music, Latin American Music Review, and Inter-American Music Review. Dr. Magaldi is completing a book on music and cosmopolitanism in ` cle Rio de Janeiro. Email: cmagaldi@towson.edu n-de-sie 1. Several scholars have addressed Rio de Janeiros urban reforms; see Teresa A. Meade, Civilizing Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889 1930 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); Jeffrey D. Needell, poque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Jaime Larry A Tropical Belle E o urbana no Rio de Janeiro Benchimol, Pereira Passos: Um Haussman tropical: A renovac a culo XX (Rio de Janeiro: Prefeitura do Rio e Janeiro, 1992). no in cio do se
2.
Meade, Civilizing Rio, 43.
udia Oliveira, A representac o da 3. For the new postcards of Rio de Janeiro, see Cla a grande Avenida e o sublime dos melhoramentos urbanos nas ilustradas Fon-Fon! e Para Todos, Escritos: Revista da Casa Rui Barbosa 1, no. 1 (2007): 93; see also Evelyn culo: Teatros e cinemas na formac o da Furquim Werneck Lima, Arquitetura do espeta a ndia (Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 2000), 97. Prac a Tiradentes e da Cinela 4. For the transformations in Rio de Janeiro and other capitals in Latin America during the same period, see Arturo Almandoz Marte, Planning Latin Americas Capital Cities, 1850 1950 (London and New York: Routledge, 2002); for a comparison between the urban transformation of Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, see Jeffrey D. Needell, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires: Public Space and Public Consciousness ` cle Latin America, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 3 in Fin-de-sie (July 1995): 519 40. nicas 5. Marite Conde explores this aspect of Rio de Janeiros culture through the cro (chronicles) and the role of lms in the description of the city; see Film and the nicas: Documenting the New Urban Spaces in Turn of the Century Rio de Cro Janeiro, Luso-Brazilian Review 42, no. 2 (2005): 66 68. stica da e poca, Gazeta de Not 6. Olavo Bilac, Mole cias, 3 November 1907; cited in nicas, 69. Conde, Film and the Cro 7. This idea was developed by Camilla Fojas in relation to Latin American literature; see her Cosmopolitanism in the Americas (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), 13. 8. These two views of globalization and their relations to Brazilian contemporary popular music are summarized in Cristina Magaldi, Adopting Imports: New Images and Alliance in Brazilian Popular Music of the 1990s, Popular Music 18, no. 2 (1999): 309 29. For a further analysis of the problems encountered by theorists of world music in the 1980s and 1990s, see Steven Felds A Sweet Lullaby for World Music, Public Culture 12, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 145 65. 9. Ignacio Coronas and Alejandro L. Madrids recent compilation of essays on this topic is a good example; see Postnational Musical Identities: Cultural Production, Distribution, and Consumption in a Globalized Scenario (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008). 10. Richard Middleton and Peter Manuel, Popular music, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/ 43179pg2 (accessed 1 May 2009). 11. Two collections of essays are particularly useful in examining globalization and cosmopolitanism today and in the past; see Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), and Cosmopolitanism, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge, et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 12. Nayan Chanda, Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 246, 248, and 319. 13. Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 8.
14. Although thousands of copies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular dances and songs are available for study in libraries and archives throughout Europe and the Americas, this repertory continues to be easily dismissed as insignicant. Jody Rosen has recently pointed out that early popular musics are not taken seriously because songs and dances in this early era of popular music were presented in the context of comic theater, saturated with ethnic pastiche, and bound up with the questions of racial representation. Recent projects in the US intending to rescue a huge repertory of mechanical recordings of early popular songs and dances, as well as catalogs of sheet-music publications, have begun to improve this situation. See Jody Rosen, How Pop Sounded Before it Popped, New York Times, 19 March 2006. The emergence of popular musics in Europe, in particular in music halls in England and in the concerts and cabarets in France, has been studied by cultural historians and sociolcafe ogists, more so than by musicologists.
lez and Claudio Rolle, Historia social de la mu sica popular en 15. Juan Pablo Gonza lica de Chile, 2005); Chile, 18901950 (Santiago, Chile: Ediciones Universidad Cato Derek Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 16. Veit Erlmann, The Aesthetics of the Global Imagination: Reections on World Music in the 1990s, Public Culture 8 (1996): 476. 17. Erlmann, The Aesthetics of the Global Imagination, 476. 18. Philip Bohlman, World Music at the End of History, Ethnomusicology 46, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 1. 19. Bohlman, World Music, 15. 20. Micol Seigel, The Disappearing Dance: Maxixes Imperial Erasure, Black Music Research Journal 25 (Spring 2005): 98. 21. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 8. 22. Jacqueline Loss, Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America: Against the Destiny of Place (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 23. For the exchange and appropriation of songs between New York, London, and Paris in 1880s, see Steven Moore Whitings Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 24. 24. Scott notes that the social changes in European cities and the incorporation of music into a system of capitalist enterprise caused a new musical style and a new genre to emerge in the middle of the nineteenth century. The new language of popular music, with different dialects and different accents, also required new musical conventions and new musical routines and performing practices. See Sounds of the Metropolis, 312. 25. For the musical connections between the Brazilian capital and Paris during the monarchy, see Cristina Magaldi, Music in Imperial Rio de Janeiro: European Culture in a Tropical Milieu (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004). 26. Luiz Edmundo, O Rio de Janeiro do meu tempo (Rio de Janeiro: Xenon Editora, 1987 [1938]), 173.
27. Several of these establishments were demolished or renovated as part of the architectural plan revitalizing Rio de Janeiro streets during the rst decade of the twentieth culo, 10710. century. See Lima, Arquitetura do espeta 28. Edmundo, O Rio de Janeiro do meu tempo, 17981. culo, 239, 259. 29. Lima, Arquitetura do espeta 30. Edmundo, O Rio de Janeiro do meu tempo, 174. 31. Jornal do Commercio (Rio de Janeiro), 5 and 19 May and 1 September 1910. 32. Even though Aurelio Cavalcanti was a prolic composer and a well-known gure in Rio de Janeiros nightlife, his biography awaits further study. Luiz Edmundo includes lio Cavalcantis piano performance; in his memoirs an illustration (by Calixto) of Aure see O Rio de Janeiro do meu tempo, 174. 33. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 3 12; see, in particular, page 7. 34. Derek Scott, Orientalism and Musical Style, Musical Quarterly 88, no. 2 (1998): 309 35. 35. Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 24. 36. Scott, Orientalism, 320. 37. William L. Hick, Social Discourse in the Savoy Theatres Productions of The Nautch Girl (1891) and Utopia Limited (1893): Exoticism and Victorian Self-Reection (Masters Thesis, University of North Texas, 2003), 24. Available online at http://www. library.unt.edu/theses/open/20032/hicks_william/thesis.pdf (accessed 1 May 2009). 38. Jornal do Commercio (Rio de Janeiro), 25 February 1901. nica, 67. 39. Conde, Film and the Cro 40. Scott, Orientalism, 309 35. 41. Hick, Social Discourse, 10. Joness San Toy ran for 768 performances in Londons Dalys Theater in 1899; British Musical Theater, http://math.boisestate.edu/ GaS/british/santoy/index.html (accessed 1 May 2009). 42. Hick, Social Discourse, 5. 43. Scott, Orientalism, 22, 27. Hick, Social Discourse, 5, 42, and 49. 44. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994 [1978]), 71 72. 45. Jeffrey Lesser, Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 14, 15, 23. 46. For more information on Milano, see Alexandre Bispo Luso-Brasileirismo, es teatrais e revistas, talo-brasileiros e mecanismos performativos: Representac o Nicolino Milano, http://www.revista.brasil-europa.eu/107/Nicolino-Milano.htm (accessed 1 May 2009). See also C. Carlos J. Wehrs, O Rio Antigo, Pitoresco & Musical: rio (Rio de Janeiro: Carlos Wehers, 1980), 1045. rias e Dia Memo (Rio de Janeiro), 3 January 1903. 47. Correio da Manha lez, the cakewalk also made it to Santiago (Chile) at the 48. According to Gonza sica, 81. beginning of the twentieth century. See Historia social de la mu
49. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 52. 50. Hick, Social Discourse, 63 70. See also Ann McKinleys Debussy and American Minstrelsy, The Black Perspective in Music (Autumn 1986), 252. 51. Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 29798. 52. See Jody Blake, Taking the Cake: The First Steps of Primitivism in Modernist Art, in Le tumulte noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 19001930 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 11 36. 53. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 14957. 54. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 154. 55. Ko Agawu argues that the idea of Orientalisms as musical constructs can parallel that of Africanisms, if one disregards Melville Herskovitss use of the term Africanism to refer specically to African-derived musical practices in the New World; see Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Position (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 95. 56. Jornal do Commercio (Rio de Janeiro), 19 February 1909. 57. See my discussion of the maxixe in this context in Before and After Samba: Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, and Popular Music in Rio de Janeiro at the Beginning and End of the Twentieth Century, in Postnational Musical Identities, 17384. 58. Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 300. 59. Seigel, The Disappearing Dance, 98. 60. Hick, Social Discourse, 83. 61. Hick notes the blurring of discourses between exoticism, race, and social class in late nineteenth-century Britain; see Social Discourse, 84. 62. For a recent study of the role of black musicians in Brazilian popular music, see n Davis, White Face, Black Mask: Africaneity and the Early Social History of Popular Darie Music in Brazil (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009). 63. Micol Seigel, Nation Drag: Uses of the Exotic, Journal of Transnational American Studies 1, no. 1 (2009). The online article is an excerpt of the authors forthcoming book Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming), http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=1078&context=acgcc/jtas (accessed 3 May 2009). 64. Seigel, Nation Drag. 65. Edmundo, O Rio de Janeiro do meu tempo, 179.

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Cosmopolitanism and World Music in Rio de Janeiro at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

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Globalization and Music in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro

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Music Cosmopolitanism in Rio de Janeiro of the Old Republic

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Whitening the Population and Blackening the Music

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