Choro: A Social History of a Brazilian Popular Music.

2005 by Tamara Elena Livingston-

Isenhour; Thomas George Caracas Garcia
Review by: Daniel Sharp
Latin American Music Review / Revista de Música Latinoamericana, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring -
Summer, 2008), pp. 96-99
Published by: University of Texas Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29739146 .
Accessed: 12/06/2014 23:02

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

University of Texas Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Latin
American Music Review / Revista de Música Latinoamericana.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.230 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 23:02:44 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Reviews

TAMARA ELENA LIVINGSTON-ISENHOUR and THOMAS GEORGE CARACAS

garcia. Choro: A Social History of a Brazilian Popular Music. 2005.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Brazilian choro shares much with itsmore markedly Afro-Brazilian relative

samba, which eclipses the largely instrumental genre in the national and
international spotlight. Both begin to emerge during the Brazilian belle
?poque, their respective mixtures of African and European musical ele?
ments celebrated by the New Republic in the 1930s as representative of the
nation's foundational racial and cultural mixture. Choro: A Social History of
a Brazilian Popular Music by Tamara Elena Livingston-1senhour and Thomas
George aims to correct choro's underrepresentation
Caracas Garcia in the
English-language literature by examining choro performance practice in
the shifting context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazil.
Choro occupies much of the same historical terrain covered by recent
samba scholarship, including The Mystery of Samba by Hermano Vianna
and Feiti?o Decente by Carlos Sandroni. Vianna's and Sandroni's books are
useful to assign together in a seminar on Latin American music because
they complement each other. Vianna's book is a historical work written by
an anthropologist focusing on salient issues surrounding popular music,
racial mixture, social class and modernist nationalism broadly spanning
the last two centuries. Sandroni is an ethnomusicologist, guitarist and
composer who is well versed in historical musicology. His book focuses on
the pivotal years in the development of the samba, 1917-1931, as he exam?
ines how the issues discussed by Vianna mentioned above affect samba's
musical details as the style crystallizes as amusical emblem of the Brazil?
ian nation.

Instead of publishing separate books readable in tandem like Vianna

and Sandroni, Thomas Garcia and Tamara Elena Livingston-Isenhour, a
PhD in performance practice and an ethnomusicologist, respectively, de?
cided to coauthor Choro, combining their work on these familiar themes of
popular music, race, class, and Brazilian modernism. Both guitarists who
admire Villa-Lobos, Garcia and Livingston-Isenhour joined forces after dis?
covering the extent to which their research dovetailed. Garcia wrote his
dissertation on the history of the choro from the 1870s to the 1950s, and
Livingston-Isenhour focused on the choro revival from the 1970s until the
present. The resulting book is an ambitious mixture of broad social history,

Latin American Music Review, Volume 29, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2008

? 2008 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.230 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 23:02:44 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Reviews ? 97

detailed analysis of chow musical style, and ethnography of performance

practice.
The book begins with brief personal accounts of how the two authors
came to become interested in the genre through their studies of Heitor
Villa-Lobos's choro-influenced concert music for guitar. This movement
from studying Villa-Lobos to researching choro identifies a core constituency
of the book's intended audience: Villa-Lobos devotees who desire to learn
more about this genre of popular music that often influenced the com?
poser's work. Chapter i begins with a useful outline of the genre's musical
characteristics, including examples of standard rhythms, countermelodies,
and basslines. Chapters 2 and 4 examine the genres lundu, modinha, and
maxixe that preceded choro, and the origins of choro in the choromeleiro en?
sembles and barber's groups. Interspersed within this account of this ac?
count of the genre's consolidation, Chapter 4 also provides concise New
Grove-style biographies of the principal composers and performers of
early choro: Joaquim Antonio da Silva Calado, Anacleto de Medeiros, and
Francisca Edwiges Neves "Chiquinha" Gonzaga.
Chapter 3 interrupts this broader historical narrative with a discussion
of a privileged context of chow music-making: the roda, or porous circle of
musicians in a bar, backyard, or private party. The chapter began with a fic?
tionalized account of an 1893 ro^amat reac^as a textual equivalent of a dra?
matic historical reenactment. Upon first reading, I was skeptical of this
passage, which risks falling into caricature. Imust concede, however, that
the students in my undergraduate survey class responded quite positively
to this imaginative exercise; they insisted that it allowed them to better en?
vision the context of the genre's early history, and offered respite from the
drier prose of prior historical sections. Through its focus on the context of
the roda, this chapter begins at the turn of the twentieth century?roughly
where Chapter 2 leaves off?and ends with an ethnographic rendering of
choro rodas in the 1990s. Especially interesting were the authors' observa?
tions regarding the negotiation of the boundaries of participation, where
the genre's core values of spontaneity and loosely structured musical con?
versation bump up against its professionalization.
Chapters 5 and 6, which span the period from the 1920s to the 1960s,
continue the practice of alternating summaries of relevant historical events
and themes with brief biographical sketches. Garcia and Livingston
Isenhour narrate the history of chow through a dizzying overview of the
Semana de Arte Moderna (The Week ofModern Art) inaugurating Brazilian
modernism; the impact of radio, the phonograph, and television on the
genre; the cultural policy of the Getulio Vargas regime; and social and
aesthetic shifts during the time of the construction of Brasilia and the
rise of bossa nova. Along the way, special attention is paid to prominent
rfioro-related composers, instrumentalists, and performers such as Jo?o

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.230 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 23:02:44 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 98 ? REVIEWS

Pernambuco, Pixinguinha, Carmen Miranda, Garoto, Almirante, Jaco do

Bandolim, Waldir de Azevedo, and others.
Chapters 7 and 8 chronicle choro from the 1970s and 1980s revival up to
the present. These chapters benefit from the ample ethnographic and
archival material that the authors have amassed in the years that they have
spent researching this topic. In contrast to the earlier section on pre-1920
choro, within which the authors are forced to rely in places on sparse
documentary sources, these chapters provide a wealth of information re?
garding the genre's recent history. The principal rodas in clubs, recording
labels, and erudite performance venues are all recounted in detail. The re?
vival of choro is examined in the context of discourses of cultural imperial?
ism; Garcia and Livingston-Isenhour understand it as a reaction against
the perceived threat of the loss of national cultural authenticity in a flood
of foreign cultural goods. The authors acknowledge that the military gov?
ernment's support for the revival in the 1970s was partly due to its reputa?
tion as a safely nationalist "anti-protest" music without lyrics to censor.
Chapter 9, the book's final chapter, returns to the first half of the twen?
tieth century to explore how choro has been used within Brazilian classical
music. It argues that Villa-Lobos's unique guitar playing and love of choro
not only affected his compositions for solo guitar, but his instrumental
music more generally. The chapter concludes with contrasting uses of
choro in the works of other Brazilian composers, such as Mozart Camargo
Guarnieri, Radam?s Gnattali, Cesar Guerra-Peixe, and others.
Although Livingston-Isenhour and Garcia do not delineate the author?
ship of individual sections of the book, the strongest passages befit their re?
spective training as ethnographer and analyst of performance practice.
Ethnographic sections, such as the unwritten rules governing the joining
of the roda, and in descriptions of musical details, such as Villa-Lobos's use
of "choro devices" in his guitar music, are particularly compelling. One only
has to compare the book to Vianna's and Sandroni's parallel works on
samba, however, to come to the conclusion that Choro at times suffers from
the impulse to include too much. By striving to write an exhaustive study
of 130 years, certain complicated histories are too neatly packaged. For
example, troubling issues such as Villa-Lobos's links to the authoritarian
Vargas regime, and the military dictatorship's support of choro in the
1970s, are acknowledged just enough to leave the reader wanting a more
lengthy and nuanced discussion of their implications for the genre.
But this shortcoming should not prevent an listener of Villa-Lobos, or
anyone else interested in learning about choro, from reading this book.
Choro: A Social History of a Brazilian Popular Music's greatest value lies in
its role as a useful choro reference book, providing a wealth of information
on the music and its important composers and performers. It is a welcome

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.230 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 23:02:44 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Reviews * 99

addition to the literature on the history of Brazilian popular music available

in English, adding valuable information and insights regarding this ongo?
ing lively musical conversation.
DANIEL SHARP

College ofWilliam and Mary

MALENA Kuss, editor. Music in Latin America and the Caribbean: An

Encyclopedic History. Volume 1,Performing Beliefs: Indigenous Peoples of
South America, Central America, and Mexico. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2004. 448 pp., 57 black and white photographs, 111figures, 13maps,
index, list of recorded examples, 2 compact discs. $60.00, hardcover with
dust jacket only.

The encyclopedia volume referenced above was in the making for over two
decades. In 1980, it was proposed at ameeting of UNESCO's International
Music Council and the Brazilian National Committee that Malena Kuss
take charge of the coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean for its "The
Universe of Music: A History" project, to which this tome corresponds.
Kuss later enlisted the assistance of Samuel Claro Vald?s in coordinating
the Latin American portion of the work and that of Olive Lewin and
Maurice Gordon for the Caribbean. This daunting effort led by Kuss even?
tually turned into amultivolume project conceived of as a single unit; only
Volume 1 is reviewed in this essay. Overall the series will contain 150 con?
tributions by over 100 scholars from 36 different countries, approximately
30 hours of recorded selections, and extensive bibliographies. Volume 1 is
the first of four volumes. Volume 2, published in December 2007, is called
Performing the Caribbean Experience; Volume 3, which will be published in
two parts, will be titled Latin America: Islands of History; and Volume 4 will
be named Urban Popular Musics of the New World.
The approach used in this encyclopedic history is novel compared to ap?
proaches used in comparable works such as the Diccionario de la m?sica
espa?ola e hispanoamericana and the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music,
Volume 2: South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. For
one, it is claimed on the dust jacket to be the first comprehensive treatment
of the topic in English. In addition, the most knowledgeable scholars from
around the world were commissioned to write the entries. Thirdly, the the?
oretical underpinnings of the work are of note. States Kuss (ix):

This work was conceived to empower Latin Americans and Caribbeans

to shape their own musical history, privileging their modes of represen?
tation and traditions of scholarship. It also was conceived to emphasize

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.230 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 23:02:44 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions