A canção brasileira

Seven earlier books on music by Mariz (born 1921), totaling 1094 pages, have reached the United States. The present study of Brazilian art-song was first published in 1948 (173 pp.). The second edition includes six appendices, the last of which (pp. 293-297) digests Brazilian reviews of the first edition. With such credentials before him, the foreign reviewer hardly feels invited to evaluate the new edition. In the first chapter, Mariz asks what an art-song is, in the second he examines the obligations of the art-song composer to his text, in the third he surveys the songs composed by Villa-Lobos’s predecessors. Except for Alberto Costa, whose fame he attributes to “plugs” by Costa’s relative, Bidu Sayao, he is kind to the early song-writers. He divides composers active in this century into four “generations,” and briefly assesses the contributions of the leading figures in each generation. According to Mariz, p. 102, Guarnieri is almost unknown outside São Paulo in his native land, despite being Brazil’s best known composer abroad (except Villa-Lobos, now dead). After art-song, Mariz surveys such folk music types as the baião, chôro, eôco, frevo, coreto, desafio, embolada, lundú, marchinha, martelo, modinha, polca, samba, chótis, tanguinho, and toada. Of these types, the modinha has the distinction of having inspired not only art-songs but orchestral pieces by so prominent a composer as Villa-Lobos. (He has also written numerous choros.) Mariz at last comes to popular music of the commercial variety (night clubs, taverns, and other urban recreational spots are its milieu). A useful appendix on the pronunciation of Portuguese in Brazilian art-song occupies pp. 261-298. The index includes names, but nothing else.