Appleby’s book is not a first English-language foray into uncharted territory. In 1943 and in 1948 the Pan American Union issued English-language epitomes of Brazilian music history by Albert Luper and Luiz Heitor Correa de Azevedo. During the interim, prolific research on Brazilian music history in all periods has been published.
The present concise history fails to exploit much relevant literature published since 1948. The best chapters are 5 and 6, on “Nationalist Composers” and “After Modernismo." When writing chapter 5, Appleby relied heavily on his own doctoral dissertation, accepted at Indiana University in 1956, “A Study of Selected Compositions by Contemporary Brazilian Composers.” In his chapters 3 and 4, “The Awakening of Nationalism” and “Folk, Popular, and Art Music,” he had the advantage of consulting freely Gerard Béhague’s 1966 Tulane dissertation, “Popular Musical Currents in the Art Music of the Early Nationalist Period in Brazil, circa 1870-1920.”
In chapter 1, he relies on such outmoded narratives as Robert Southey’s History of Brazil, rather than levying data from Manuel Vicente Ribeiro Veiga’s meticulous dissertation citing original sources, “Toward a Brazilian Ethnomusicology: Amerindian Phases” (University of California at Los Angeles, 1981). Nor does he quote Helza Camêu’s Introdução ao Estudo da Música Indígena Brasileira (1977)—not in his bibliography—or numerous other important works on Brazilian ethnic musics cited on Veiga’s pages 289-347.
After lamenting the “incomplete picture of musical life of colonial São Paulo on the basis of available information,” Appleby mentions merely in passing the one colonial musical director at São Paulo from whom a sizable body of music does survive, André da Silva Gomes (1752-1844). Moreover, Silva Gomes’s Missa a 8 vozes e instrumentos (Universidade de Brasilia, 1966), December 8 orchestrally accompanied motet composed about 1785, and Vísperas in Féria 3a a 4 Vozes e Orgão have been published. As for Bahia, Appleby ignores the fact that the “earliest preserved composition by a Brazilian Colonial composer” has been published in entirety (Universitas, Salvador/Bahia, 8-9, 1971, 291-299), and seems not to know that the 1759 aria has already been twice recorded.
The same partial acquaintance with relevant literature that compromises his sections on São Paulo and Bahia clouds his treatment of the prime Rio de Janeiro composer, José Maurício Nunes García (1767-1830). He knows the Mattos catalog but not her 69-page edition of Nunes García’s 1799 orchestral Matinas do Natal (Río de Janeiro: Funarte, 1978; literary introduction, pp. vi-xi). He ignores the edition of Nunes García’s 1809 Lauda Sion Salvatorem sequence (Mattos, no. 165) published by the General Secretariat, Organization of American States, in 1975, and its recording by the Roger Wagner Chorale. Appleby needs to document his opinion that Marcos Portugal found the musical situation at D. João VI’s court “intolerable” when he arrived in 1811.
What he says of the composer of the Brazilian national anthem shows no acquaintance with Francisco Manuel da Silva’s major masterpieces. In his chatty paragraphs on Brazil’s paramount opera composer, Antonio Carlos Gomes (1836-96), he substitutes trivial small talk (about the Brazilian birds that Gomes imported and a boat painted green and yellow) for any informed discussion of his operas that by 1893 gave him the reputation of being the greatest composer not only in Brazil, but in the Americas.
In contrast with the little on Gomes, Appleby devotes 23 pages to Villa-Lobos. Here at last he evinces more than merely superficial acquaintance with some of the music under discussion. Even so, what Gerard Béhague’s Music in Latin America: An Introduction (1979) says of the seven composers entering Appleby’s chapter 5 carries greater weight.
Appleby’s last chapter leaves out of account the extremely significant Compositores Brasileiros series published in 34 fascicles by the Minstério das Relações Exteriores, Departamento de Cooperação Cultural, Científica e Tecnológica between 1975 and 1978.
In sum, this history would profit from ampler bibliography and from personal acquaintance with the music of major masters not treated in the author’s doctoral dissertation. Endnotes should preferably direct the reader to primary sources; unverifiable anecdotes should be retrenched; and mistakes concerning crowning figures such as Gomes should be eliminated. In general, the music examples are too short to open doors on individual composers’ styles.
The book contains nothing on current Brazilian popular music. Figures ranging from Gal Costa, Dorivai Caymmi, Jair Rodrigues, Elizeth Cardoso, and Jorge Bern to Roberto Carlos are shunted aside in order to make room for contemporary art-music vanguardists of scant interest to any but a miniscule elite.
