Samba has its origins with the African slaves in Brazil. They started to mix their beats with European rhythms, like polka and waltz. The slaves used to play their instruments, sing, and dance in a circle, creating Samba de Roda. However, by that time, these kinds of beats were much more intimately tied with religious celebrations and rituals than entertainment itself. Historians say Samba originated in Bahia, but strengthened in Rio de Janeiro in the 19th century when Rio became the capital of the Portuguese Empire.
However, just like Capoeira , Afro-Brazilian religions , and any other type of African expression, Samba was not seen with good eyes. Important names of Samba in Brazil like Pixinguinha, Heitor dos Prazeres, and Donga got involved with these events back then. By the end of the 19th century, samba started to grow among the slums of Rio and the general population, establishing itself as a musical genre. From the s onwards, samba found space with the phonographic industry and radio.
By then, people were also relating Samba with Carnival and ballroom parties. That is when Samba became one of the main elements of Brazilian culture. With a slower pace and romantic lyrics, it often sings about loneliness, love, and relationships.
This style uses sudden stops in the song to which the singer adds personal comments, usually with a critical or humorous tone. A ballroom dance type of Samba. It is influenced by maxixe music, in which dancers explore rhythm and sensuality. This subgenre sings about the reality of the slums and unprivileged people of Brazil. It is one of the most traditional types of samba in Brazil. Singing, clapping, and playing musical instruments around a circle strongly characterizes Samba de Roda.
Moreover, lots of dancing also occur around the musicians. The musics of Brazil are as socially diverse and culturally mixed as its people. Yet, out of this assembly, samba in particular has emerged as a national cultural expression. Its combination of heterogeneous musical and cultural influences has enabled it to symbolise the buoyant diversity of the country itself.
Samba is enacted most spectacularly in the Brazilian Carnival celebrations, which have captured the global imagination in its pulsating rhythms, its decadent revelry, its extroverted performativity and its extravagant exhibitionism. The official and universal language is Portuguese, except amongst indigenous communities along the Amazon Basin who speak around discrete languages. However, they were primarily nomadic groups with oral cultures and so, unlike the Maya or Inca civilisations, made little permanent impact on the physical landscape of Brazil.
Most of their indigenous culture was lost through acculturation by missionaries and enslavement by colonial invaders, though traces of their traditional practices have been maintained through syncretic cultural forms and amongst living indigenous communities themselves.
The settlement of Brazil by Portugal was driven by Papal direction through the Treaty of Tordesillas : aiming to avoid conflict between Portuguese and Spanish expansionists, the Pope drew a line between them in the mid-Atlantic. The Jesuits disregarded the Tordesillas demarcation line, expanding their influence, and Brazil itself, far westwards up the Amazon River. Unlike the Spanish, the Portuguese settlers did not have the population to support full colonisation, and Portugal was prioritising its resources for expanding into India and the Spice Islands, so they only set up barrios small scattered communities which focused on trade, agriculture and sugar plantations.
Enamoured by the Brazil wood tree, a valuable source of red dye, they renamed the territory after it. As their settlements expanded and their trade activities grew, with a mini gold rush in the s, Portuguese colonists arrived to fully establish the territory 17 th C th : they imported slaves from Africa into the colony and, to appease their Papal patrons, expelled the Jesuits and enlarged the presence of the Roman Catholic Church, for example by setting up irmandades lay brotherhoods in urban centres that essentially merged religion into all aspects of social and cultural life.
When slavery was abolished , the coffee magnates backed a mass coup and, though they founded an independent Federal Republic of Brazil, they ruled it as a tycoonocracy until a military coup, led by Eduardo Vargas, took over and imposed a martial regime. Amid rising unrest, power was ceded to the people, paving the way for a truly sovereign civil democracy Brazil then experienced rapid growth, mainly driven by its rich natural resources.
The history of traditional music in Brazil is one of persistent blurred lines: between sacred and profane; between rural and urban; between Indigenous, Luso-Hispanic and African; and between traditional, art and popular musics.
Yet, it is the interactions between these diverse cultures and the synthesis of their distinct musical practices that produced the syncretic musics, most of all samba , that ascended to embody modern Brazil. Historically, the traditional pre-mixed musics of Brazil reflect its three major ethnic groupings: musics of the indigenous population; musics of the Luso-Hispanic settlers and colonists; and musics of the African slaves.
The Jesuit missions and Portuguese colonisation resulted in the devastation of much indigenous culture. In fact, Christian music was employed by the Jesuits as a tool of conversion: priests performed Catholic autos morality plays for the indigenous populace and taught native musicians to sing Christian songs in Latin and Portuguese and how to make and play European string, woodwind and keyboard instruments.
Impressed by their talents in music and craft, the priests even enlisted musicians to sing and play for their autos , which, poignantly, intensified the process of indoctrination further and thus deepened the depth of indigenous culture loss. Despite this, neither the Jesuit missionaries nor the Portuguese settlers acted in a way that resulted in the total annihilation of the indigenous people or their culture unlike in some Spanish colonies of South America and the Caribbean and thus there is some knowledge of historical indigenous musical practices.
Sizeable indigenous communities still maintain their own living musical traditions today, though the music of most of these groups is yet to be systematically studied. General trends include the dominance of song, the use of curative, festive and war dances, the use of a huge diversity of flutes and rattles and the cultural significance of music in social, ritual and spiritual life.
Other indigenous groups even developed syncretic fusions of indigenous and Christian cultural practices. This produced a syncretic tradition that is particularly significant not only in that it survived inculcation but also because it went on to influence the Luso-Hispanic traditions of the Portuguese settlers and subsequent mestizo traditions in the area, thus maintaining the presence of indigenous influences on later Brazilian musical forms.
Luso-Hispanic tradition made its home in Brazil in the barrios of the early Portuguese settlers. The barrios were socially stratified, headed by the wealthy Portuguese landowners, followed by poor Portuguese labourers and then by the enslaved indigenous workers at the bottom before the arrival of African slaves. The poor Portuguese labourers brought their traditional song and dances and adapted them to their new life in Vera Cruz. Some songs bore direct cultural and religious significance, such as cyclical ritual songs e.
Others were linked to work e. The religiosity of song intensified further as the full colonist forces arrived and founded the irmandades lay brotherhoods , which reinforced the influence of the Roman Catholic Church and initiated new Catholic musical traditions, such as the folias de reis polyphonic singing ensembles who travelled door-to-door to sing embryonic toadas tunes recounting the story of the Magi and collect donations to raise money for the Dia de los Reyes Day of the Three Kings festival.
Yet, there was also a distinctively indigenised musical-spiritual aesthetic to these practices, most likely due to the involvement of indigenous musicians as with the Jesuit autos , which led to the reimagining of saints and other legendary religious figures as outgoing lovers of music and dance. Luso-Hispanic dance, on the other hand, was primarily recreational. In fact, Carnivalcelebrations became a competitive matter for landowners, a symbol of their benevolence towards their workforce entitling them to pride and prestige over their peers and, in the context of labour shortages, a means of attracting workers to their plantations.
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