Cristina Magaldi - Cosmopolitanism and World Music

8/13/2019 Cristina Magaldi - Cosmopolitanism and World Music

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Cosmopolitanism and World Music

in Rio de Janeiro at the Turnof the Twentieth Century

Cristina Magaldi

The urban reforms in Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of the twentiethcentury were central to the new Republican governments motto ofCivilization and Progress. From sanitation and electrical lighting ofstreets and parks to the construction of neoclassical buildings and largeboulevards comparable to those of contemporary Paris, urban renova-tions marked important moments of both political affirmation andcultural transition in the Brazilian capital. On the one hand, the urban-ization 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 providedmuch-needed infrastructure to a city that had grown continually in theprevious decades, doubling its 1890 population to almost a millionpeople by 1910.2

The new landscape also came to symbolize the dream of a growing(mostly white) middle class, as new architectural facades and publicspaces changed fashions and behavioral patterns, giving Rios residentsthe feeling of being at the center of their country. The new capitalbecame an icon of urban transformation and modernity to be followed bythe rest of an agrarian Brazil viewed by the political and intellectualelite as backward. Mayor Pereira Passoss plan to reinvigorate the Braziliancapital also highlighted the governments attempt to put the country atthe center of the Western world, showcasing Brazils embrace of Europeanideals of civilization and progress that associated modernization withurbanization. Having Hausmanns Paris as a model, the urban transform-ation of Rio de Janeiro was accompanied by carefully designed postcardsthat helped project new images of the country abroad and attract foreigninvestors and visitors.3 Most importantly, the new urban landscapeallowed the Brazilian capital entrance to the European Belle Epoque and

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,

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The new Rio de Janeiro landscape was also part of a pattern ofurban growth and transformation that went beyond Brazilian politics andthat reflected an international historical moment of political and socialtransition and globalization.4 In fact, besides a new urban landscape, atthe beginning of the century Rio de Janeiro shared several other featureswith emerging cities in Europe and the Americas as follows: (1) ithoused a large number of immigrants; (2) it provided the stage for theintroduction of new technologies and became a magnet for foreign visi-tors and investors; and (3) the city saw an unprecedented growth of itspopulation, a diversification of its ethnic fabric and cultural expressions,and the empowerment of a growing middle class. Cities in Europe andthe Americas were also linked by a set of shared images, as emergingtechnologies in photography and film helped Western European ideas,ideologies, and fashions travel faster and farther. Furthermore, as thegrowth and spread of a capitalist economy opened new markets for cul-tural goods in cities worldwide, it also set in motion a cosmopolitan cul-tural fabric of unprecedented outreachan early globalized worldculture 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

Figure 1. Avenida Central, Rio de Janeiro, first decade of the 20th century. Photo byAugusto Malta. Fundacao Museu da Imagem e do Som, Rio de Janeiro.

330 The Musical Quarterly



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pervaded Rio de Janeiro.5 Local writers left numerous accounts of thefeeling of being part of the world. Olavo Bilac told his readers in 1907,

for instance, that while walking from one Rio de Janeiro neighborhoodto the next, and from one movie theater to the next, he could easilyand quickly also travel to Paris, Rome, New York, and Milan.6 Bilacand his contemporaries were puzzled by the new sounds of the busy,modern city and often described Rio de Janeiros soundscapes byhighlighting the noise of cars and electricbondes(cable cars), therhythmic clicks of typewriters, and the parroting sounds of gramophones.Although hardly studied systematically, popular music played a key rolein strengthening this cultural connection among emerging cities and inshaping the new urban culture of the Brazilian capital.

The international circulation of music driven by the growingmusic-publication business, the alliance between the music and enter-tainment industries in urban areas, and the introduction of new technol-ogies like movies and the gramophone, permitted an unprecedentedsharing of repertories and musical practices between Rio de Janeirosemerging middle class and those of contemporary cities in the Americasand Europe. This temporal-sonic experience not only paralleled butalso intensified the global connections fostered by large boulevards,architectural facades, photographic images, and early movies. If trans-forming the urban landscape can be viewed as a tangible example ofthe Republican governments attempt to connect Rio de Janeiro to aninternational circuit of cosmopolitan culture, then a cosmopolitanstate of mind7 was also achieved by a soundscaperepertories,performance practices, and listening experiencesthat fostered stronglinks between residents in the Brazilian capital and those in othercontemporary cities.

In this essay, I focus on the international circulation of music as aglobalizing force that allowed for the creation of a cosmopolitan culturein the early 1900s. My main goal is to offer insights into issues of cosmo-

politan identities and popular musics in general, and in the Braziliancapital in particular. Rather than presenting early popular musics in Riode Janeiro in their potential to display early signs of Brazilianness, I showthe emergence of popular music in the city as part of a larger context ofinternational urban culture. One aspect of the early globalization ofmusic is of special significance: the availability, in early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, of dances and songs from far away places, aphenomenon that can be understood as an early stage of the worldmusic trend so familiar at the turn of the twenty-first century. Thesesongs and dances, both imported and reproduced locally, serve as

examples of how the new middle class of Rio de Janeiro imagined

Cosmopolitanism and World Music in Rio de Janeiro 331



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themselves and their Others. I am most interested, however, in anemergent musical cosmopolitanism and in early examples of world

music as ephemeral international fashions that can offer an alternativeto the often historicized understandings of the role of music in identitypolitics of early twentieth-century Brazil. By seeing the emergence ofpopular musics in the Brazilian capital as an outgrowth of an internationalcircuit of music production, circulation, and consumption, rather than asa localized phenomenon, I offer ways to de-essentialize Brazilian popularmusic history and revisit general assumptions about race, nationalism, andmusical identity in the first part of the twentieth century.

Globalization and Music inTurn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro

The globalization of cultural production, and of music in particular, soreal and prevalent at the turn of the twenty-first century, has received agreat deal of attention from scholars in a variety of disciplines. Somewriters have been skeptical of the panorama of music dissemination enmasse and see as a result a homogenization of musical cultures and theuniversalization of the mundane as the music industry in central areasindiscriminately explores and/or imposes musics on markets worldwide.Others have addressed the wide circulation of music as an enrichmentof music making through artistic cross-pollination and as an opportunityfor empowerment of musicians and audiences in peripheral areas.8 Asthe acceleration and intensification of globalization continues to chal-lenge our understanding of the relations between music and group iden-tities on local, national, and international levels, scholars have turnedtheir attention to musical repertories and practices that have crossednational boundaries to create transnational and transcultural bonds.9 Ifpresent-day processes of music distribution and sharing have caused thespread of rock and hip-hop to be viewed as an international phenom-

enon, these processes have also challenged essentialist views of musicand group identities outside centers of musical production. RichardMiddleton has pointed out that, during the 1990s, the globalization ofmusic led large and small, global and local musical systems to reach anuneasy but mutually advantageous coexistence.10 Thus, there is atrend in recent scholarship toward reconsidering and (re)theorizing con-temporary relationships between music, nationalisms, and universalisms,while rethinking relationships of gender, race, and sociocultural identi-ties 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




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globalization is predominantly ahistorical, because it is linked too muchto recent socioeconomic and cultural history. He points out that

massive economic integration, and with it cultural globalization, has faroutpaced our global mindset, which is still rooted in nationalist terms.12

Nonetheless, social scientists have offered case-specific examples of howglobalization and cultural cosmopolitanism have historically worked con-comitantly with a range of contrasting nationalisms, postulating that thevery idea of nation building, within and beyond the nation-state, is his-torically intertwined with globalization.13 Thus, the assumptions wemake about globalization, nationalisms, and cosmopolitanisms, and theresultant cultural articulations of belonging and detachment, of Self andOtherness, need to be understood not only within fluid geographical

boundaries but also across historical contexts.The dynamics of music and globalization have yet to be systemati-

cally approached from a historical perspective. Musicologists have exam-ined European art-music repertories and practices as ways of exoticizingthe European Other, but less so as powerful political tools in the imper-ialistic expansion of Western European countries. In the field of popularmusic and globalization, studies often portray a contemporary globalizedworld that has altered, positively or negatively, a set of previous culturaland musical systems that are axiomatically defined as static or undis-rupted by cultural interactions. Because scholars of popular music tendto situate their object of study in the middle and later part of the twen-tieth century, our understanding of popular music as a global commodityis defined essentially by an absence of history: the newness element inthe contemporary globalization of music is often key to analytical argu-ments about issues of identity politics. This, of course, is an issue thatspills beyond globalization, for popular musics and their history inEurope and the Americas have themselves been approached as carica-tures and presented as an Other that cannot be understood through thesame lens used to assess recent musical systems and are therefore left

out of mainstream historical narratives.14

Musicological studies dealingwith popular music before the 1920s are indeed scarce, although therecent books by Juan Pablo Gonzalez (2005) and Derek Scott (2008)might invite others to investigate this largely unexplored area.15 The fewstudies that touch on the history of the globalization of popular musichave generated essentialist views of the music of the past, ones that vali-date popular musical practices outside the center of musical productionby mythical associations with local authenticity, roots, and folk cul-tural purity. If, as Veit Erlmann suggests, the dynamics of contemporarymusic-globalizing processes feed on universal pursuits of authenticity

and exaltations of locality,16 caution is needed to resist historicizing




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approaches that essentialize uniqueness, nationality, and difference intoa historically deterministic cycle. Consequently, there is an urgent need

to rethink the newness of the contemporary globalized musical world, toproblematize popular music history, and to reassess our understanding ofwhat 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 phenom-enon, Philip Bohlman has provided an account of past encounters withmusic from outside our own world.18 He points out that at the turn ofthe twentieth century, internal conflicts of Self and Otherness in Europeand 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 dominatedby a powerful few.19 Bohlmans focus on the politics of ethnic represen-tation within Europe is of crucial importance to the understanding ofearly processes of music globalization, one that will have repercussionsoutside the European realm, as we will discuss later in this article.Nevertheless, while Bohlmans accounts of past musical encounters takeplace within Europe and the United States, and therefore from the per-spective of the centers of musical production, they leave the ideas ofauthenticity, exoticism, and roots unquestioned. The complex nature ofthe cultural interchanges fostered in great part by the circulation ofmusics between Europe and the Americas at the turn of the twentiethcentury involved exoticisms and representations, as Bohlman pointedout, but also re-presentations and re-contextualizations, back and forth,in a complex transnational dynamic in which culture and commercefed imperial ideology with panoplies of available exotics.20

To understand the political and cultural roles of popular musics inturn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro, one needs to consider that, liketoday, the urban middle classes of emerging cities had more in commonwith one another than with parts of their own local surroundings, and

that popular music was part of a consumer society from the start. Oneneeds also to contemplate the possibility that globalization of music inthe past, as today, permitted engaging and disengaging in a myriad ofcultural practices from near and far, and that it generated several layersof group identities that flowed across boundaries of countries andnations. The repertory discussed below, dances and songs of Europeanand US provenance disseminated in Rio de Janeiro through sheet-musicpublications, in music-hall performances, and in early recordings, helpsus to investigate historically the potential of music to create collectiveidentity bonds that go beyond nationality; but more importantly, it

allows us to postulate that popular musicmarket-driven pieces




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disseminated in massive numbers across cities and countrieswas trans-national and situated as cosmopolitan beforeit was used politically as a

tool for constructing twentieth-century national alliances; that it wasdefined as a sonic experience of cities before it was touted for its poten-tial to enforce nationalisms. And here the example of the Braziliancapital is of particular relevance. Because popular music has served as amost powerful tool in the construction and management of nationalisticideologies in Brazil throughout the twentieth century, its Brazilianness isoften understood as intrinsic and natural, devoid of social agency andhistory. By evoking a history of Brazilian popular musics as cosmopolitanand transnational, I attempt to offer fresh insights into the process ofconstructing musical symbolisms of Brazilianness.

To be sure, the idea of a past cosmopolitan music culture is anabstract concept no less politicized than the nationalistic approach.Cosmopolitan cultures are often driven by issues of economic and cul-tural power and, more often than not, permit one-way connectionsbetween center and peripheryno matter where (or when) the centeror the periphery is located. At the turn of the twentieth century,whether one was in Paris, London, Buenos Aires, or Rio, the imaginedcosmopolis did indeed have a specific locale of origin in Paris. At thesame time, a cosmopolitan cultural identity is one of a specific kind,created among individuals living in large cities who have access to andengage in a variety of shared musical practices that are delimited moreby temporal factors, social standing, and generational lines than bynational alliancesan identity that is historically shaped and re-shapedby musical fashions more than by locality. In fact, as I explore the poten-tial of music to be historically transnational, I also postulate that, beforelocal popular musics were coopted as political tools for creating nationalalliances, early marketers saw in music a potential to congregate a com-munity of transnational feeling21 that could be used as a tool to escapeand 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 musicas we understand it todaya commercially explored, market-driven, andmass-disseminated productionto the rise of music halls, cafeconcerts,cabarets, and dance halls in mid-nineteenth-century European cities, itis exactly its origin in an urban context that allowed for its marketabilityin various contemporary cities outside of Europe. Even if early musichalls in England and France had connections to the audiences peasantroots, the growth of the musics popularity and the shaping of theirstyles were intertwined with an emerging metropolitan contexta

context dependent on new but shaky power relations and that involved




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the mingling of large numbers of people from various backgrounds, whowere confronted with social, ethnic, racial, and gender (re)negotiations.

One should not be surprised, therefore, that the market for earlyEuropean popular musics was easily and quickly widened well beyondborders and found fertile ground in cities throughout the Americas.23

Rio de Janeiro of the First Republic was one such city with a boomingmarket for what Scott calls the revolutionary style of emerging popularmusics.24 The Republican governments investment in the idea of urbanmodernity, civilization, and progress, combined with the growth of thecitys population and advancements in technology, allowed for the fullparticipation of residents of the Brazilian capital in the internationalcircuit of music cosmopolitanism.25 But Rio de Janeiros participation in

the globalization of music started when there was already a delineatedurban musical culture and an established market for popular musics inEuropean cities. Rio de Janeiro audiences engaged with the newpopular musics after they had already been characterized as both urbanand cosmopolitan. For audiences and musicians in the Braziliancapital, popular music was born as ready-made city music, as anessential part of a cosmopolitan culture tailored to fulfill the needs ofthose who shared the delights and the frustrations of the fin-de-sie clemetropolis.

Music Cosmopolitanism in Rio de Janeiro ofthe Old Republic

While the new Republican government was not an ideal patron of elitemusic, it fostered the growth of the entertainment business in theBrazilian capital, a business that responded primarily to the demands ofthe emergent middle class. Private entertainment enterprises in Rio deJaneiro strove to catch up with those in European cities by making theiraudiences 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, LuizEdmundo noted that in Rio we can be proud to have the highestnumber of the best [music halls] available on the face of the earth. . .we have here the companies and artists that perform in the most famousmusic halls in Europe and North America. . . [such as] the Alhambra inLondon, the Moulin Rouge in Paris, and the Winter Garden inBerlin.26 Native and immigrant entrepreneurs invested heavily in theneed of Rio de Janeiros well-to-do to participate in the Belle Epoquesbohemian urban life and betted on the success of well-known foreignformulas and musical practices that were central to European urban cul-

tural life. Music halls and cabarets named after elegant models, such as




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Maison Moderne, Moulin Rouge, and High Life (later renamed FoliesBergere),27 added to the already coveted Rio de Janeiro flamboyant cafe

concerts, the less refined casas de chope(beer houses), and the low-browchopes berrantes(noisy beer houses). Several of these venues, located onand around the Rua do Lavradio, were equipped for showing movies andincluded a stage for short theatrical shows, music presentations, anddances. Music was usually performed by a small ensemble of five to sixperformers, and in the less luxurious establishments sometimes by onlythree instruments, like a flute, 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 interna-tionalesor to perform waltzes, schottische, and polkas.28 New and fash-

ionable music also entertained the public in waiting rooms constructedspecifically as movie theaters, like the Cine Parisiense, inaugurated in1907 on the new Avenida Central. In the spacious waiting-room areathe owner, Italian Rosario Staffa, could entertain his audiences with livemusic performances by a pianist, a small orchestra, a gramophone, andlater, in 1908, also with an electric pianola.29

It is hard to estimate precisely the range of musical styles availableto Rio de Janeiros residents early in the century. A glance at publicationlists on the covers of sheet music, catalogs of publishing houses, musicshops advertisements, and early catalogs of recordings shows a dauntingpicture of what popular music meant in the Brazilian capital of the FirstRepublic. Thousands of waltzes, polkas, mazurkas, and schottische, aswell as songs in French, English, Italian, and Portuguese, written bylocal composers, added to endless lists of foreign publications in thesame fashion. A closer look at these lists shows that the music by com-posers such as Cecile Chaminade (18571944) and Emile Waldteufel(18371915), as well as older nineteenth-century champions of theinternational music trade like the Strauss family, Oliver Metra (18301889), and Emile Prudent (18171863), were sure hits in the Brazilian

capital. Edmundo recalls that in Rio de Janeiros music halls theMontmartrechanson, with its short and suave melodies, and sometimespornographic French lyrics, were popular enough to drive the old-fashioned Italian lyric singers out of business.30 The French chansonsalso inspired the local canconetaphenomenon; several male intellectuals,chroniclers, and writers took their shots at writing Portuguese canconetalyrics, and local composers paralleled the craze, creating tunes by thedozens, some of which made it big in comedy acts and theatricalintermezzos.

Local performers kept themselves busy playing these songs and

dances in the waiting areas of theaters and movie theaters, on small




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stages in cafeconcerts, and in music halls; their popularity increased astheir pieces spilled over to dance halls and outdoor performances inparks, where family socializing took place. A staggering number of thesepieces made available in sheet music also reached the female domain ofprivate living rooms. And if one could not play Waldteufels music athome, 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

Figure 2. Advertisement for Nascimento Silva & Company. Above: Withouthaving 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-autographicois an artistic wonder, perfect for music amateurs, hotels, restaurants,cafes, etc.




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of singers and the music of bands and performers from all over theworld, according to a newspaper advertisement,31 opened up a whole

new set of possibilities to enjoy music. Together, these songs anddances, imported and local, formed a sort of sonic ambience that helpeddefine the urban context of Rio de Janeiro, and allowed people tosituate themselves in time and spacein a large, modern city at theturn of the twentieth century. (See Figure 2.)

It was exactly the need to supply more new music for Rio deJaneiros growing entertainment business that led to an explosion inlocal musical production. As the impresarios replicated the models ofpublic entertainment from European capitals, so did local composers andperformers, who were quick to provide an enormous output aimed at

the local market. Thus, in cities like Rio de Janeiro, the music industrywas fed by both local and imported musics, but these were ratherintertwinedfrom the titles of pieces to melodic lines, from rhythmicpatterns in accompaniments to the language used in songs, the bound-aries of authorship, originality, and origins were somewhat irrelevant.The recycling of imported songs with added Portuguese lyrics and thedisguising of well-known melodies by new titles addressing familiar situ-ations were all fair game. Thus, when in 1908 the pianist composerErnesto Nazareth (1863 1934) started to perform his well-knownwaltzes and polkas at the luxurious waiting room of the new movietheater Odeon, he gained local notoriety exactly because of his ability toprovide his audiences with danceswaltzes, polkas, tangos, schottische,and mazurkasthat were extraordinarily well crafted but, at the sametime, were in a style that was already fashionable and crystallized inter-nationally. No less than rock music in todays Rio de Janeiro, Nazarethspieces were transnational works that fulfilled the cosmopolitan demandsof Rio de Janeiro audiences in the First Republic.

We may postulate, therefore, that engaging with early popularmusics allowed for a more worldly feel in places outside the original

centers of production. While those who provided songs and dances forthe music halls in England or the Parisian cafe concerts were profitingfrom the foreign sales of their music, they were engaged primarily withtheir own musics, while those in Rio de Janeiro had available to them awider spectrum of foreign productions. Audiences in the Braziliancapital could enjoy at the same timesometimes in the same nightmusic from the music halls in London, from the Viennese dance halls,and the Montmartre cabarets, music from Portugal, Spain, and theUnited States, in addition to the output of local composers who repli-cated those musics for local consumption. In Rio de Janeiro one could

listen to musics from Europe and the United States, pick and choose




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from a variety of styles, engage in fashions from different places, hear andsing 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 muchwider spectrum of the global cosmopolitan culture. This ironic paradox ofthe centerperiphery musical flow made for an important ingredient in thelocal soundscape of Rio de Janeiro. Geographically far from the centers ofmusic production, Rio de Janeiro audiences were truly cosmopolitan; tothem, novelty and fashionable musics were surely important factors, butvariety and eclecticism were also vital in their popular-music scene.

The output of pianist and composer Aurelio Cavalcanti (active inRio de Janeiro during 18901920)32 provides a good example of thiscomplex interplay between cosmopolitanism and locality. Cavalcanti was

a prominent figure in Rio de Janeiro nightlife and one of the mostpopular composers and performers in the city at the turn of the twentiethcentury. With his skills as a pianist and his memorable pieces, Cavalcantilit up the local music halls and filled the chronicles of old-time commen-tators, who describe him with an enthusiasm that can be compared tothat associated with twentieth-century pop stars. Cavalcantis pieces werea must in the private salons of middle-class families, in the male-dominated world of music halls, and in the chopes berrantes on the Ruado Lavradio and surroundings; his music crossed social boundaries andshared the devotion of the local public with works by international figureslike Waldteufel and the Strauss family. Cavalcanti was particularlynotable for the popularity of his waltzes and polkas which, according tocontemporary commentators, were an essential part of the soundscape ofRio de Janeiros Belle Epoque. Referred to by some of his contemporariesas the king of the waltz, Cavalcantis dances reveal his awareness of thelatest popular musical styles of his time. He penned hundreds of them,some of which reveal a breadth of invention hard to find in the compo-sitions 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 atbecoming cosmopolitan. His Bregeira,polka francesa(French polka;1900) offers an idea of his musical style as well as the context for whichhis pieces were composed (see Figure 3 and Ex. 1).

Bregeira is written in the usual dance format of three sections thatrepeat (AABBAACCAA); each section is self-contained and, like themajority of contemporary polkas, is constructed with regular pairs ofeight-bar phrases. Analyzing European dances of the second half of thenineteenth century, Scott has shown that the marketing possibilitiesopened up by the association of music with the entertainment business

in London, Paris, and Vienna began a musical revolution in terms of




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performance practices, new musical styles, and new aesthetical conven-

tions.33 CavalcantisBregeirais a typical example demonstrating that com-posers outside European capitals understood well and adopted this musicalrevolution. Although the structure of his polka does not add much to theestablished compositions in the same vein,Bregeirasdescending melodiclines followed by sudden leaps of up to an octave and endings on theaccented lower note easily demonstrate Cavalcantis use of the yodelingViennese motives so common in Strausss music and in WaldteufelsParisian dances. Cavalcanti also makes wide use of the characteristic polkarhythm in the melody, a combination of quarter, eighth, and two sixteenthnotes, to contrast the steady oom-pah, march-like rhythmic figure in thebass and to create the lively swing realized in performance. Cavalcantis

Figure 3. Cover, Aurelio Cavalcanti, Bregeira,polka francesa. Biblioteca Nacional deRio de Janeiro, Divisao de Musica e Arquivo Sonoro.




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Example 1a. Aurelio Cavalcanti, Bregeira,polka francesa (1901) (Rio de Janeiro:A. Lavignasse Fillho & Cia.). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisao de

Musica e Arquivo Sonoro.

D. C. al

Example 1b. Aurelio Cavalcanti, Bregeira,polka francesa (1901) (Rio de Janeiro:A. Lavignasse Fillho & Cia.). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisao de





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polka also reveals an awareness of the harmonic novelties that Strauss hadestablished in his dances, using the added-sixth note in the melody in the

second measure to create melodic interest and to contrast with the predict-able move from B-flat to E-flat, and F. In sum,Bregeirashows Cavalcanti asa composer of polka at its best, fulfilling perfectly the expectations ofdancers and listeners accustomed to the devices used by contemporarycomposers in Europe.Bregeirais a French polka, a designation given byCavalcanti, who was also aware of the distinctions of tempo in polka per-formances favored in specific cities; French here meant thatBregeirashould be a lively dance but performed in a slower tempo.

Cavalcantis waltzBuenos 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 deRio de Janeiro, Divisao de Musica e Arquivo Sonoro.




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Like many in contemporary Paris, Cavalcanti and his audienceswere fascinated by Spanish music as a European internal Other, onethat was frequently evoked in European pieces of different genres and

styles by a well-defined musical syntax of Spanishness.34 Buenos dias,

1. 2.

FIM

Example 2a. Arurelio Cavalcanti,Buenos dias,valsa hespanhola (ca. 1903) (Rio deJaneiro: Arthur Napoleao e Co.). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisao de


D. C. al

Example 2b. Arurelio Cavalcanti,Buenos dias,valsa hespanhola (ca. 1903) (Rio deJaneiro: Arthur Napoleao e Co.). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisao de





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one of several of CavalcantisValsas hespanholas, serves as a conspicuousexample of exoticism being recycled outside the European realm, for the

dance includes all the required musical elements marking the musicsdifference from his FrenchBregeira: the rhythmic displacements of themelody accentuating the second beat in the first section, the use of the tri-plets, and suggestions of Phrygian mode in the melody in the third section,while at the same time using a harmonic progression that helps reiteratethe dances Frenchness. Cavalcantis knowledge of the syntax ofSpanishness ala Chaminade and Waldteufel is quite significant, for hisValsa hespanholais not a mere homage to a place by a suggestive title, but aconscious use of musical codes of exoticism that was dependent on his andhis audiences familiarity with the European models to make sense.

CavalcantisBuenos diascan be seen as more than an exotic piece thatcharacterized a Self/Other duality; it is a work that displays Cavalcantisskills to replicate the French constructions of difference, a cosmopolitanposition that helped him articulate a variety of Others without focusing onhis own peripheral condition. Positioned as both insider and outsider,Cavalcantis cosmopolitanism is marked by his ability to engage with themusics of a variety of localities and ethnicities through his understanding ofa central musical language derived from urban centers in Europe. In thisway, hisValsa sertaneja(sertao[northeastern] waltz), in which he makesreference to a Brazilian regional style, can be interpreted in the same way ashis polkaBregeiraand his waltzBuenos dias, as an exploration of a cosmopo-litan culture passed to him through European imaginaries of Otherness.

As a cosmopolitan on the periphery, Cavalcanti was able to offer hisaudiences in Rio de Janeiro as broad a picture of the sonic world as poss-ible, and that wide palette included nearby regions. In fact, a largenumber of nineteenth-century dances and songs were linked to specificlocalities, if not by musical codes then surely by suggestive titles such asPolka Madrid, La Parisienne, The Yankee, orValsa sertaneja. Theseworks show that places, near and far, were used as important marketing

tools to widen the interest in popular pieces, increasing circulation inlarger markets with the concomitant potential for larger profitstitlesand musical codes of Otherness functioned as a kind of ornamentationthat brought interest to the works as exotic pieces. However, localityassociated with these dances also involved an expectation of a commonstylethe European metropolitan popular musical style. For these piecesto make sense, they needed first to follow a common language acceptedas cosmopolitanthey needed to be easily recognizable as waltzes andpolkas, for exampleand only then could they work as musical commod-ities opened up for negotiations of individual identities. Cavalcantis skill

in writing waltzes and polkas highlights his position as a participant in the




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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 discus-

sion that praises the authentic and dismisses the replica, or that highlightsa process of reinventing European dances into originally Brazilian compo-sitions. My argument here lies in the nature of Cavalcantis pieces, whichwere written to fill a space that was local (Rio de Janeiro) but through amusical language that was cosmopolitan. Thus, it would not be a mischar-acterization to classify Cavalcantis polkas and waltzes as successful imita-tions of Waldteufels dances in and for Rio de Janeiro. To be sure, the ideaof center versus periphery is evident in this case, since Waldteufels or

Strausss works were circulating in Rio de Janeiro, while Cavalcantisdances did not follow a reciprocal path in Paris or Vienna. Nonetheless,one cannot rule out the possibility that, had the Brazilian composersettled in Paris, New York, or Buenos Aires, he would have succeeded as acomposer for the local dance halls in any of these cities. In this way, theparticular success of Cavalcantis work as a composer of polkas and waltzesin Rio de Janeiro lies not in its particular uniqueness, but in his ability tocater to the local audiences needs to locate themselves in a generic andsomewhat abstract growing city at the turn of the twentieth century.

Orientalism in Rio de Janeiro at the Turn of theTwentieth Century

Similar to todays music market, at the turn of the twentieth century,novelty and variety were essential to the success of musical works mar-keted to large numbers of people from different cities. Londons musichalls and Parisian cafe concerts and cabarets were ideal venues in thisregard, for they allowed for variety, intermingling, and experimentationas impresarios depended on music to ornament variety and comedy acts,

circus, and theatrical presentations. Because their early commercialsuccess coincided with the height of European imperialism in the nine-teenth century, these venues were also appealing as international sites.On their small stages, musics and dances were used to represent avariety of colonized places, to portray those places as exotic, and then topresent the exotic as fashionable; in the process, re-creation and adap-tation of songs and dances from places near and far became a commonpractice.35 At these venues, popular songs and dances fueled curiosityabout 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




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disseminated of plays stereotyping Chinese nationals at the turn of thetwentieth century.41 The success of these works on both sides of the

Atlantic, William Hick has suggested, was not simply cultural voyeur-isms but rather a time-specific fashion made possible exactly becauseurban audiences perceived the Orient as both local and distant; theseworks served as a safe haven from which to portray exotic problems thatwere in fact nearby.42 In these theatrical works, Eastern-sounding musiccould be created by any combination of musical tools that soon becameformulaic 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 theOriental-exotica musical syntax did not stay in Europe. In fact, by theturn of the twentieth century, the exotic Orient had entered the inter-national music business with tremendous force. The phenomenon wasfueled by the idea of the fashionable otherworldliness, which, togetherwith the complementary worldliness of waltzes and polkas, provided urbanaudiences a link to a common cosmopolitan culture. As could beexpected, following its success in London and on Broadway, in 1901JonessSan Toyalso had a successful opening in Rio de Janeiro. At a timewhen Brazilian politicians were discussing the possibility of using Chineselaborers to substitute for Africans, and when images of the Chinese[floated] like an omnipresent specter through discussions of ethnicity inBrazil,45 the success ofSan Toy in the Brazilian capital was also fueled bythe fragile line between the distant and the local. It was also not a coinci-dence that exotic popular songs and dances marked their presence in theBrazilian capital at the same time when Brazilian intellectuals were busymapping the racial and ethnic profile of the country. And while musicalOrientalisms arrived in the city as a fashionable, cosmopolitan otherworld-liness, Brazilian composers took on the task of providing the flourishing

music business of Rio de Janeiro with their own fantasies of the Orient.Like Cavalcanti, the composer Nicolino Milano (18761962)

made full use of the cosmopolitan musical tools available to him,moving swiftly between locality, cosmopolitanism, and fashion through along list of songs and dances. A native of Sao Paulo, Milano studied andlived most of his life in Rio de Janeiro, where he was active as a violinistand composer. He studied at the National Institute of Music with pro-minent musicians like Vicenzo Cernichiaro and Miguel Cardoso, andlater 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




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and Alberto Nepomuceno in concerts, while also playing at night at theCafeJava.46 As a composer, Milano was most successful writing music

for the theater, working with the most prestigious writers of musicalcomedies in the Brazilian capital. Milano is mostly known for the musiche provided for Arthur de Azevedos famous musical reviewA capitalFederal (1897), but he also left a large number of polkas, waltzes,Spanish dances, tangos, and other works that put him at the center ofthe popular musical fashions of his day. His song Ti-fa (verses byOrlando Teixeira), written for the Chinese operetta Ti-Fa, provides anexcellent example of how the idea of world music was recycled withinthe perspective of a Latin American composer (see Figure 5 and Ex. 3).

The song shows Milano excelling in the manipulation of well-known

cliches, moving back and forth from worldliness and otherworldliness likethe best of his contemporaries. The work abounds in musical signifiers ofOtherness in its use of well-known formulas of Orientalism, like anopening in unison, the use of parallel fourths and octaves, and the use oftrills in the manner of glissandos, with bare fifths functioning as drones inthe first section; in the second part, Milano explores the augmentedsecond as exotic by adding the C-sharp in the appoggiatura but movesfrom minor to major, comfortably going back to the clear-cut tonalcadence, a move that further displaces the Oriental beginning of hisChinese song. On the one hand, Milanos piece needed to articulate theOrient as the exotic Other (and thus made sense within the currentinternal political debates about Chinese labor, race, and nationality inBrazil). On the other hand, Milanos Ti-fa needed to be fashionableand cosmopolitan, one among several other songs that belonged to histime and his city. It is significant that Milanos piece is not unique withinthe Rio de Janeiro context, as examples of Orientalisms in popular songsand dances by his contemporaries abounded in the Brazilian capital at thistime. A compelling example is provided by the famous pianist composerJulio Reis (18701935), another luminary of Rio de Janeiro nightlife. Like

Cavalcanti and Milano, Reis was prolific in writing waltzes, polkas, andschottische, but he also left a most intriguing piece entitled Scenas orientais(Oriental Scenes), where a whole gamut of musical stereotypes is skillfullyblended together to locate not only the Orient as the Brazilian Other, butthe Brazilian composer as a cosmopolitan artist (see Ex. 4).

Whitening the Population and Blackening theMusic

On 7 July 1903, the Italian immigrant Paschoal Segreto presented in

Rio de Janeiro the French film Le cake-walk infernal(1903) by Georges




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Melies (18681938). The film included scenes of the cakewalk dancethat had become a craze in New York and Paris, and thereby added thedance to the potpourri of musical choices available to residents in theBrazilian capital. No more than a month later, the famous cakewalkappeared alongside French chansons and pieces from Joness San Toy ina local music hall as one more cosmopolitan product with internationalappeal. Earlier in February of the same year, the first page of a promi-

nent local newspaper had already featured an article about the cakewalk

Figure 5. Cover, Nicolino Milano, Ti-fa fromTi-fa. Biblioteca Nacional de Rio deJaneiro, Divisao de Musica e Arquivo Sonoro.




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craze in Europe, anticipating its success in Rio de Janeiro. According tothe article, the cakewalk originated among the blacks from the UnitedStates, [who] get together in bars, form a ring, and with the sound of

the banjo, perform the most eccentric jumps and leg movements arounda cake; [the cakewalk then spread] to cafe concerts. . .and ended upbecoming universal, thanks to what one calls the Americanization of theWorld.47 The commentator was not exaggerating, as the cakewalk andragtime spread quite easily via the international musical circuit fromNew York to Paris, London, Rio de Janeiro, and other Latin Americancities like an epidemic.48 At a time when the economic and politicalpower of the United States was growing at a fast pace, the universalstatus of the cakewalk and other dances and songs, such as ragtime andthe two-step, helped expand the imagined cosmopolitan urban cultural

circuit to include cities like New York and Chicago.

Example 3. Nicolino Milano, Ti-fa,Cancao chineza(ca. 1908) (Rio de Janeiro:Vieira Machado & Cia.) Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisao de Musica e

Arquivo Sonoro.




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Example 4. Julio Reis,Scenas orientais(ca. 1908) (Rio de Janeiro: Casa VieiraMachado). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisao de Musica e Arquivo

Sonoro.




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The appearance and the success of the cakewalk and ragtime songsand dances in Rio de Janeiro reflected the continuation of a trend in

urban popular musics by Europeans to represent black culture and blackmusic. While examples of such representations appear in Europeantheater and music going back to the eighteenth century, the appeal ofthe African element took an international turn with the success of min-strel shows in the United States and Europe in the middle of the nine-teenth century, and later with the success of John Philip Sousasperformances in Europe. Stephen Fosters minstrel songs, for example,were so popular in and outside the United States that his Old Folks atHome served as inspiration for Johann Strauss Jr.sManhattan Waltzesat 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 thecentury, they opened new possibilities for the popularity of all-blackmusicals in New York, like the Creole Show(1890), which included thedance of the cakewalk,Oriental America(1896), andA Trip toCoontown (1898). Minstrelsy music was particularly popular in London,where as early as 1865 there was a permanent local minstrel troupe; theBritish fascination with African American music as the new exoticOther can also be seen in the minstrelsy scene in Gilbert and SullivansUtopia Unlimited(1893).50

It did not take long for London to become a center of minstrelsheet-music production in Europe, ultimately competing with New York,as the music became one more appealing cosmopolitan fashion thatcrossed national boundaries. Minstrel songs and the cakewalks, already afad on Broadway in the 1890s, were presented repeatedly on the stagesof London and Paris early in the 1900s. The craze was further fosteredin Paris by John Philip Sousas concerts, which included minstrel andragtime songs, as well as the cakewalk. As the dance grew into an inter-national craze, it inspired the Parisian production on the famous stage ofthe Nouveau Cirque ofJoyeux negre, Grand American nautical panto-

mime (1902). The show inspired the composer Rodolphe Berger towrite his cakewalk Joyeux negres (1903).51 The fad for AfricanAmerican popular musics in Europe also fueled the avant-garde in Parisat the turn of the twentieth century, from artworks, sculptures, and lit-erature, to the elite musical world; Debussys Gollywogs Cakewalk(190608) is a very well-known example of how the African element asexotic, repositioned as African American, became entrenched withinParisian culture.52

It was not a coincidence, therefore, that the idea of syncopationpresented in minstrel songs became a defining force in African

American popular musics in the second part of the nineteenth century.




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As Scott has noted, alongside call and response in idiomatic instrumen-tal music and suggestions of pentatonic melodies, a particular kind of

syncopationwith an accent on the note immediately before the synco-pated notewould become one of the most important signifiers ofAfrican American popular musics.53 Combined, these elements allowedfor the development of a syntax of Africanisms in popular music thatadded to the already widespread syntax of Orientalisms. While theseAfricanisms were part of the popular music revolution of the late nine-teenth century, they need to be viewed within the parameters of thecosmopolitan context that had European white bourgeoisie as a point ofreference. Before they became a fashionable city craze, they were pre-sented in popular comedy acts and dismissed as parody. As Scott points

out, both African American and white musicians were refashioning eachothers musics to meet their own aesthetic demands, but were doing sowithin a system of unequal power relations, in which the white musi-cian was able to define the nature of black music and dominate itsreception, leaving the black musician with an identity at odds with hisor her subjectivity. . .African Americans were left dispossessed of ameans of representing themselves on stage.54

If, on the one hand, the participation of black musicians in theproduction and performance of such music gave them some authorityover 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 thatthe celebration of Africanisms in early popular musics needs to beunderstood 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 operatedwithin larger complex systems of social, ethnic, and racial exchanges anddynamic politics of representations on both sides of the Atlantic,exchanges in which the lines between Self and Other became compli-

cated, blurred, and at times somewhat irrelevant. In fact, as one exam-ines Orientalisms and Africanisms alongside Europeanisms ascosmopolitan fads in early popular pieces, the similarities between syn-taxes become as significant as their differences.

As cakewalk and ragtime started to make their way onto the Riode Janeiro musical scene, it was their status as international popularmusics representing black musical practices filtered through the whitemusic business that appealed to audiences in the Brazilian capital. Thus,one would not be surprised to find local composers also writing minstrelmusic, cakewalks, and ragtime in order to be part of the cosmopolitan

musical circuit. Fosters Old Folks at Home, for example, reappears




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disguised in local instrumental arrangements, such as in the Cake-Walk, Georgia marcha for bandolimand piano by Eugenio Orfeo(published by E. Bevilacqua, Rio de Janeiro).

The novel cakewalk also occupied the experienced composerAurelio Cavalcanti, who saw in the dance another way to appeal to cos-mopolitan audiences in Rio de Janeiro (see Figure 6 and Ex. 5).

CavalcantisCake-walkis a march with the same dance structureas his polkas, three sections that repeat. The work, which shows anunequivocal semblance to Bergers cakewalk Joyeus negres, includes

the already established trait of nonstop melodic syncopations that

Figure 6. Cover, Cavalcanti, Cake-walk. Biblioteca Nacional de Rio de Janeiro,Divisao de Musica e Arquivo Sonoro.




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emphasize the first beat of the march, rather than the syncopated note,with the added suggestion of pentatonicism in the melody; at the sametime, the composer makes use of the added sixth in the melody recallingthe fashionable Viennese waltzes. Cavalcantis use of accentuated, syn-copated chords in the second section also recalls his use of the accentedchords in the second section of his Valsa hespanhola, both of whichserved to highlight his middle sections element of surprise. In his Cake-

walk, Cavalcanti was fully aware that syncopation was necessary to

Example 5. Aurelio Cavalcanti, Cake-Walk(ca. 1903) (Rio de Janeiro: EditorManoel Antonio Guimaraes). Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Divisao de





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define the pieces Africanisms as an exotic element, but he was quick tocombine it with other Others, such as his French polkas or his Spanish

waltzes; Cavalcantis Africanisms, translated into syncopations, wereelements added to his tools of worldliness and otherwordliness that situ-ated his musics, as well as his audiences, as part of a large urban sounds-cape of fin-de-siecle cities.

While the appeal of the cakewalk and ragtime in a city like Rio deJaneiro sheds light on a shared cosmopolitan culture at the beginning ofthe twentieth century, it also points to cosmopolitanism a la Europe in acity that had been dominated by African-derived musical traditionssince its colonial days. If, in Milanos song Ti-fa, one can find a con-nection between Orientalism and local political discussions of race, the

idea of Chinese immigration was only a temporary topic that soon lostits force. It was overshadowed by a much larger discussion aboutBrazilian nationality focusing specifically on the African element, anelement unmistakably present in and strongly intertwined with all facetsof Brazilian life. Very aware of contemporary European theories of race,the local intelligentsia flirted with the idea of whitening the Brazilianpopulation through increasing subsidies for European immigration, andthus avoiding the degeneration of the local culture perceived to resultfrom its intermingling with the African. Within this context, the spreadof musical Africanisms as fashionable and cosmopolitan was particularlysignificant in Rio de Janeiro as both an engagement with and an escapefrom the ongoing discussion of the black races role in the constructionof Brazilian nationality. Perceived as US eccentric dances of blacks, thecakewalk and ragtime became a most desirable addition to Rio deJaneiros urban soundscape in the comedy theater, musical reviews, andduring carnival season, when they shared the space not only withwaltzes, polkas, and marches but also with a local dance called maxixea variant of the European polka and march, conspicuously ornamentedwith syncopations in both the melodic line and accompaniment. In the

carnival season of 1909, for example, Paschoal Segreto offered in hismusic hall a lively Yankee ball with the delicious cakewalk and the notless delicious maxixe.56

The inclusion of both maxixe and cakewalk was one more pairingof cosmopolitanisms with locality marked by exoticism, for the maxixehad also been presented in Paris and had become part of the inter-national circuit of musical exchanges. By locating the maxixe as bothcosmopolitan and exotic, the local dance could be celebrated in Rio deJaneiro as part of a local urban culture.57 As Whiting rightly pointsout, 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




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self-exoticism and instead become a convenient tool in the local politicsof 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 culturalexchanges in the second decade of the twentieth century.59 The story ofthis exchange from the viewpoint of the burgeoning music business inRio de Janeiro offers similar examples, but can also provide another layerto already complex transnational interactions; it highlights not onlyAfro-diasporic musical expressions as transnational, but also shows theirrelocation from transnational Afro-diasporic to cosmopolitan, andthen, finally, to local.

On the one hand, musical Africanisms in cakewalks and ragtime

disguised as the exotic Other served as a strong marketing tool for fash-ionable dances coming from overseas. On the other hand, cakewalksand ragtime dances and songs were particularly useful in validating thelocal maxixe production by also highlighting local Africanisms as bothfashionable and desirable by all. Viewed first as one more element in thewide array of possibilities offered by the international circulation ofmusic and widespread cultural cosmopolitanism, popular songs anddances saturated with syncopations acquired a life of their own in theBrazilian capital. Part of an international discourse of African andAfrican American expressions that had emerged as representations ofOtherness within the confines of a well-defined and profitable conven-tion of mass entertainment60 set by white Europeans, they became dis-tinctive and conspicuously celebrated signifiers of Rio de Janeirosmusicsignifiers that effectively and conveniently blurred concepts ofrace, cosmopolitanism, and local uniqueness into a singular discourse.61

In the 1930s, during the height of a dictatorship and within discoursesof ideological nationalisms in Brazil, syncopations in popular songs anddances were no longer celebrated as exotic Africanisms, or represen-tations of Otherness, but as a symbol of local authenticity. Desperately

sought after by musicologists within Brazil and abroad as an aestheticvalidation of local musical production, syncopations and otherAfricanisms ultimately locked the musical expressions of Afro-Braziliansin an essentialist box, marked by race and difference, from which therewas no escapefor it became the ultimate symbol, one that came toshape not only imaginaries of Afro-Brazilian popular music, but also ofBrazilian music, and in the end of Braziliannessan unquestionableicon, for which authenticity was undeniable and history played no role.In this way, Brazilian popular music became historically inseparable fromAfro-Brazilian musical expressions, creating a myth that continues to

this day.62




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Still, one wonders how a society ruled by a white elite whose takeon race was modeled on European theories, and who invested in the

whitening of the population as a just cause for self-serving debates ofidentity and representation, could see in black musics a potential forlocal constructions of national identity; put simply, how could those incharge of whitening the population favor blackening the music? Thisparadox cannot be taken for granted as an inherent Brazilian mystery,nor can it be simplified or justified by friendly meetings between blacksand whites in the bohemia of Rio de Janeiro. Beyond the internationalcelebration of Africanisms as fashionable and desirable, popular musicmaking in the Brazilian capital was dominated by large numbers ofblacks, who sought and found work in Rio de Janeiros emergent music

industry. In the Brazilian capital, they became the frontrunners of theproduction and performance of the new cosmopolitan musics, local andforeign, just as had happened on Broadway late in the nineteenthcentury. They understood well and made use of the exotic, ofOrientalisms, Africanisms, and Europeanisms, while positioning them-selves as true cosmopolitans. As Seigel notes in relation to AfricanAmerican performances, Afro-Brazilian musical production and perform-ances within these transnational, cosmopolitan environments of manyexotics cannot be seen in a well-defined black/white racial scheme;rather, they operated in multiple, competing racial schemas that workedsimultaneously.63

Like Aurelio Cavalcanti, who was described by Luiz Edmundo as amulatto, Afro-Brazilians (and mulattos) were successful composers andperformers in music halls, cafeconcerts, and chopes berrantes. After aFrench chanson, a Japanese song, and a German dance, Edmundo recalls,they could satisfy the audiences with polkas and waltzes, and also withother cosmopolitan musics including cakewalks, ragtimes, habaneras,tangos, maxixes, etc. As true cosmopolitans in a white society dominatedby European culture, Afro-Brazilian and mulatto composers and perfor-

mers had to navigate a complex set of social dynamics that was marked bythe politics of race representationsas in the United States, Seigel notes,They navigated the riptides of internal colonialism.64 Edmundo praisedthe performances of blacks in Rio de Janeiros music halls for the synco-pated cadences of the African batuque that they added to all musics, aquality that showed them as barbarians, Edmundo continues, So muchso that one could not accept any othertypeof performer duringCarnival.65 Race, then, was crucial to add local African authenticity tothe cosmopolitan production and performancesan authenticity thatcould then be presented and represented as parody in Carnival parades.

However, the participation of blacks in the musical production of early


byguestonJanuary14

Cristina Magaldi - Cosmopolitanism and World Music

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