Hearing Brazil

Minas Gerais is a state in southeastern Brazil deeply connected to the nation's slave past and home to many traditions related to the African diaspora. Addressing a wide range of traditions helping to define the region ethnomusicologist Jonathon Grasse examines the complexity of Minas Gerais by exploring the intersections of its history music and culture. <p/>Instruments genres social functions and historical accounts are woven together to form a tapestry revealing a cultural territory's development. The deep pool of Brazilian scholarship referenced in the book with original translations by the author cites over two hundred Portuguese-language publications focusing on Minas Gerais. This research was augmented by fieldwork observations and interviews completed over a twenty-five-year period and includes original photographs many taken by the author. <p/><i>Hearing Brazil: Music and Histories in Minas Gerais </i>surveys the colonial past the vast hinterland countryside and the modern twenty-first-century state capital of Belo Horizonte the metropolitan region of which is today home to over six million. Diverse legacies are examined including an Afro-Brazilian heritage eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liturgical music of the region's Minas Baroque the instrument known as the <i>viola</i> a musical profile of Belo Horizonte and a study of the regionalist themes developed by the popular music collective the Clube da Esquina (Corner Club) led by Milton Nascimento with roots in the 1960s. <i>Hearing Brazil </i>champions the notion that Brazil's unique role in the world is further illustrated by regionalist studies presenting details of musical culture.