Essay on Brazilian music under the aegis of intersectionality

Abstract

This text has as its initial motto to propose a dialogue with the“Essay on Brazilian Music”by Mário de Andrade, whose central motivation was to question the autonomy of the national musical consciousness and its dependence on foreign models. If Andrade’s modernism sought to promote an aesthetic emancipation that recognized Brazilian music as the result of a critical maturation of national artists, validating it as a genuine expression of Brazilian art, the present text aims to reorient these discussions by addressing forces that, contemporaneously, reshape the strategies of critical inscription through art. In this space, the intersectionality that arises from the empowerment of dissident bodies emerges as a discourse that permeates the music that today opens up to critical awareness
of the nation and its historical ills, such as racial, gender and sexuality prejudice and social condition. It locates this phenomenon in the midst of the social tensions poorly acknowledged by social dominant layers and the policies engendered by an establishment that tries to preserve its zones of influence and power. The text discusses the direction of traditional musicology itself, which faces difficulties in analyzing these phenomena due to its methodologies rooted in paradigms of historical analysis constituted and active for the positivist reflection that unfolds towards the colonizing affirmation. In this sense, the present text, in addition to exposing this scenario, proposes a theoretical outline that starts by considering that music, like any other social field, forms self-referential systems that move through symbolic exchanges. Its basis is the cultural and social identities that create their own metaphors, without, however, breaking with the points of coupling such as the productive/economic, legal, technological system, etc. This essay is part of a larger project that seeks to rethink musicology from a decolonial epistemological turn, transcending rigid boundaries and cultural hierarchies to understand music in its sociopolitical complexity.