‘Birdsongs, frog orchestras, and forks’
This is my invited response to a session on the music of Hermeto Pascoal at the 2021 Society for Ethnomusicology annual conference. I’m responding to three papers given by Adam Rosado (also the session organizer), Andy Connell, and Nick Payne.
Hi everyone, it’s great to be here and I hope you’re all keeping well. I’m coming to you from unceded Turrbal and Yuggera country in Brisbane, where it’s now 5:15 in the morning! Many thanks to Adam for the invitation to respond to this terrific panel, and to Adam, Andy and Nick for their thought-provoking ideas about Hermeto’s music. I’m going to speak for slightly less than twenty minutes, because I have some specific questions for each of the presenters but also want to allow time for more general discussion.
There’s a brief moment in Andy’s paper that sets the stage nicely for reading these three projects through one another. Andy cites Itiberê, who says, discussing the sheer density of Hermeto’s music, ‘it’s always possible to insert something new anywhere’. This is a fantastic framing of Hermeto’s ethos, and probably ought to animate any investigation of Hermeto’s music. As Andy follows, ‘you can’t stuff too many ideas into a small musical space!’ I take this as an invitation to make little gestures do a lot of productive theoretical lifting. For today those gestures include frog orchestras, forks, multistable conceptions of syncopation, mashups and border-crossings, and of course water and birdsongs. I’ll start with the last of these.
One idea I found especially compelling in Nick’s presentation has to do with the function or utility of birdsongs according to Charles Darwin, and the notion of aesthetics contemporaneous with Darwin’s work. I’m tempted to lightly disagree with Nick that Darwin thought birdsongs have more than a functional value, rather, Darwin seems to be suggesting that something we would call beauty is developed and expanded very specifically in pursuit of the utilitarian project of mating. I’ll come back to this, but that said, Nick spins this idea in two potentially very interesting directions. The first is is that use-function can change: a performative act originally intended to fulfill a very specific social purpose (in this case, reproduction) can drift into other functional territories. This, by the way, is precisely what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they elucidate their concept of deterritorialization; interestingly, they use birdsongs to make the point. So while a male bird might labor to craft the most enticing song for the purpose of attracting a mate, there seems ever to be the possibility that that song might be redeployed for other purposeful goals, such as the call for aid or warning Nick cites.
What’s interesting and important about this for our more anthropocentric purposes is how well this maps onto the history of human-made music. If we think of different modes of ‘functional’ music: music for dance, ritual, healing, pedagogy, and so on, we see and hear these kinds of drifts, redeployments, and becomings constantly. To stay in the Brazilian context, take nagô music from the Candomblé tradition, with its well-inscribed constellation of ritual-specific functions. We all know not only how those rhythms get repurposed outside the terreiro and how its practitioners borrow from other musical practices, from afoxé and ijexá to samba, but also how nagô practices themselves are fluid and multivalent. What’s important here is how the ritual significance—the site-specific function—of a particular nagô musical utterance can take on new functional registers through those displacements and redeployments, and also how traces of its original meanings and functions remain for cultural insiders even in those new contexts.
The second way I find the points Nick brings up to be interesting and important have to do with Darwin’s time and place and the way he seems to be drawing upon contemporaneous concepts of what we need to call in scare quotes ‘the aesthetic’, as a particularly 19th-century European bourgeois notion of what art’s function is in its social contexts. There’s a insistent return in Darwin’s account to the notion that what birds are doing when they sing is in some important way aesthetic, which belies what, in every sentence, affirms the very specific functional role songs play in bird life. What I mean is that in the 19th-century bourgeois imagination, aesthetics is aligned with a kind of ineffable ‘truth’ that underlies human acts; this ‘truth’ is what art (and only art) is capable of somehow revealing. An ethico-epistemological imperative follows that our actions and thoughts need to cleave toward the aesthetic; as Friedrich Schlegel put it, ‘all nature and science should become art’, or elsewhere, ‘life and society should be made poetic’.
Now I need to resist the urge to colonize Hermeto Pascoal with crusty old hegemonic notions of art and philosophy. But the Darwin connection Nick makes is important, I think, and here’s why. Schlegel’s (or Kant’s, or Herder’s) aesthetics is a thoroughly ‘human, all-too-human’ proposition, but Darwin—via Nick—is moving toward a posthuman conception of aesthetic agency that I think we need to take seriously. Andy goes further still, implying that water has its own kind of aesthetic agency. So—moving as far as we can away from that problematic word ‘truth’ and toward, perhaps, something more like what Félix Guattari calls an ‘ethico-aesthetic paradigm’ (developed in no small part, it should be underscored, in his Molecular Revolution in Brazil)—it behooves us to think about what ‘work’ a conception of nonhuman agency does, how music might be a useful space for thinking through that idea, and how someone like Hermeto makes these kinds of questions especially vivid.
Turning, then, to Andy’s paper, we might further unpack the idea that water is performative. Andy gives us a litany of ways in which this is shown to be true, and water references in Hermeto’s music are of course pervasive. For anyone who hasn’t seen Grupo’s famous ‘música da lagoa’ footage, I encourage you to do so. The word I would use, rather than performative, is agential: water is an actor in ‘Zurich’, in ‘música da lagoa’, and in any other situation, musical or otherwise, in which it plays a part. In Hermeto’s posthuman water duo on ‘Zurich’ its role is to transform Hermeto’s improvisational utterances in terms of timbre, pitch, density, and more, with both humorous and intensely expressive results. It also dialogues with Hermeto’s piano improvisation: the piano/hand assemblage functioning as a kind of pitch-quantized Platonic referent, voice/water functioning as the ecstatic excess that overspills its rational boundaries.
Now, turning to Adam’s paper. First of all, is there a better candidate for a corpus study that the work of a major composer, composed under controlled temporal and physical constraints (one song per day, one page per song), accomplished during an especially productive period in that composer’s long and distinguished career, drawing at least potentially on the entire range of compositional and intertextual resources available at the time?
I’d like to prod a little further into the quantitative methods Adam has invoked for his project. My reflexive response is to recoil at the idea for a whole range of reasons (resisting the musicological taxonomy-drive; Hermeto’s own cleavage toward multivalence and against essentialism, and so on). But I’d like to pursue some productive implications that emerge in Adam’s study. First of all, to turn back to Andy’s framing—‘you can’t stuff too many ideas into a small space’—what Adam’s study might reveal in more detail than a more cursory listening is what we might call the ‘maximalism’ of Hermeto’s musical language. Adam focuses on melodic density and ambit on one hand, and intertextual trajectory on another, enlisting these characteristics and contexts to consider some details about how Hermeto ends up ‘mixing everything’ in his compositional process. So the empirical project here cuts two ways: pinning down a few of the ‘everythings’ that constitute the framework for how one might deploy these musical sketches, and partially constraining that ‘everything’ through the very act of giving it a frame to hang on.
I would like to pose these two ideas as questions for Adam, and for everyone. First, what should we—as a community of ‘worthy interpreters’ with a pretty good grasp of the affordances different musical features provide for creative deployment—what should we take away from a statistical analysis that searches for common characteristics across a sub-corpus of thematically related songs? And second, more interesting and perhaps more fruitful, how do we square such a stastistical inquiry—which seeks specifically and strategically to limit both within-music and intertextual expressive possibilities—with the essential openness of a ‘music without borders’ in Jovino’s words?
To clarify, I don’t mean this as a critique, but as a provocation for further thought. After all, and this ties into the posthuman terrain of Nick’s and Andy’s presentations, Hermeto’s project seems to me to be one of ever stretching the capacities of a given Brazilian genre, which he achieves among other things by speed, density, chromatic redirections, and much more. So for me, pace Jovino, it’s less a question of erasing musical borders than of continually interrogating samba, baião, choro, etc. and asking what else they can be, what other expressions they are capable of affording. I’d be curious to hear everyone’s thoughts on this.
This also connects back to an idea Adam touches on, which is the ways genres and subgenres get fixed in the popular imagination, both within and outside Brazil. It’s terribly important to keep in mind that when samba was inscribed as ‘the’ national music of Brazil, it was an overt political move to align ‘real’ Brazil—the Brazil of ordem e progresso, the Brazil of ‘50 years of progress in 5’—with the urban, the cosmopolitan, the capitalist. This goes back to early-20th-century arguments about what counts as the ‘real’ samba; for example Nei Lopes’s account of how Bahian samba duro was described by the carioca intelligentsia as a ‘vulgar’ form, or how Muniz Sodré reports on the emergence of Rio-style partido alto as the ‘correct’ samba of the time. But of course baião is ‘the’ Brazilian music for certain Northeastern communities, just like ijexá might be for others. More important, though, is how all of these melt into one another, and what effect that has for our signifiers. The ‘fork’ rhythm can index baião as well, and forro, and many other genres besides samba, and there are a number of ways we can theorize its polysemy—as cross-pollination, as hybridity, as deterritorialization, as speciation and common descent, as convergent evolution.
For just one example, on ‘Voz e vento’, the opening track from Hermeto’s Cérebro Magnético, we hear zabumba and triangle playing traditional baião roles, a pervasive fork rhythm in the melody, and musical breaks that signify samba, complete with a mimetic surdo ‘call’ to herald in the next phrase. Here, in other words, we have certain gestures indexing baião, others samba, and others stretching across the liminal space between.
One more idea that stems from Adam’s paper—specifically his points about harmonic rhythm, but which resonates with Floriano’s collaborative call and ‘Zurich’s’ metric multistability—is the nature and function of syncopation. In order to make this point I need to draw on my own work on what I call ‘timeline musics’, of which samba and maracatú are exemplars (but baião might not be, for what it’s worth). In my work I emphatically insist that syncopation is not a phenomenon that functions ‘against’ a comparatively stable ground: we can certainly figure it as such (and there are probably good pedagogical reasons for doing so), but as an ontological condition of the musics we’re dealing with, a timeline, clave, tamborim pattern, or even a characteristic baião rhythm like we just heard are fundamental music-temporal layers that coexist and complexly interact with what Justin London would call ‘nominally’ isochronous metric cycles. There are two important implications here: first, that either layer can be provisionally taken as the ‘ground’ alongside which figures act, and second, stemming from this, that rhythmic gestures from the ‘metric’ stratum can be conceived of as the ‘syncopated’ layer, as we hear in this example from the Cuban diaspora. In this recording, the horn melody, in one hearing, syncopates alongside the rumba clave stratum—this is an important reality that can get lost in discourses that foreground ‘en clave’ playing and ‘cruzao’.
I think this notion of different strata syncopating alongside one another is a useful way to characterize what Andy described as a metric superimposition of 5 and 4 in ‘Zurich’: 5 is established very clearly as the ‘ground’, but when the ‘4’ layer is added it is easy to flip back and forth between two entrainment-perspectives and hear either 5 or 4 in terms of the other.
So I was first drawn back to this concept while reading Adam’s paper and thinking about the role harmonic rhythm plays in Hermeto’s music, including of course in the Calendário. But then the thought came flooding back reading Nick’s paper, thinking about the very strategic ways Hermeto would deploy Floriano’s songs as rhythmic interjections within the context of a maracatú-adjacent musical expression. And that makes think—very speculatively—about origin stories and where the kinds of syncopated expressions that characterize so much African and Afro-diasporic music come from in the first place.
This, then, leads me to one more ‘posthuman’ theme that has emerged from setting these three presentations in dialogue with one another, on water, birds, frogs and music. Bear with me, I’m just riffing on a very half-baked idea, which I intend as a thought experiment rather than any kind of ontological claim.
Nick briefly mentions the Australian bowerbird, which collects shiny objects to adorn its home. This reminds me of another famous Australian bird, the lyrebird, who perfectly reproduces the laugh of the kookaburra, the click of a camera shutter, a car alarm, and a chainsaw, and also a friend I made in Phoenix a few years ago, a little mockingbird that would sit on the same spot on the same telephone wire day after day, slowly looping a series of eight or ten songs it had picked up along the way. Hermeto’s parrot is of course another mimicking bird, and it would surprise no one to learn that Floriano picked up some of his melodic vocabulary by listening in on Grupo rehearsals.
This gets me thinking about the relationship between humans and the environment. This relationship is usually phrased in just those terms: humans as one category, ‘the environment’ as another, the former ‘in’ the latter in a kind of crude Aristotelian sense (or, worse, not even in it!). I’ve recently finished reading Victor Steffensen’s book Fire Country, which is about indigenous fire management practices but is really about recontextualizing our understanding of the human–environment conjunction, reminding us that, at least outside industrial contexts, human activity is a crucial component of a well-functioning ecosystem. For Andy’s depiction of water as an agential force, this means that water’s agential function is put to specific musical use; it is Hermeto’s actions that direct water into this or that agential coupling with the music environment, even while the water’s agency overspills—pun intended—the use to which Hermeto puts it. For Nick’s depiction of Floriano’s maracatú rhythm, this opens onto a question of the origins of rhythmic contours in African and Afro-diasporic musics: might early practitioners have been influenced by the asymmetrical rhythms they heard around them, and did that play into how various musical structures took shape? Or, conversely, did birds like Floriano hear the rhythms around them and invent their own mimetic renditions?
So the provocative prompt I’d like to conclude with is this: rather than think of water and birdsongs simply as environmental ‘objects’ we can take and use, to imagine the relational trajectories that these more-than-human interactions set into motion, where each agent is affected by the other in a productive feedback loop. And finally, might we fold in as one further bit of evidence an almost throwaway line from Andy’s talk, citing Hermeto’s description of frogs as both a ‘perfect orchestra’ and a ‘faithful and sensitive audience’, implying, of course, the necessity of active and especially of creative listening for participatory posthuman musicking.