“When is Samba Samba?: ‘Musical Premises’ in Carlos Sandroni’s Feitiço Decente”
Presentation for “Music Theory in the Plural,” a symposium on translations of music-theoretical texts hosted by Anna Yu Wang and yours truly, April 2022.
Carlos Sandroni opens his 2001 book Feitiço decente: Transformações do samba no Rio de Janeiro (1917–1933) with a historical vignette: the 1st national samba congress in 1962; organized by musicologist Edison Carneiro. The congress participants agreed that their task was to develop a historiographical and syntactic ‘map of the samba’ that ‘represents an effort to coordinate practical measures for preserving the traditional characteristics of the samba’.
There are many accounts of samba’s genealogy; I’ve drawn especially upon Nei Lopes’s 2009 Partido-alto: Samba de bamba in my work. But the congress’s syntactic concerns are of particular interest for a symposium on music-theoretical matters.
Sandroni foregrounds a pair of key conclusions offered by the congress:
“Música, o samba caracteriza-se pelo emprego da síncopa. Preservar as características tradicionais do samba significa, portanto, em resumo, valorizar a síncopa.” (Carneiro 1974, 161, in Sandroni p. 21)
“Music[ally], samba is characterized by the use of syncopation. Preserving the traditional characteristics of samba therefore means, in short, valuing the syncopation.”
He goes on to cite the early twentieth-century anthropologist Mário de Andrade and others to enlist support: Andrade’s characterization is particularly telling:
“síncopa … no primeiro tempo no dois por quatro [ é a] característica mais positiva da rítmica brasileira”
“syncopation on the first beat of a bar of 2/4 is the most positive characteristic of Brazilian rhythm.”
While Sandroni doesn’t include it (at least yet), here is the rhythm Andrade provides to illustrated this ‘most positive’ rhythmic figure.
There’s already some interesting work being done here, which I might summarize as the following three points:
this rhythm is not particularly associated with samba, so the reference by Sandroni (and his erasure in this exposition of Andrade’s actual example) is making a bigger claim about ‘brasilidade’ that samba might later, stragetically, be said to exemplify;
this particular rhythmic cell, as a five-event embellishment of the well-known tresillo rhythm, draws some connecting lines to a more generalized pan-Latin American practice;
that the Andrade quote comes from an essay specifically on Portuguese influences on Brazilian music problematizes what will soon be (and what often is) characterized as an essentially Afro-diasporic reading.
I’ll come back to the second and then the first point in a moment.
The next bit is important: Sandroni goes on to problematize the word syncopation, noting that the word itself comes from Western musicological discourse and should therefore be interrogated carefully. In doing so, he clarifies his own productive program, hinting that he wants to see what productive ways musicologists and practitioners can communicate with one another.
(that said, he has no kind words for a third constituent beyond musicologists and practitioners: “academic composers who wish to give their works a ‘local flavor’”…)
He draws upon three sources to define syncopation:
Marc Honegger’s Dictionnaire de la musique, which describes syncopation as a “rupture” that occurs when “the regularity of accentuation is broken by displacing the expected rhythmic accent”
Alberto Basso’s o Dizionario della musica, which refers to it as a “change in the normal metrical accentuation”
Willy Apel in the Harvard Dictionary of Music, who describes it as “deviation from a schema” that is “felt as a disturbance or contradiction”
First of all, it’s stragetic that Sandroni draws upon European sources to make his points (he could easily have drawn on sources from ‘música erudita’ or ‘erudite music’ in Brazil). Second, more important, Sandroni emphasizes how all of these musicologists “see the irregular as the exception to the rule” He then makes a key point, that we must address
“…as consequências paradoxais que daí resultam para o caso brasileiro, a saber: que precisamente o ‘irregular’ seja ali o ‘característico’, o mais comum, em uma palavra: a regra.
Esse paradoxo só pode ser desfeito se se admite que a síncope não é um conceito universal da música, mas uma noção gerada para as necessidades da prática musical clássica ocidental, e como tal, de validade restrita. Aliás, o grande mérito da definição de Apel citada acima é que ela assume abertamente este caráter restrito: a síncope seria um fenômeno próprio de ‘nosso sistema de ritmo musical’, onde ‘nós’ quer dizer a música clássica ocidental.” (p. 23)
“the paradoxical consequences that therefore result from the Brazilian case: that the ‘irregular’ is precisely the ‘characteristic’ there, the most common, in a word, the rule.
This paradox can only be resolved if it is understood that syncopation is not a universal musical concept, but a notion generated for the needs of Western classical music practice, and as such, of restricted validity. In fact, the great merit of Apel’s definition cited above is that he assumes openly its restricted character: syncopation would be an apprppriate phenomenon for ‘our system of musical rhythm’, where ‘our’ refers to Western classical musicians.”
He goes on to engage some ways in which Western musicologists—A.M. Jones, John Blacking, Philip Tagg, Simha Arom, and others—have considered temporal aspects of African music, which I’ll skip for time’s sake, only to say that numerous related issues arise.
All of this is preamble to Sandroni’s development of ‘what makes samba samba’. (The title of my talk today is a gloss on a later chapter in Sandroni’s book, ‘Since when is samba samba?’) The second half of the chapter I’ve been describing is divided into two sections titled, respectively, ‘the tresillo paradigm’ and ‘the Estácio paradigm’. I’ll go through some key aspects of each.
Sandroni mentions many historical and contemporary manifestations of tresillo, for example “the handclaps accompanying Bahian samba de roda, Northeastern coco, and partido alto from Rio de Janeiro.” He also notes the earliest known notated example in Brazil in 1856: “Beijos de frade” (a lundu by Henrique Alves de Mesquita).
The Estácio paradigm is named for the Black working class neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro where samba is said to have first developed into what we know it to be.
I think everyone here is familiar with the tresillo rhythm, which I describe as one of many characteristic ‘away-from—back-to’ motifs in African and Afrodiasporic music and which is often characterized as an “additive” 3+3+2 distribution.
Sandroni begins with this rhythm, notated just like I’ve shown here. He then moves through three notational interpretations of the five-onset figure from Andrade’s text, which I shared a few minutes ago. Here are Sandroni’s three renditions:
The first, we might say, is comparatively unmarked. The second splits the bar in two equal halves, with three events (Mario’s syncopation) in the first half and two in the second. The third groups onsets in terms of their relation to tresillo. Sandroni describes this by writing “but the truth is that is possible to read the same rhythm in an asymmetrical grid” (p. 31). He goes on to further theorize this asymmetrical grid, perhaps shockingly, as a kind of quasi-metrically entrainable form, suggesting that “the fundamental characteristic” of the tresillo paradigm “is the countermetric mark occurring on the fourth … sixteenth note of a group of eight, which is thereby divided into two unequal ‘quasi-halves’ (3+5). It is this mark that distinguishes this from rhythmic patterns that obey [the rules of] Western classical theory” (p. 32).
Sandroni’s follow-up point is really interesting:
“O que se faz aqui, portanto, é aplicar a lógica da imparidade rítmica a figuras rítmicas que habitualmente são encaradas pela lógica binária do compasso. Acompanhamos assim as intuições dos raros musicólogos que procuraram desfazer-se dos preconceitos do compasso ao estudar a música latinoamericana. Argeliers León, por exemplo, diz do tresillo que ‘as acentuações não foram deslocadas; o que aconteceu foi que a música se libertou de acentuações regulares e constantes, e no lugar delas se instalou um novo sentido rítmico ... Não um deslocamento, mas uma nova articulação rítmica’.” (p. 32; internal quote from León 1974, 283)
“What is done here, therefore, is to apply the logic of rhythmic impairment to rhythmic figures that ordinarily are considered via the binary logic of the metric bar. We therefore follow the intuitions of the rare musicologists who have tried to get rid of metric preconceptions in the study of Latin American music. Argeliers León, for example, says of tresillo that “the accentuations are not displaced; what happended was that music freed itself from regular and constant accentuations, and in their place a new rhythmic sense was installed…. Not a displacement, but a new rhythmic articulation’.”
I’m reading this as an important disability corrective, insisting on a ‘rhythmic logic’ that takes syncopation not as broken, abnormal, or deviant, but as an alternative mode of ‘being in meter’, to borrow a formulation from Steven Friedson, and one fully capable of expressing the music’s temporal impetus.
There’s much more, but I want to quickly touch on Sandroni’s second theme, ‘o paradigma do Estácio’. What Sandroni is trying to do in this section is to develop the beginning of a genealogy of what would be recognizable to all insiders as one of the most characteristic samba rhythms.
Sandroni begins by citing an early text by Carlos Didier, who writes of the earliest practitioners of what came to be called samba:
Os sambas de Ismael Silva, Bide e Nilton Bastos, entre outros, diferenciaram-se daqueles consagrados por Sinhô, pelo menos por sua pulsação rítmica mais complexa. Enquanto estes guardavam vestígios de antigos maxixes, aqueles sambas que vinham do Estácio [caracterizavam-se] pela agregação de mais uma célula rítmica à marcação. (Didier 1984, 3; in Sandroni, p. 34)
“The sambas of Ismael Silva, Bide, and Nilton Bastos, among others, differ from those established by Sinhô, at least in terms of their more more complex rhythmic pulsations. While these retained traces of old maxixes, these sambas that came from Estácio [were characterized] by aggregating one more rhythmic cell to the ‘marcação.”
There are a few keywords here: maxixe, which was a popular Brazilian style in the late 19th-century and often described as a precursor to samba; Estácio, a Black working-class neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro where a lot of the early samba innovation was happening, and marcação, which is a common word in the parlance of samba musicians, referring to the main identifying features of a rhythmic gesture.
Sandroni then shares the following two musical examples from Didier’s text, which shows how that ‘one more marcação’ is added to the figure we heard about from Andrade; the two figures in alternation produce the second example.
First, Didier asks us to
“Bata no tampo da mesa, na garrafa, ou no violão a divisão descrita abaixo. Enquanto isso, assobie a introdução do samba ‘Jura’, composição de Sinhô”
“Hit on the tabletop, bottle, or guitar the division described below. Meanwhile, whistle the introduction to the samba ‘Jura’, composed by Sinhô”:
He follows with these instructions:
“Agora, faça a experiência com a divisão que se segue, e mude o repertório. Cantarole desta vez o samba ‘Se você jurar’, de Ismael Silva e Nilton Bastos”
“Now, make an experiment with the division that follows, and change the repertoire. This time, sing the samba ‘Se você jurar’ by Ismael Silva and Nilton Bastos”
Here are recordings of the two songs Didier cites.
Didier, in a rather gross chauvenistic gesture, then exclaims ‘It’s something else, isn’t it? And look, it was just one of those tricks of the bambas who hung out in Estácio!’
Sandroni goes on to show a few further developments into different variations, including especially samba’s characteristic tamborim rhythm, before wrapping up the chapter.
So that’s a quick summary of the first chapter of Sandroni’s book. Of course there are many rich details I glossed over. I’m especially taken by how Sandroni ties a number of interesting themes together in ways that stimulate multiple ways of thinking about temporal processes in Brazilian musics, not least the possibility of an ecologically rich coexistence of multiple entrainment paths, and especially the notion that syncopation should probably not be described as functioning ‘against’ a more fundamental binary grid, but instead that the two phenomena interrelate and co-constitute one another. I’m excited about this idea, since it’s something I’ve been trying to put in words for some time, and I’m finding some tools here—as well as some local support—for doing so.
Coda
I read Sandroni’s book about six years ago, and came back to it very recently to start this project. Just before my presentation in April, while searching for an image for a powerpoint slide, I discovered that Michael Iyanaga had just published a translation of Feitiço Decente with University of Illinois Press! It says something about the relevance of this work, since so little scholarly writing from Brazil is translated into English, much less entire books. For non-Portuguese readers interested in delving further into this work, I highly recommend Michael’s translation.