Villa-Lobos' canções típicas brasileiras and the creation of the Brazilian nationalist style

Abstract

The objective of this document is to investigate the development of Heitor Villa-Lobos’s nationalist style during the first three decades of the twentieth-century. The song set Canções Típicas Brasileiras, representative of the style, is used as a case study. It is important to understand the creation of this style because it was the first consolidated example of Brazilian nationalist art music, and especially because of the enormous influence and fame achieved by the composer. His “official” biography is riddled with inaccuracies, and this document is part of a larger process of clarifying the events surrounding the composer’s life. For this study, a comparative analysis of his published biographies was executed, and the sources and music in Canções Típicas Brasileiras were studied. The results of this investigation support the theory that Villa-Lobos’s nationalist style was developed as a consequence of his first trip to Paris in 1923 and that he misdated the composition of many of his earlier nationalist works, as seems to be the case with these songs.