Outside of Brazil, samba is synonymous with Brazilian music, even though it is just one of many popular music genres heard in Brazil. Within the nation-state, samba is recognized as central to national identity, and the story of its rapid adoption as the national rhythm in the 1930s has been explored at length by numerous scholars. In A Respectable Spell, prominent Brazilian ethnomusicologist Carlos Sandroni contributes important perspectives by detailing the musical transformation of samba from the first recording in 1917 to its codification as a genre, circa 1930.
The book is divided into two sections. In the first part, Sandroni traces samba from its origins in mid-nineteenth century Rio de Janeiro, to its emergence as one of numerous dance forms in the early-twentieth century. Chapters 1-3 of his study are based on literary accounts and published piano sheet music that combined European dances with Afro-Brazilian rhythms for the purpose of accompanying social dancing. A fascinating variety of genres existed from the 1850s to the 1920s, which Sandroni explores at length: “lundu, polca-lundu, cateretê, fado, chula, tango, habanera, maxixe” (13). Sandroni observes that genre names were used interchangeably in song titles and essentially served to designate the music as “syncopated” and “typically Brazilian.” He notes too that samba by that name was barely known in Rio until the late 1800s. The point is that, before 1930, samba songs were indistinguishable from other genres of popular songs such as maxixe and tango (13, 16). Sandroni even mentions one composition labeled/recorded as a “tango-samba,” illustrating the flexible genre boundaries of these musical practices before they became strongly identified with nationalistic politics in Brazil and Argentina.
In chapters 4-5, Sandroni uses the story of the first recorded samba, “Pelo Telefone,” to illustrate the larger transition at play during the 1920s. During that time, samba was practiced in the homes of Afro-Brazilians who had migrated from Bahia, in northeastern Brazil. Certain older Bahian women, known as tias (aunts), would host gatherings in their homes where samba was played with improvised lyrics and melodies. In 1916, a musician named Donga, himself the son of a Bahian tia, registered “Pelo Telefone” as his own composition with the National Library. This provoked controversy with Tia Ciata—who hosted perhaps the most famous of the samba gatherings in her home—and others who attended such musical evenings, including another musician, Sinhô. He and Tia Ciata jointly complained in a letter to the newspaper that the “Pelo Telefone” samba was known to them all and did not belong to Donga. This pattern of registering others’ compositions would continue in the following years. As a result, samba changed from being improvised musically and lyrically to being pre-composed and inscribed, and from being performed primarily in private houses to public botequims (neighborhood bars) where, incidentally, it became easier to buy (or steal) sambas from other musicians.
In the second section of the book (chapters 6-10), Sandroni details just how “old style” samba, based only lightly on Afro-Brazilian rhythms, transformed into the “new style” samba, which he refers to as the “Estácio Paradigm.” This section contains the musicological riddle at the heart of this book. In searching to understand the history of samba in Rio de Janeiro, Sandroni was puzzled by the fact that today’s standard samba rhythm—the rhythm he learned on guitar as a youth in Rio de Janeiro—was different from the rhythms in the earliest samba recordings. This is exemplified by “Pelo Telefone,” the rhythm of which would likely surprise listeners familiar with more contemporary sambas. While music scholars and the earliest samba musicians widely acknowledge this difference exists, none had demonstrated musicologically how the change occurred. This led Sandroni to his close musical analysis of the rhythms in the recordings and their changes over time. The chapters in this section are organized on the basis of a series of shifts entangled with the rhythmic changes: social spaces, composition and authorship, and social status of musicians/composers.
It is helpful to understand that this book is based on Sandroni’s PhD research at the University of Tours (France) in the 1990s which was published in Portuguese in 2002 as Feitiço Decente: Transformações do Samba no Rio de Janeiro, 1917-1933. Since Sandroni draws on the immense scholarship of the genre’s origins, readers unfamiliar with Brazilian music may find the details and musical analysis overwhelming. To be fair, Sandroni himself suggests that such readers might skip over the first and last chapters. For those interested, however, Sandroni’s discussion on how to represent the polyrhythms characteristic of much of Brazilian music is an important theoretical contribution.
While in France, Sandroni encountered the works of Gerhard Kubik and Simha Arom on African music and found their writings on syncopation helpful for understanding Brazilian music. This is because Western music theory presents syncopation as an exception to the rule, and this approach was carried over by Brazilian scholars and musicians who at times went as far as claiming syncopation as the defining characteristic of samba and even of Brazilian music in general (1). Sandroni rejects the term syncopation, which he views as culturally bound, and presents instead “commetricity” and “contrametricity” (first used by Kolinski in 1960; cited by Sandroni, 3). In contrametricity, the “off-beat” or syncopation is integral to the music and not an exception. For much of African music and African-derived genres contrametricity is expected. Thus, in ways that resonate with ethnomusicologist Kofi Agawu’s work (2003), the emphasis of being on or off the beat deals with how “the rhythm can confirm or contradict the given metric expectation” in African-derived polyrhythms (3).
For readers seeking a cultural history of samba, the classic and accessible work The Mystery of Samba (1999) by Brazilian anthropologist Hermano Vianna could be read alongside Sandroni’s work. Vianna elaborates on the socio-cultural conditions that saw samba constructed as Brazil’s national music, beginning with the parties at the Tia’s houses, where white, literate elites encountered Afro-Brazilian working-class musicians, “discovered” samba, and almost immediately championed it as an “authentic” national tradition. Sandroni relates many of these details, but by contrast, focuses on a much tighter temporal frame and specifically the rhythmic changes that occurred on a specific set of samba recordings made between 1927 and 1933.
A Respectable Spell is highly recommended for anyone interested in a definitive study of the musical transformation of samba. It is written in clear prose which, though precise and technical, is not overly full of jargon. Though Sandroni identifies as an ethnomusicologist, he stresses that his book employs the methodologies of historical ethnomusicology and especially meticulous transcription and musical analysis (xxxiii). This illustrates, further, an important facet of Brazilian ethnomusicology, which generally expects very extensive, conventionally analytical engagement with musical sound. Also characteristic of Brazilian ethnomusicology is a great emphasis on collaboration and dialogical methodology. This emphasis is seen in the helpful introduction by the translator and ethnomusicologist Michael Iyanaga who orientates the reader to Sandroni’s context and beautifully outlines his own approach to translation. Significantly, Iyanaga explains that he discussed the whole translation at length with Sandroni. Iyanaga claims this allows the English text to be a “decolonial spark.” His collaboration with Sandroni and Sandroni’s original text, then, are exemplary for taking seriously the voices of the early Afro-Brazilian samba musicians. Moreover, this book provides welcome access to the perspectives of a noted Brazilian scholar, whose work, along with that of many of his peers, is otherwise rarely available in English.
Works Cited
Agawu, Kofi. 2003. Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions. New York: Routledge.
Agawu, Kofi. 2016. The African Imagination in Music. New York: Oxford University Press.
Vianna, Hermano. 1999. The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil. Translated by John Charles Chasteen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
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[Review length: 1290 words • Review posted on May 5, 2023]