Birdsong and a Song about a Bird: Popular Music and the Mediation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Northeastern Brazil

Michael B Silvers

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Diverse Musicological Studies Musicology and Musical Analysis Music History and Culture

Abstract

Abstract The mid-twentieth century songs of popular singer Luiz Gonzaga include lyrics about northeastern Brazil’s traditional ecological knowledge. For individuals who predict rain and drought based on natural patterns in the region’s semi-arid backlands, Gonzaga’s music continues to lend credibility, clarity, and local significance to the practice known as rain prophecy. Through cultural history, lyrical and musical analysis, and ethnography, this article examines the process through which Gonzaga’s voice became a vehicle for the transmission of knowledge about the weather, suggesting that music produced through a profit-driven industry has played a role in the maintenance of local ecological knowledge.

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References

1991Why Suyà Sing. A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People 2010Vanishing Songs: How Musical Extinctions Threaten the Planet 2009Flowing Down Taiwan’s Tamsui River: Towards an Ecomusicology of the Environmental Imagination 1991Voices of the Rainforest 1977Appeal for Cultural Equity 2000Dueling Landscapes: Singing Places and Identities in Highland Bolivia 2012Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, 3rd edition with a new introduction by the author 2002Culture, Conservation and Community Reconstruction: Explorations in Advocacy Ethnomusicology and Participatory Action Research in Northern Kwazulu Natal

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