Vocal Agency: Gestural Mapping of Contemporary Brazilian Popular Singing

• Main Authors: Ricardo Alexandre de Freitas Lima, Regina Machado
• Format: Article
• Language: Portuguese
• Published: Associação Nacional de Pesquisa e Pós-Graduação em Música 2019-09-01
• Series: Opus
• Subjects: canto popular. gesto vocal. tradição. música popular. semiótica da canção.
• Online Access: https://www.anppom.com.br/revista/index.php/opus/article/view/719
• ISSN: 0103-7412; 1517-7017

This article is part of an effort to understand the state of the art of vocal gestures in Brazilian popular song especially in reference to their relationship to traditional aesthetics. Having auto-ethnographic aims, it situates the researcher-interpreter in relation to research and uses conceptual and analytical tools linked to the realm of semiotics of song, such as identifying the Emotional Qualities of the Voice. Laterally, we use the Actor-Network Theory to understand the configuration of Brazilian popular music through vocal gestures in the here and now of this tradition. Also, as an ancillary tool to song analysis, we use Molina's (2014) procedures to understand the interference of musical moments and sound units as intervening elements in constructing narrative meaning. From the analysis brought to this article we can see how two interpretive gestures (by Caetano Veloso and Filipe Catto) can interfere in the project of making compatible the melody and lyrics of a song i.e., Amor mais que discreto, offering different alternatives to fruition. Concerning the relationship between traditional and contemporary vocal gestures, we identify distinct forms of activation: at times it chooses to recover the past by critical bias, other times by revealing endorsement and praise; sometimes from a parodistic perspective, other times by means of pastiche; at some point it celebrates tradition while at another it questions and reinvents itself.