technological means of collecting an audience and disseminating the music (radios,
phonographs, computers, etc.), but also on a merchandiser to act as an intermediary
between the artist and the audience (music publishers, record companies, concert
venues, the film industry, etc.). As a result, the evolution of popular music would
have been impossible without the innovations that developed due to modernization,
urbanization, and industrialization, such as printed sheet music, player piano roles,
phonograph recordings, and the radio.
Because popular music developed as a result of urbanization it is fitting that in
Latin America its evolution took place predominantly in the major city centers of
Mexico City, Havana, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro. The following examples
provide instances of hallmarks in popular music from these regions. Mexican
composer Juventino Rosas won recognition as one of the first Latin American
popular musicians when his waltz, “Sobre las olas” was published and performed
internationally in the late 1800s. In the early 1900s popular music began to gain
momentum in major cities. The Cuban habanera exterted a strong influence in
the Caribbean and also formed the rhythmic basis of tango music, which has con-
tinued to be a noteworthy popular music genre. In the hands of Mexican singer
and songwriter Agustin Lara, the Cuban bolero fused with cancion mexicana to create a new style of internationally recognized Mexican bolero. Carnival also
exerted an influence on the development of popular music in Latin America. In
Brazil, for example, urban samba, which developed out of the sambas of Carni-
val celebrations, originated in Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s and 1930s. This new
urban samba was then exported internationally through the popular music sys-
tem to become an intrinsic part of Carnival celebrations all over Latin America.
More recently, genres such as jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, rap, reggae , and hip-hop have
Folk, Art, and Popular Music | 167
fused with the folk and art music traditions that already existed in Latin America
to create dynamic new genres such as reggaetón and rock en español . The ultimate outcome of the modernization of the 1900s has been a gradual homogeniza-
tion of popular music in Latin America and all over the world as musicians and
merchandisers are forced to respond to the tastes of the mass audience in order to
ensure their continued popularity and success. The limit to creativity caused by
this mass listenership is a characteristic unique to popular music and has shaped
the development of the sound and style of many genres that fit within its label,
such as balada .
Despite their inherent differences, there are not always clear delineations be-
tween the systems of folk, art, and popular music. There is often a blurring of
boundaries as genres of music either change systems and adapt to match the new
modes of transmission, or alternatively, are appropriated by other artists and styles
of music both within and outside of their original system. In Latin America, the
Colombian vallenato is an example of the affect that a change in systems has on a
musical genre; the music of Astor Piazzolla shows the ways music has been ap-
propriated across different systems. Vallenato began as a folk music tradition in
northern Colombia. The earliest vallenato ensembles consisted of an accordion,
caja (small drum), and guaracha (stick scraper). But, after it spread to city cen-
ters and gained a popular following, an electric bass, a guitar, and Afro-Cuban
percussion (such as the conga and cowbell ) were added to the original trio instrumentation. These new instruments gave the vallenato a distinctly modern sound,
which reflected urban tastes, a testament to the effect of the shift from a folk to a
popular music system. The work of Astor Piazzolla, an Argentinean composer and
bandoneón player, is an example of the appropriation of music across different
systems. Piazzolla developed what became known as the new tango by infusing
his art music compositions with tango rhythms, appropriating elements of urban
popular music. The affect of changing music systems and appropriation of styles
by different artists and genres shows that even armed with the labels folk, art, and
popular, music evades classification, which is what makes music in Latin America
such a fluid and dynamic field of study.
Further Reading
Appleby, David. “Folk, Popular, and Art Music.” The Music of Brazil, 94–115. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1989.
Behague, Gerard. “Music, c. 1920–c. 1980.” In A Cultural History of Latin America: Lit-
erature, Music and the Visual Arts in the 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Leslie Bethell,
311–67. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Booth, Gregory, and Terry Lee Kuhn. “Economic and Transmission Factors as Essential
Element in the Definition of Folk, Art, and Pop Music.” Musical Quarterly 74 (1990): 411–38.
Hamm, Charles. “Popular Music.” The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, edited by Don
Michael Randel, 646–49. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1986.
168 | Forró
Manuel, Peter. “Perspectives on the Study of Non-Western Popular Musics.” Popular
Musics of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998.
Nettl, Bruno. “Folk Music.” The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, edited by Don Mi-
chael Randel, 315–19. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1986.
Shaw, Lisa, and Stephanie Dennison. “Introduction: Defining the Popular in the Latin
American Context.” Pop Culture Latin America!: Media, Arts, And Lifestyle, 1–7. Santa
Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005.
Tracy McFarlan
Forró
Forró is the name of a type of social gathering in Brazil where, most commonly,
music is played live and couples dance. The word is probably short for forrobodó,
which was a style of dance accompanied by live music that appeared around the
19th century among the lower, working class. Forró has its roots in a kind of en-
tertainment practiced as a backyard pastime after a hard day’s labor in the dry hin-
terland of northeast Brazil known as the sertão, which is a very poor area with a
high rate of illiteracy. It is also related to the Catholic June feasts that are widely
celebrated in rural areas commemorating the days of Saint Anthony (June 13), Saint
John (June 24), and Saint Peter (June 29). Beginning in the 1930s, migrants moved
in large numbers from the northeast to the south. They began to hold forró events
in the big cities. By the 1960s, these migrants were creating what came to be called
forró houses. As a result, the word forró began to refer to a place, such as a night-
club, that offers music and dancing. The first important and longest operating forró
house in São Paulo was Forró do Pedro Sertanejo, which remained opened for 27
years, from 1965 to 1992. During the 1950s and 1960s forró developed into a spe-
cific genre of dance music by Jackson do Pandeiro (José Gomes Filho, 1919–1982).
In the musical realm, forró is an umbrella term for a variety of genres related to
the northeastern Brazil and its culture. The main musical genres played at a forró
event are baião , xote, arrasta-
pé, and forró itself. Baião and forró have the same dance but forró is the faster of the two. Xote and arrasta-pé feature different dance steps. Xote is considered the bolero of the Northeast while the arrasta-pé style of dancing is closely related with quadrille and pas-de-quatre.
Forró as a backyard entertainment used to be instrumental, without singing
or lyrics. It was played on a variety of instruments such as the button accordion,
cane-like transverse flutes (called pifes or pífanos ), rabeca (a sort of rural violin), or viola (a 6- or 10-string guitar). It was not until the 1940s that forró became popular with the music of Luiz Gonzaga (1912–1989), who was a musician, singer,
and accordion player. He was called the king of baião (one of his first hits is called
“Baião,” 1946) and through baião ’s success he also introduced xote and arrasta-pé. It
Forró | 169
Joquinha Gonzaga plays accordion at New York’s Lincoln Center in 1999 during a tribute
to his uncle, Brazilian folk musician Luiz Gonzaga. (AP/Wide World Photos)
was Gonzaga who created the northeastern trio ( trio nordestino ) of the zabumba (a
medium-size double-headed drum), piano-accordion and triangle. He also intro-
duced lyrics to the music he recorded. His lyrics usually were written with other
people such as Humberto Teixeira (1915–1979) and Zédantas (José de Souza Dan-
tas Filho, 1921–1962). The lyrics that they wrote featured aspects of northeastern
culture and reinforced the character of this regional music. They created an image
of Northeasterners as violent and dangerous. Gonzaga was popular until the 1960s,
when he was superceded by bossa nova .
In the 1970s and 1980s, there were some isolated hits by Genival Lacerda (“Sev-
erina Xique Xique” in 1975) and Clemilda (“Prenda o Tadeu” in 1985). These forro
recordings were noted for the double entendre in their lyrics and as a result were
classified as pornographic forró, or porno-forró. In São Paulo in the 1990s there
was a discovery of forró music by university students who began to play what
became known as university forró ( forró universitário ) that was marketed as a
middle-class, polite, well-educated forró. The students hired trios usually formed
by northeastern migrants such as Trio Virgulino and Trio Sabiá, to play at their
parties and soon opened university forró houses. The students also began to have
their own forró bands. Falamansa and Rastapé were the first of these groups to be
successful playing and recording university forró. Although they began as trios,
170 | French
Guiana
these university forró bands began to add other instruments to their music includ-
ing electric guitar, bass, and traps as well as lyrics that represented their own tastes
and worldview but they still claimed to be performing traditional forró.
The year 2000 was the peak of the forró revival with the release of the film
Eu, Eu, Eles ( Me, You, Them ). Directed by Andrucha Waddington and with mu-
sical direction provided by Gilberto Gil, Eu, Eu, Eles was an Oscar candidate in
the category of best foreign film. The movie provides an accurate representation
of forró because it combines the old style of forró music with more modern ver-
sions of it.
Some of the most important performers of forró music besides Gonzaga are
Jackson do Pandeiro, Dominguinhos (José Domingos de Moraes), Marinês (Inês
Caetano de Oliveira), Abdias do Acordeon, Trio Nordestino, Genival Lacerda,
Carmélia Alves, Luís Vieira (Luis Rattes Vieira Filho), Pedro Sertanejo (Pedro de
Almeida e Silva), Oswaldinho do Acordeon, Clemilda (Clemilda Ferreira da Silva),
Sandro Becker, Zé Duarte, Mastruz com Leite, Frank Aguiar (Francineto Luz de
Aguiar), Flávio José, Trio Sabiá, Trio Chamego, Trio Virgulino, Waldonys, Ar-
lindo dos Oito Baixos, Falamansa, and Rastapé.
Further Reading
Crook, Larry. Brazilian Music: Northeastern Tradition and the Heartbeat of a Modern
Nation. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005.
Fernandes, Adriana. “Music, Migrancy, and Modernity: A Study of Brazilian Forró.”
Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005.
Ramalho, Elba Braga. “Luiz Gonzaga: His Career and His Music.” Ph.D. diss., Univer-
sity of Liverpool, 1997.
Adriana Fernandes
French Guiana
French Guiana is a South American country bordering the North Atlantic Ocean,
between Brazil and Suriname. Creoles, who are descendants of freed slaves, make
up the largest percentage of its total population, which is about 220,000 people. Nev-
ertheless, the Maroon and Amerindian population represent a significant cultural
demographic that has influenced French Guiana’s popular music. The middle-class
Creole population has, since the 19th century, imitated European musical models
with the significant genres being music for ballroom orchestras and outdoor bands.
Maroon-influenced music such as the drum-based Aleke has grown from a regional
style of folkloric music to a popular music style that has gone beyond the borders
of French Guiana to festivals of Aleke music in Suriname and the Netherlands.
Kaseko music from Suriname is popular in French Guyana and is believed to have
Frevo | 171
first evolved out of Bigi Pokoe, which was a style from the 1930s played by large
brass bands during festivals and strongly influenced by Dixieland jazz. Nowadays
the ensembles include electric guitars and keyboards with influences from abroad
such as calypso and rock ‘n’ roll.
Further Reading
Bilby, Kenneth. “ ‘Aleke’: New Music and New Identities in the Guianas.” Latin Ameri-
can Music Review / Revista de Música Latinoamericana 22, no. 1 (2001): 31–47.
George Torres
Frevo
Frevo is a syncopated genre of music and an improvisatory style of dance closely
associated with marching band participation in Carnival celebrations from Per-
nambuco, Brazil. An expressive form of urban vernacular culture, its roots lie in the
second half of the 19th century among multiracial walking clubs ( clubes pedestres )
comprising working-class Carnival revelers in Pernambuco’s capital city of Re-
cife. In the early 20th century, the frevo became Pernambuco’s premiere Carnival
music and a regional cultural marker of the multiracial mixture in the northeastern
state. During the 1930s, the frevo entered national consciousness in Brazil via the
country’s nascent recording and broadcast industry centered in Rio de Janeiro. It
reached its peak of national popularity in the 1940s and 1950s.
Early History of Frevo
The first written record of the term frevo (likely a slang expression derived from
ferver, meaning to boil over) appeared in the Recife newspaper Jornal Pequeno
(1907) in a Carnival club’s advertisement that announced a march titled “O frevo.”
The term quickly captured local imagination regarding the social exuberance of
Carnival in Recife and the effervescence of its music and dance. Journalist Osvaldo
de Almeida—writing under the pen name “Pierrot”—helped popularize the term
through his Carnival column in the Jornal Pequeno.
During the late 19th century, a hybrid musical repertoire was developing among
military ba
nds in Pernambuco that was used to accompany Carnival celebrations,
including the parading of working-class clubs. Band repertoire drew from cosmo-
politan social dances ( tango , waltz, polka ), military marches, and from a com-
mon inventory of songs that revelers sang in the streets during Carnival. Mixtures
of polkas and marches led to the hybrid designation marcha-frevo. This was a
syncopated march in fast tempo featuring two short sections of 8-16 measures
in length, each repeated. By the early 20th century, wind, brass, and percussion
172 | Frevo
ensembles called fanfarras (fanfares) featuring requintas (small b-flat clarinets),
trumpets, trombones, and a percussion core of tarol (snare), surdo (bass drum),
and pandeiro (tambourine) became the standard accompaniment for the Carni-
val frevo. Bandleaders composed and arranged the two-part form for the brass and
wind instruments of their fanfares over which experienced requinta players impro-
vised melodic variations. The percussion accompaniment developed syncopated
cadences and performance styles that were passed on in oral tradition. These mu-
sical dimensions of frevo developed in close relation to the participatory esthetics
of parading revelers and interactions with capoeira (Afro-Brazilian martial-arts
dance) groups that accompanied marching band parades. Fanfarras also played
lyrical selections called marchas carnavalescas (Carnival marches), which mixed
instrumental sections with songs sung by adoring Carnival crowds. Like the instru-
mental frevo, the marcha carnavalesca developed syncopated rhythmic elements
in conjunction with dancing participants.
By the 1920s, middle-class revelers in Recife began forming Carnival associa-
tions known as blocos carnavalescos (Carnival Blocs). The musical repertoire of
these groups mixed popular genres such as samba , tango, and Carnival marches
with local traditions of lyrical serenading and Christmas-time pastoril tradition
typically sung by young girls. In contrast to the loud and rhythmically hard- hitting
nature of the fanfares, blocos carnavalescos favored softer ensembles called or-
Encyclopedia of Latin American Popular Music Page 31