Music of the Brazilian Indians collected in the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century

Appropriations and re-readings of the colonizer and the western musician

Abstract

This article, uniting historiographical, anthropologic and musical perspectives, intends to examine fundamental aspects of Brazilian indigenous music, including the social dimension and the history of assimilation and restrictions imposed by the Western culture. It is intended, above all, to reflect on the inadequacy of approaches which have examined the indigenous practical music based on criteria of listening and annotations exclusively cemented on Western parameters. This text is an attempt to reflect the distortions that can arise from a dislocation of a cultural production outside of its context.