How Afro are the brazilian popular chordofones? Musical practices in question by historical iconography

According to authors affiliated to the nationalistic musical literature in Brazil that influenced ideas about music from the 1920’s up to today, the local modern guitar-shaped string instruments (like cavaquinho, violão, viola caipira and others) are frequently associated with similar European (especially Portuguese) chordophones. The power of these narratives is so naturalized in Brazilian modern musicological contexts that this issue is rarely questioned and there is no room for other genealogical possibilities. However, there are important indicators, especially iconographic ones, that point to the need to expand the view over the historical path of chordophones to Brazil. Among iconographic records, the naturalist paintings and drawings of the colonial period stand out, especially after the transfer of the Portuguese royal court to Brazil at the beginning of the 19th century. By that time there was a significant increase in the record of Brazilian social life through drawings and paintings. They do present several chordophones radically different from the European chordophones, mainly due to their constitutive form in excavated monoblocks – a construction technique that - apparently - does not exist in Iberian chordophones. The fact that very similar instruments were recorded by António Cavazzi in his work Istorica Descrizione de' tre regni Congo, Matamba ed Angola, (1690) suggests that the NgolaBrazil crossing may have been traveled by such chordophones in their historical journey. Some of these instruments are depicted in naturalist paintings present in Brazilian and Portuguese institutions, like the National Library (RJ), Museum of Music (Lisbon) and others. This work intends to present a mapping of the iconographic records of chordophones associated with West-Central African populations that were forced to migrate to Brazil during the colonial period, in order to point to new ways of understanding the reality of past and contemporary string instruments in Brazilian music.
published