History

Music in Brazil is all over. From north to south, inside or outside, high class or low class, there always seems to be music present at any given time. The musical landscape is hugely divers and extremely varied with hundreds of different styles.

It is hard to pinpoint a specific beginning of popular music in Brazil but one important personality for its documentation has been Mario Andrade  (1893-1945), a poet, novelist, art critic, lecturer and musicologist. Andrade is known for his meticulous documentation on the historical music of the north and northeast of Brazil when he was the director of the Department of Culture for the city of São Paulo. The missions he undertook with a large crew resulted in a vast collection recorded audio, images and musical notes which mark one of the first large collections of Brazilian folklore music in history. Andrade realised that with the fast growing urbanization of Brazil, the traditional music of the interior could be endangered of being lost.