The matter of the popular, concerning the music of Paraense Amazonia in the first half of the 20th Century

Abstract

The current study approaches the musical activity of Paraense artists in the first half of the 20th century, focused on the senses of “popular” developed due to the repercussion of these characters’ intellectual and artistic performance. The clues examined in this work were collected in journals, memory records and folklorists’ essays, related to the specified chronological term. The data indicate the exis­tence of two areas of musical practice in this period, in which allocated themselves musi­cian-folklorists and professional popular mu­sicians. The text analyses the claiming of dif­ferent meanings by these musicians’ creations, in the Amazonian context, around categories as folklore music, popular music and artistic music.