During the two years of the master's program, students are required to present four concerts, one each semester. These concerts are called “Semester Concerts” and the fourth of them is called “Exam Concert”. They serve as a laboratory where we can test ideas and present what we are developing in our artistic research, not only to our teachers and peers, but also to the general public. This is the moment when our explorations must leave the practice room and reach people, which means that we must also reflect on what and how we want to communicate with the audience.
One of my recurring choices during the semester concerts was the reading of poems on stage. Either written by me or by other poets, these texts had an important role in building a stage persona that I consider to be one of the results of my research and of my experience as a foreign artist in Sweden. It was a way of addressing important political and historical issues behind the music, but also of highlighting the importance of literature in my life and artistic work. I have always loved reading and had even attended one semester of a Literature Course in University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil when I was 18. At that time, I fell in love with poetry and started to read and write a lot.
Poetry, besides music, is still the most intimate and honest way I use for expressing my feelings. Reading and writing poetry has always been a habit for me. However, most of the time I do not share these poems with other people. During my research I felt the urge to bring my poet side to the stage. I realized that the spoken word is a really powerful performance tool. It reaches people’s ears differently from the sung word.
When you play popular music in your home country, you share a common basis of knowledge and life experiences with the audience. We speak the same language, we know at least the basics about the countries’ history, and we listen to more or less the same kind of music. As a consequence of that, you just take for granted a lot of information between the lines of your work. But this context changes completely when you play your music in other countries. Then you suddenly face an audience that may be interested in the music you are playing, but does not understand the lyrics, does not know artists that are completely familiar for people from your home country, and may not be aware of your country’s history and social issues. This may not be a problem for other musical genres and for other profiles of artists, since the music undoubtedly speaks a lot by itself. But for me, it started to feel like something I had to work on. For my artistic work to be better understood I had to improve my communication with the audience. I needed to find new and creative ways to share some extra knowledge with the audience that only the music itself would not be able to do.
I had a lot of interesting discussions about this subject with my peers in feedback sessions after our mid-term presentations28 and semester concerts. Aga Wójcik, a Polish jazz singer, and Björg Blondal, an Icelandic singer and composer, were facing the challenge of deciding whether to sing or not in their mother tongue for an international audience. Each of them found different and interesting answers to this issue. Aga, for example, explored deeply vocal improvisation using a wide range of sounds and extended techniques, giving up the use of any language in some of her performances. Björg, in her own way, mixed compositions in English and Icelandic with songs performed without words, and chose to tell the audience the stories behind the Icelandic songs.
My case carried particularities that instigated me to look for other strategies. After all I come from a tradition of cantautores where the lyrics are very important. My repertory is almost entirely composed by me in Portuguese. Furthermore, in the kind of music I make the voice is rarely dissociated from the text. In dialogue with Mário de Andrade's pioneering studies on Brazilian music, author Luiz Tatit characterizes singing within the tradition of Brazilian popular music as follows:
Mário de Andrade thinks in terms of art song, in which there is indeed a strong tendency to transform the voice into a musical instrument. Brazilian popular song has never followed this path. Without the voice that speaks behind the singing voice, there is neither attraction nor consumption. The audience wants to know who owns the voice. Behind the technical resources, there must be a gesture, and the oral gesturality that distinguishes the song performer is inscribed in the particular intonation of their speech. 29
Although we all agreed that singing in our mother tongue brings a strong and deep expression that goes far beyond the understanding of the lyrics, I felt that I needed another layer of communication with the audience. My approach to this inquiry was a mix of strategies.
In my first semester concert in December of 2023, I decided to translate all the lyrics to English in a written program that would be distributed to the tables before the concert began. This program is displayed below (click on it to open the PDF file):
It seemed a good idea that people would understand what I was singing. I think it was a wise solution and I received good feedback from teachers and colleagues. However, I also realized that a part of the audience did not read the program. This can be attributed to several reasons such as: lack of lighting in the room (which is often the case with nightclubs, concert halls, bars and theaters); people not wanting to divide their attention between what was written on the paper and what was happening on the stage; lack of interest in the lyrics; and not realizing that it was a program for my concert (especially because there were other two concerts happening that night). After that, I thought I should find ways to include the information I wanted the audience to grasp within the stage performance itself.
During the process of creating my second semester concert I had the idea of beginning the performance reading a poem I wrote especially for this occasion. It was a poem - written in English - about the birth of music. I wanted to create a parallel with the Bible's Book of Genesis, when the creation of the world by God is described:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.30
It is important to mention that I did not use this reference for religious purposes. I did, however, want to refer to an emblematic and ancient text that almost everyone knows and begin creating a ritualistic atmosphere that reflected my intentions with this concert. Since the core of this concert was the central role of percussion in my music, but also in Brazilian popular music and - if I may expand this idea - even in music as a whole. I wanted to relate the creation of music to the creation of the world itself, having the percussion as the leading character. In one of my personal notes, I wrote: “I am increasingly convinced that our salvation lies in African percussion (and the percussion of the African diaspora). VOICE & PERCUSSION & DANCE – THE ORIGIN OF EVERYTHING”.
I also wanted to address other deities that, in Afro-Brazilian religious traditions, are closely connected to the elements of nature. In other words, these deities are nature itself. Nature, deities, percussion, drums, humanity, origin, rise. These were the key words I had in mind. Furthermore, I wanted to situate humans also as creators of the world, and not only as passive recipients of an exclusively divine creation. This is the poem:
In the beginning there was sound
A huge and powerful tone
Vibrating everywhere
The sound just was
Asking no permission
Recognizing no borders
It just spread through the earth
Involving lands and seas
The voice of the mother earth
Resonating in the womb of nature
Making each form of life
Feel part of something bigger
Then there was the verb
And humans split sound into parts
First there came the silence
Then, there came the rhythm
The rhythm was the force of life
Transcribed into sound
The cycles of the seasons
The sprout of a seed
The long sleep of the winter
The explosion of sex
The walk on the leaves
The run on the hills.
The heartbeat
Then humans created drums
And they saw that it was good!
Drums connected people
And remembered them
Of their deepest roots
Drums made people
Feel like dancing
like singing
like loving
Drums made people enjoy life
Thousands of years later,
From the very core of Africa,
Those drums spread over the earth
And on the other side of the Atlantic Sea
They met Brazil.
As the poem unfolds, we go from a wider shot (the creation of the world/music) to a specific historical event: the transatlantic slave trade from Africa to Brazil, here considered from the musical perspective. In the first part of the poem (the wider shot), I planned to have a cello drone playback, evoking an Indian mantra and building an out-of-time atmosphere. Then, when I read about the rise of rhythm, a conga drums beat starts (played live by the percussionist Jakob Kain). In the end of the poem (“And on the other side of the Atlantic Sea/They met Brazil”) there is a dramatic stop in both the cello drone and the percussion beat, allowing me to slide into the riff of the first song of the concert: Babá Alapalá.31 You can watch this performance in the following video:
In my opinion, performing the reading of this poem at the beginning of the concert was more successful than printing a program with the translated lyrics, in terms of adding a new and essential layer of communication with the audience. Instead of looking like an external tool, the poem was integrated into the music and into the performance in a more organic and artistic way. This way, I not only captured the attention of the audience better, but also created a whole musical, mystical, narrative, and philosophical atmosphere for the rest of the concert, expressing the overarching concept of the repertoire.