Acordes modernos em notas de tradição : as lutas de representações em torno da recepção do Iº Festival paraibano da moderna música popular brasileira na imprensa paraibana (1967)

Abstract

In the artistic-musical field, the 1960s were marked by the debate concerning the modernization of Brazilian Popular Music, constituted by diverse and complex variables, placing at the center of the debates cultural symbols and political ideologies that not only sought to re-elaborate the scenario of Popular Music, but also the very meaning of making music amid the authoritarian times of the military dictatorship. In this context, the stages of the Brazilian Popular Music Festivals were representative spaces of the effervescent Brazilian musical production, which acquired different contours in the most varied spatialities of the country. In view of this, this work has as its core the I Festival Paraibano da Moderna Música Popular (I FPMMPB), which took place throughout April 1967, in the city of João Pessoa/PB, and carried in its name the expectation of a modern musical practice in a spatiality revested by a constellation of symbols and representations that historically forged an ideal of regional identity invented from the signs of tradition and nostalgia for the past (Albuquerque Júnior, 2011). Thus, the objective of this work is to map and analyze the reception and circulation of the I Festival Paraibano da Moderna Música Popular Brasileira in the Paraiban press, in order to understand how the disputes and controversies around the public sphere of the historical experience of this festival unfolded, also aiming to identify the contours that the discussion on the modernization of Brazilian popular music assumed in these communication channels. To this end, this work will focus, in light of the propositions of Roger Chartier (2002), on the struggles of representations that constituted the coverage of the contest by the newspapers A União, O Norte and Correio da Paraíba, three of the main communication outlets in Paraíba in the period, which actively covered the event – from the preparations to the developments of the grand finale. The methodological path I adopted is what Marcos Napolitano (2005) called the “investigation of the public sphere of a musical experience,” a procedure that seeks to take into consideration the multiple planes of reception that compose the immediate context of a musical experience – woven from a complex relationship between composers, artists, audience, and critics. Dialogically, it sought to view the press in its relationship with the social, as part of a communicational process in which both the production of messages and their interpretation by readers are constituted from cultural codes permeated by intentionalities and historicities, as pointed out by Marialva Barbosa (2007), Tânia de Luca (2008), and José D’Assunção Barros (2021). This tracing in the press revealed, therefore, that this Festival, despite having attempted to close its doors to Northeastern traditions, saw them enter through the “window” with the victory of the song O Repente, a result that aroused diverse reactions, mobilized disparate sensibilities, and activated multiple plots in the pages of the newspapers, allowing the understanding of the existence of other layers of impasses and conflicts regarding the process of circulation of the tendencies of a modern musical practice during the 1960s, which, as the Pessoa case itself reveals, did not spread uniformly throughout the country.