Musical modernism is a concept that can have different meanings. In Brazil the term "modernism" assumed a very specific connotation due to strong connections with the movement organized around the Modern Art Week held at the Municipal Theater in São Paulo in February 1922. Modernism had two complementary and contrasting implications—one was the idea of aesthetic renewal, based on the perceived need to place Brazil alongside the avant-garde movements occurring in Europe; the other was an expression of nationality, claiming that what Brazil had experienced until then was merely the reproduction of European culture, and that the country was now ready to produce its own, home-grown model.

Collective memory and common wisdom have erroneously assessed Brazilian musical modernism as a predominantly nationalist movement, closed to international circulation. It was principally constructed around two men, who were active participants in the Modern Art Week: Mário de Andrade and Heitor Villa-Lobos. Mário de Andrade participated as a poet and speaker, having been one of the creators and organizers of the event. Villa-Lobos was the only Brazilian composer to have works presented there. The strongest discourse in relation to Brazilian musical modernism was linked to the notion of nationalism. Both in its early stages and in the memory passed down as its legacy, the idea of Brazilianness has been central. However, as will be shown below, the international circulation of ideas and people also played a very important role.

São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Paris. The genesis of Brazilan musical modernism

Even before the Modern Art Week, musical modernism in Brazil received an initial impulse from the presence of European musicians, such as Ernest Ansermet, Arthur Rubinstein, and Darius Milhaud. Not only did their performances include the modern repertoire, but Ansermet and Rubinstein also sensed the value of Villa-Lobos's work. Brazil lacked institutions capable of training composers, its conservatories aimed at educating instrumentalists and the concert market was dominated by nineteenth century European music. Ansermet and Rubinstein's interest helped Villa-Lobos overcome rejection from Brazil's emerging musical criticism, it boosted his career, and attracted sponsors and intellectuals interested in promoting Brazilian music.

At the beginning of the twentieth century Rio de Janeiro was practically the only Brazilian city which had a diversified press and professional musical critics. The most prominent critic was Oscar Guanabarino, who had worked in the newspaper O País in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and at that time had a column in Jornal do Comércio. Villa-Lobos' initial attempts to establish himself as a composer ran into Guanabarino's scathing vigilance, as the writer was mostly concerned with the technical level of execution and traditional European standards of taste. The presence of European modernists in Brazil favored Villa-Lobos by valorizing other aspects, not recognized by Guanabarino, such as originality or even a certain exoticism.

The French composer Darius Milhaud lived in Rio de Janeiro for several years in the 1910s and was familiar with Brazilian popular and carnaval music. He used maxixes from Rio de Janeiro in works such as Saudades do Brasil, which encouraged Brazilian composers to do the same. In Paris, Milhaud also helped raise French interest in Brazilian music. Arthur Rubinstein was a very active pianist on the Parisian scene and like various European musicians did concert tours in South America. When in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, he talked with influential people and patrons, convincing them of Villa-Lobos's importance, and suggesting he should be supported financially to travel to Europe. Rubinstein was also the first musician to include compositions by Villa-Lobos in concert programs in Paris and he continued to include his works in his repertoire in the following decades. For example, the cycle Prole do bebê was included in his Carnegie Hall concerts in 1961.

While Guanabarino was the principal reference for music criticism at the beginning of the twentieth century, Mário de Andrade would establish himself as the most important name of the new generation. His work as a music critic and professor from the 1920s onwards became instrumental to the consolidation of musical modernism. In 1927 he started a column in São Paulo's newspaper, Diário Nacional. There he commented on, divulged, and defended the work of new Brazilian composers, such as Villa-Lobos, Camargo Guarnieri, Luciano Gallet, Francisco Mignone, and Lorenzo Fernandes.

In addition to criticism, Andrade was a scholar of Brazilian culture and held positions as a government official. He was the interlocutor of artists and musicians, both in letters and artistic partnerships, since he provided plots for operas, dances, and symphonic poems by composers he had encouraged. Among his various books, published either during his life or after he died, one exercised a remarkable influence on various generations of composers and musicologists—Ensaio sobre a Música Brasileira, published in 1928. In this book, Mário de Andrade offered elements of Brazilian popular culture he encouraged composers to study and understand to produce authentic national music.

Although this emphasis on the defense of national production is most often emphasized in his work, Mário de Andrade was also an intellectual closely connected with ideas circulating outside the country. Even without leaving Brazil, he accompanied European intellectual debates thanks to imported books and periodicals. His library (now in IEB-USP) contains sheet music from modern European composers, as well as other material, such as Harmony and Fugue manuals in French by Charles Koechlin.

The periods Villa-Lobos spent in Paris in the 1920s formed the major experience of interaction of Brazilian musical modernism with Europe. There he absorbed musical avant-garde influences, received the support of orchestras, performers, editors and critics, and saw his work premiered and published. Villa-Lobos' success replaced the previous model—based on composer Carlos Gomes—and encouraged young musicians to try to establish themselves as composers. Carlos Gomes had left Campinas, the coffee producing region in the state of São Paulo, for the imperial capital in 1859. After making a name for himself in Rio de Janeiro, he was soon sent to Europe with a scholarship, achieving success in Italian opera with the debut of Il Guarany in Milan in 1870. In the following decades Carlos Gomes became recognized as the most important Brazilian composer, but for modernism he became almost an anti-model. In his best-known opera, Guarani Indians were represented by bel canto in Italian, something which modernism considered completely out of context, and used as an example of the subservience of Brazilian culture to European models. Not by chance, one of Villa-Lobos's most striking works, Choros n^o 10, resignified indigenous presence in Brazilian music, having the choir sing in a non-European language and assimilating the supposed rhythmic irregularity of indigenous music. Although Villa-Lobos was not really a connoisseur of indigenous music, what is important is that his work created this impression.

The fight against this subservience to the model of the Italian opera was a mark of modernism, and Villa-Lobos's role made it appear as if the movement was free of foreignisms. However, São Paulo, the cradle of modernism, had a striking presence of first- and second-generation Italian musicians. The professor and composer Agostino Cantú and the maestro Lamberto Baldi came from Italy. The parents of composers Francisco Mignone and Camargo Guarnieri, as well as musician and conductor Armando Belardi were Italian. Also Italian was professor Luigi Chiaffarelli, responsible for training pianists who made their names on the international concert circuit, such as Guiomar Novaes, Antonieta Rudge, and João de Souza Lima.

Lamberto Baldi played a central role in the education of the composer Camargo Guarnieri, giving him classes in harmony, counterpoint, fugue, orchestration, and composition. During the 1930s Camargo Guarnieri became Mário de Andrade's principal protégé, as the modernist musical critic increasingly came to regard Villa-Lobos' work as erratic. In 1932 Maestro Baldi moved to Montevideo to become the conductor of the orchestra of the Servicio Oficial de Difusión Radio Eléctrica (SODRE), recently created by the Uruguayan government. Camargo Guarnieri was insecure about writing after the departure of his teacher, especially orchestral works. He intended to complete his education with a period in Paris, studying with Charles Koechlin. He went there in 1938, but the imminent Nazi invasion made him return to Brazil the following year, interrupting his studies.

The Good Neighbor policy and the US music market

Although it felt like a failure, Guarnieri's period in Paris was strategic for his later entrance into the concert market in the United States. His works called the attention of professor Nadia Boulanger, who introduced him to the US composer Aaron Copland, her student. Copland helped Camargo Guarnieri receive support through the US Good Neighbor Policy and they exchanged correspondence about Guarnieri's trip to the US in 1942-43. Copland's correspondence with Guarnieri is kept in the composer's archive at the IEB-USP. In various letters written in French at the beginning of the 1940s, Professor Nadia Boulanger is mentioned as a common friend of both. When Camargo Guarnieri was in the US, she was also living there, due to the war in Europe.

In addition to the composer, the musicologist and professor Carleton Sprague Smith also spent various years in Brazil at the service of the State Department and found in Camargo Guarnieri a privileged interlocutor.¹

The Good Neighbor Policy was a US geopolitical initiative, resulting from concern with Nazi-fascist influence in South America, especially in the Southern Cone region where there was a strong presence of Italian and German immigrants. America invested in soft power initiatives, such as the granting of scholarships and the funding of South American artists. The best-known cultural icons of the Good Neighborhood policy are Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda working in US cinema and the creation of the character Zé Carioca by Disney. However, these policies also had an impact on modernism in Brazil, notably the connections established by the writer Érico Veríssimo and the musicians Villa-Lobos, Francisco Mignone, and Camargo Guarnieri. Although the presence of Villa-Lobos in the US had a greater public impact, Camargo Guarnieri established deeper and more fruitful ties of cooperation.Guarnieri's ties with the US were reinforced by the presence of Luiz Heitor Correa de Azevedo in the Music Division of the Pan-American Union. The Brazilian musicologist was already an important supporter of Camargo Guarnieri's music and assumed even greater institutional importance than Mário de Andrade, principally from the end of the 1930s. Luiz Heitor had been the librarian of the National Institute of Music, where he became professor of folklore. He was the executive director of Revista Brasileira de Música, held important positions in the Getúlio Vargas administration, and was responsible for the music section of the periodical Cultura Política and the radio show Hora do Brasil. Luiz Heitor became the principal Brazilian representative in international institutions in relation to music, working for a short period in the Pan-American Union in Washington and later for various decades in UNESCO, in Paris. In Washington, Luiz Heitor worked with Charles Seeger in the Music Division

During his Washington days, Luiz Heitor emphasized to his US colleagues the importance of Camargo Guarnieri as the most promising Brazilian composer. Charles Seeger commissioned him a work to be used by high school bands and was instrumental in obtaining a six-month scholarship in the United States for him in 1942-43. Guarnieri's works were presented by orchestras and published by US printing houses. Among the most clearly marked by cooperation with US partners were the orchestral works Encantamento, Abertura Concertante, Concerto n^o 1 for violin and orchestra, and Sinfonia n^o 1.

As had happened previously with Villa-Lobos in Paris, Camargo Guarnieri's time in the US was the differential in his professionalization as a composer. There he maintained his friendship and collaboration with Aaron Copland and began a fruitful partnership with then music student Leonard Bernstein, who would be responsible for Camargo Guarnieri's phonographic success with the recording of Dança Brasileira by the New York Philarmonic

The transit of Brazilian musicians in France and the United States is remembered because of the international impulse given to their careers as composers. However, the circulation of people, musical ideas, and works occurred both from other countries to Brazil, and from Brazil elsewhere. Villa-Lobos included works of French modernists such as Florent Schmitt and Arthur Honegger when he was a conductor in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Camargo Guarnieri conducted the Brazilian debuts of various works by Aaron Copland. Exchanges facilitated the access of Brazilians to more mature concert music markets, but still relatively unknown French and US composers were also interested in expanding their presence in the concert repertoire in Brazil.

Exchanges were not limited to the transit of composers and works. Collaboration also existed between intellectuals and bureaucrats involved in institutional activities and governmental agencies, such as Mário de Andrade, Luiz Heitor, Curt Lange, Carleton Sprague Smith, Alan Lomax. The work of these musicologists, professors, and critics constructed historical interpretations and attributed artistic value to modernist composers. There were various collaborations among them, involving their institutions and publications. Curt Lange established partnerships in Brazil and exchanged correspondence with various people. He edited the Latin American Bulletin of Music, the sixth volume of which was entirely dedicated to Brazil. He published the scores of Brazilian composers in the Editorial Cooperativa Interamericana de Música, which he founded and directed. He also lived in Brazil for a short period, doing pioneering research on music in Minas Gerais in the eighteenth century and in the Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth.

Luiz Heitor Correa de Azevedo worked in partnership with Alan Lomax in folk music recording projects. While Lomax made recordings in the US, Luiz Heitor went on various expeditions for this purpose in Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais, Goiás, and Ceará. These collections of recordings were exchanged between the Center of Folkloric Research in Rio de Janeiro and the Library of Congress in Washington. The projects used recording technology to perpetuate the oral tradition of countryside music in both countries, considered under threat of extinction due to the expansion of the phonographic industry.

The Música Viva group and dodecaphonism in Brazil

Also of importance was the German Hans Joachim Koellreutter's arrival in Brazil at the end of the 1930s. He became a reference for new generations of composers, who considered already established names as excessively conservative and linked to the interests of Getúlio Vargas's dictatorial government. Grupo Música Viva, with his students Claudio Santoro and Guerra Peixe, led a second modernist wave in Brazil. The new composers burst onto the scene through the polemical use of the dodecaphonic technique, their experimental productions between 1944 and 1948 attracting attention in Brazil and other countries.

Koellreutter became an influential reference for new generations principally due to his far-ranging knowledge, his humanistic education, and his capacity to discuss questions of art and aesthetics in depth. Mário de Andrade had been such an intellectual beacon for various musicians in the 1920s and 1930s. For the new generations, this role would be largely exercised by Koellreuter, from the 1940s onwards. Young composers such as Claudio Santoro and Cesar Guerra Peixe found considerable possibilities of professional training as composers studying in Rio de Janeiro, which had not been possible for Villa-Lobos. However, both composers tended to consider the education they received as too academic and rigid. The interaction with Koellreuter would be strategic, principally due to the German professor's defense of the free learning of composition, where the dominion of musical notation was not weighed down by the classical tradition, the command of which was considered compulsory in courses of composition. Guerra Peixe even stated at the time that he had learned to compose like Beethoven, but that these abilities were useless in the world of his time. It would be Koellreuter who helped him face this dilemma.

Koellreutter's international contacts also contributed to the diffusion of the music of his students. The conductor Hermann Scherchen, his professor in Europe, conducted some of Guerra Peixe's dodecaphonic works. In 1949 Koellreutter gave a talk in the Darmstadt Holiday Course on dodecaphonic music in Brazil

Santoro moved to Europe to study composition after being prevented from going to the US due to his connection with the Communist Party. He witnessed the presentation of the doctrine of Socialist Realism by Zdanov in the Prague Congress of Progressive Composers in 1948. Santoro echoed communist doctrine in Brazil in articles for Boletim Música Viva and for the communist periodical Fundamentos,² while the party's aesthetic approximated young composers from the folklorist movements, previously associated with a conservative matrix and with the political right wing.

The long cycle of musical modernism, which began in the 1920s with Mário de Andrade and Villa-Lobos ended with this folklorist alliance, symbolized in the Carta aberta aos músicos e críticos do Brasil, a document released by Camargo Guarnieri in 1950,³ which attacked dodecaphonism and defended Brazilian music. With the adhesion of Santoro and Guerra Peixe to the aesthetic of socialist realism, the idea of Brazilian music grounded on folklore became so strong that this nationalist memory surpassed other aspects in the development of musical modernism in Brazil. Yet Brazilian musical modernism was always more diversified and international than this folklorist discourse lets appear.