A presença da cultura afro-brasileira na música de Waldemar Henrique

Abstract

Waldemar Henrique has composed a number of songs, pieces for piano solo, choir, orchestra, music for soap opera, theater and films inspired by the Amazonian, indigenous and northeastern folklore, and representations of beliefs and habits of Afro-descendant populations in the Amazon and Brazil. The presence of African-Brazilian culture in Waldemar Henrique’s work can be perceived by simple observation of the lyrics, rhythms and genres used in many of his works. This research aimed at investigating the factors that contributed to the presence of African-Brazilian culture in the work of this composer. The specific objectives were to provide contextual information about Waldemar Henrique; to verify how the composer addresses the African-Brazilian theme in his compositions; and to describe and analyze the compositions called “Ritual Points.” For this, it was necessary to search for contextualized information on the composer’s life and work, verifying his relationship with people connected to the African-Brazilian culture, and the analysis of his work. Our starting point was the review of the available literature, with reference to the catalogue of his works published by Claver Filho (1978) and Miranda (1978), moreover, we considered the issues proposed by Béhague (1992), Durand (2001) and Blacking (2000), among others, the investigation of the socio-cultural and aesthetic-ideological dimensions in the study of a composer, for the understanding of his musical production. Facing the lack of pieces of writings on the subject at hand, data collection was carried out in the field, in the form of semi-structured and “episodic” interviews with musical personalities, related to the conductor, who studied and analyzed his works. From the results, we propose a classification for the works which were inspired or presented issues related to African-Brazilian theme into three categories and an updated catalogue of the composer's work.