Galant style and musical decorum in eighteenth-century Portuguese and Brazilian music

• Grant number: 14/21081-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: December 18, 2014
• End date: May 17, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Music
• Principal Investigator: Diósnio Machado Neto
• Grantee: Mitia Ganade D´Acol
• Supervisor: Robert O. Gjerdingen
• Host Institution: Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Northwestern University, Evanston, United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 13/15151-4 - Musical decorum and galant schemata: a case study on the Requiem Masses from José Maurício Nunes Garcia and Marcos Portugal, BP.MS

Abstract

Brazilian and Portuguese musicologists have usually described the eighteenth-century church music of lusophone composers as indecorous, for it contained a great penetration of the operatic style of composition, establishing a theory of "musical backwardness" of this repertoire. The aim of this project is to expand the discussion on this topic, the musical decorum of eighteenth-century Portuguese-Brazilian church music; the study will be done through a comparative analysis - grounded on schema theory - of various works written by Portuguese, Brazilian, and Italian composers for Portuguese and Brazilian churches. The focus of this analysis is to bring up an examination on how composers managed the style of their compositions, considering a possible concern with the decorum, the correct construction of a discourse regarding the audience expectative and the place were it would be performed. Through this study, we will attempt to evaluate how the style of selected compositions and the uses of music schemata by the composers can be employed to the verification of a musical decorum existent through the period. (AU)