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Original Article • rev. hist. (182) • 2023 • https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2316-9141.rh.2023.200561   copy

THE SOUND COLOR: CONSTRUCTION OF OTHERNESS AND RACIALITY IN BRAZILIAN PHONOGRAPHY IN 78 RPM, IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY1 1 This is not a purely ethical problem, of course, but the dichotomization between forms of life as a symbolic condition for the processes of primitive accumulation that allowed the modern West to constitute and remain as a hegemonic force. Witches, peasants, satyrs, cannibals, cynocephali and cyclops, inhabitants of the most different tropical longitudes and the most varied eastern latitudes, are just a few examples mobilized in the constitutive phases of the Early Modern period. And if in different periods and cultural and historical circumstances the savage/primitive came to be positively evoked as a moral critique of the civilized world (already in Montaigne and Léry; in pastoral literature at times, passing through Rousseau to the romantics), it is only a matter of a logical inversion that confirms the constitutive dichotomous dynamic of modern rationality. It is important to consider that we are not saying here that the device of ethical otherness is an invention of modernity. Narratives and figurations of otherness constituted since Antiquity are even reused and re-signified in the context of the encounter with the other in the Early Modern period. What we support here is the preponderant role of this device in the constitution of self-representation and in modern practices.

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Abstract

This article analyzes the selection of 18 phonograms found on CD 1 of the publication “500 years of Brazilian popular music”, a book with two CDs published by the Museu da Imagem e do Som in Rio de Janeiro, 2001. Referenced in the historiography of sound, listening and music, the article proposes to think about professional listening in history and recording technique among different social groups. A research was carried out on the production dates of the 18 phonograms of CD 1 (1908-2001). The use of sound reproduction machines and artifacts, from mechanical recordings to the digital CD era, background the analysis of the selection pointing out some cultural choices to which the technique of recording and sound reproduction is submitted when the museum writes the history of popular music in Brazil at the turn of the 21st century.

Keywords
History writing; Records from Brazil; Sound technology; Museum; Popular music

Universidade de São Paulo, Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas, Departamento de História Av. Prof. Lineu Prestes, 338, 01305-000 São Paulo/SP Brasil, Tel.: (55 11) 3091-3701 - São Paulo - SP - Brazil
E-mail: revistahistoria@usp.br
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