This appendix does not try to give a comprehensive list of African and African- derived musical instruments in Brazil. Three of these have been described in Chapter 5; some others are mentioned, as appropriate, in the rest of the book. Here there is a short account of pioneering listings of such instruments, followed by some additional information about some of them.
The Brazil-born moralist Nuno Marques Pereira (1652–1728) seems to have been the first to make a list of African musical instruments in his country, but it was neither enthusiastic nor exhaustive. Tabaques (log drums), botija (jug), canzá (shaker), castanets, and pés de cabras (‘goats’ feet’, an expression meaning ‘crowbar’ and here perhaps indicating a kind of striker) were all of them ‘hellish instruments’. The proof was that when they were put on a bonfire, which was their fate after they had kept him awake all night, they caused loud explosions and gave off a smoke almost as black as night. Its unbearably horrid stink lingered until the Credo was recited, whereupon a cool breeze sprang up and scattered it.1
It would be some 200 years before any attempt was made to draw up a more comprehensive and rational list of musical instruments of African provenance in Brazil. This was the work of Manuel Raymundo Querino (1851–1923), self- taught son of poor black parents and one of Brazil’s neglected pioneers of black studies. In a paper given in 1916 to the Fifth Brazilian Congress on Geography, and later republished several times, Querino listed nine musical instruments of African provenance in Brazil.2 His list, reproduced and annotated in Table 1,
was keyed to an accompanying photograph, in which nos. 2 and 3 were examples of the same instrument; the batá-côtô, unillustrated, was unnumbered. The next attempt to compile a list of African musical instruments in Brazil was made by the composer and student of folklore Luciano Gallet (1893–1931). His list of 25 such instruments (‘some already out of use’) was published posthu- mously in 1934.3Unclassified, it is arranged more or less alphabetically, except
that Triangulo – a European instrument unaccountably posing here as one of African provenance – comes at the end, as if it were an afterthought. Gallet’s list, though confused, pre-scientific and far from complete, is often cited as an authority for the statement that Brazil has just 25 instruments which come from Africa.4But Gallet’s work must be used with caution. For instance, one of
the instruments on it (no. 2, Adufe) is of Arab origin and came to Brazil from Portugal. No description is known of another (no. 7, Cucumbí); yet another (no. 11, Gongon), similarly undescribed, may simply be an alternative name for the well-known agogô double clapperless bell. On the other hand, Ganzá or Canzá (no. 10) can mean three distinct instruments, and so can Marimba (no. 13). Table 2 briefly describes the instruments listed by Gallet.
Table 1
No. Name as given Description and function by Querino
1 Chéré or Chéchére Usually spelt xere, this denotes several types of metal shaker. The one Querino illustrates, used in Xangô ceremonies, is a copper vessel containing pebbles. 2 and 3 Adjá Small metal bell used in candomblé
and Xangô ceremonies.
4 Batás Small wooden drums of Yoruba origin,
used in Xangô ceremonies.
5 Ilu Large wooden drum, usually spelt ilú.
Sometimes signifies the batá-côtô (see below) but more usually the rum, largest of the three atabaques used in candomblé ceremonies.
6 Afofiê Small bamboo flute with wooden
mouthpiece.
7 Tabaque médio Medium (rumpi) and small (lé)
e menor, played with atabaques used in candomblé baquetas (drumsticks) ceremonies.
8 Agôgô Clapperless double bell, struck with
metal stick. Used in candomblé ceremonies. Usually spelt agogô.
9 Agê Large net-covered gourd shaker with
shells attached to the net as external strikers. Usually spelt aguê.
10 Baquetas Drumsticks
unnumbered Batá-côtô War drum
Table 2
No. Name as given Description and function by Gallet
1 Atabáque Conical hand- or stick-beaten hollow-log drum of various sizes. Used in candomblé and similar ceremonies.
2 Adufe Hand-beaten square frame-drum with jingles: an instrument of Arab provenance that came to Brazil from Portugal.
3 Birimbau Gourd-resonated single-string musical bow. Accompanies capoeira.
4 Agogó or Agogô Clapperless double bell, struck with metal stick. Used in candomblé and similar ceremonies.
5 Carimbó Large hand-beaten hollow-log drum c. 1m long and 30cm in diameter, with deerskin head. Used in carimbó dance and batuque ceremonies in Pará. 6 Caxambú Large drum of atabaque type, used in dance of same
name (probably an alternative name for the jongo dance) in São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Goiás. 7 Cucumbí No description known. Said to be used in dramatic
dance of same name and in Taieiras. 8 Chocalho Generic term for various types of shaker. 9 Fungador Alternative name for cuíca friction drum.
10 Ganzá or Canzá Name of three different percussion instruments: a) small wooden drum with ox-skin head
(Amazonas);
b) cylindrical or egg- or pear-shaped tin rattle; c) notched scraper (Bahia).
11 Gongon No description known. May be another name for agogô.
continued
Table 2 continued
No. Name as given Description and function by Gallet
12 Mulungú Large tambourine.
13 Marimba Name of three different instruments: a) xylophone;
b) lamellophone;
c) berimbau (in north-east) . 14 Puita Friction-drum, also called cuíca
15 Piano de Cuia Large net-covered gourd shaker with shells attached (Balafon in to net as external strikers. (Balafon is the Manding Africa) word for resonator xylophone; the Yoruba word for
the net-covered gourd shaker is s.è.kè.rè.).
16 Pandeiro Tambourine.
17 Quissango A type of lamellophone (cf. one Angolan name for this instrument: quissanje).
18 Roncador Alternative name for cuíca friction drum.
19 Pererenga Medium-sized drum used in the Maranhão ring- dance called punga.
20 Socadôr Alternative name for cuíca friction drum. 21 Tambôr or Drum used in jongo dance.
Tambú
22 Ubatá No description known. May be alternative name for batá drum used in some Recife Xangô ceremonies. 23 Vuvú or vu’ No reliable description known.
24 Xequerê or This refers to four different kinds of shaker, Xêguedê including that listed above as Piano de Cuia. 25 Triangulo Of Portuguese provenance.
Gallet adds to this list two supplementary lists that overlap with the first to some extent. One is of sub-Saharan African instruments collected in Brazil and preserved in the National Museum there. A conical drum (bombo), said to have belonged to an African king, is described as about 50cm high, resting on a three-legged stool, and ‘of very rich appearance, covered with black and white leopard skin’. The list includes ‘African tambourines’; musical bows (here called cimbos); an undescribed ‘valica’ (which Mário de Andrade took to be the Malagasay valiha tube zither);5 a large bell (cincêrro); small bells (campainhas)
used on sheep and camels; various rattles; and a wooden flute.6The other sup- plementary list reproduces that of Manuel Querino.
Renato Almeida, in his História da musica brasileira (first published in 1926 and greatly revised for its second edition, 1942), reproduced the lists of Querino and Gallet and added three more names: bansá (small traditional guitar, usually spelt banza); macumba (probably another name for the reco-reco scraper); matungu (apparently a lamellophone with gourd resonator).
Taken together, these lists show how serious are the problems of overlap and nomenclature in this field. Above all, it is hard to say how many such separate instruments there have been. Following Gallet, the figure of 25 is commonly given, but this is very likely an underestimate. It is probably more helpful to say that musical instruments of African provenance account for some three- quarters of the popularly used instruments in the country,7 though this too
may be something of an understatement.
Wind instruments. The afofié (Yor. afofie) wooden or reed flute and the cangá
cane or bamboo flute were widely used by Africans in Brazil, as in Africa.8 Brazil’s tradition of flute-and-drum or pipe-and-drum bands has Portuguese antecedents but may also have some connection with a similar tradition in Senegambia.9The Scottish botanist George Gardner was unimpressed by the
pipe-and-drum band he heard at Crato in Ceará in the late 1830s. On the last night of the Festival of Our Lady of the Conception an immense crowd assembled on the terrace in front of the church, and ‘at a little distance a band of musicians were playing, consisting of two fifers, and two drummers, but the music they played was of the most wretched description; there was also a display of fireworks, quite in keeping with the music’.10There are modern recordings
of pipe-and-drum bands in Ceará, where such a band is called banda cabaçal and in Sergipe, where it is called zabumba.11 In Alagoas the name esquenta-mulher is used.12
Stamping tubes, known among the Ga of Ghana and also in Colombia and
Venezuela (quitiplas) as well as Haiti (ganbo), seem not to have been widely reported in Brazil. That such instruments did, however, exist in Salvador in the 1840s is shown by James Wetherell’s reference to ‘a short, hollow, thick piece of bamboo, a piece of which is taken in each hand and one end of which is struck against a stone, this gives a dull hollow sound’. Wetherell heard these AFRICAN MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS IN BRAZIL 165
instruments played for dancing, together with a large gourd rattle and a small hand-beaten drum: ‘all these played together give a very singular and deafening kind of noise, without any apparent attempt at tune, but beaten in time’.13
Shakers of various kinds are extremely common in African traditional music,
and many kinds of African rattle found a home in Brazil.14 A black man is shown playing a gourd rattle on a mid-seventeenth-century map of part of north-eastern Brazil (Fig. 2). Prominent in candomblé is the large gourd rattle, covered with netting and shells, which the Yoruba call agè. and s.è.kè.rè. and the Brazilians call aguê, xequerê, etc. In 1842 James Wetherell described it very accurately:
a large calabash gourd, partly covered with a loose net-work, at each crossing of which was strung a glass bead, or a cowrie shell, and edged with a fringe. This gourd is held lightly in the hands, and is gently struck with first one and then the other palm: it emits a dull sound relieved by the sharper rattling of the beads.15
There is an important reference by Tollenare to the use of a gourd rattle to provide a supplementary rhythm, besides that of the gourd’s shaken contents: the handle is struck on the wooden sound-box of a lamellophone, before whose player the percussionist kneels. This procedure is widespread in African traditional music; for Tollenare, who heard it in 1816–19, it was a ‘racket’ that spoilt the effect of the lamellophone. It was made by
an eight-inch stick on whose end was fixed a small gourd in which some seeds were shaken. Rhythmically and in a very lively way [the player] struck the other end of the stick on the box. It was this rhythm which seemed to produce the orchestra’s main effect, since according to whether it was more or less animated, the dancers displayed more or less fervour.16
The Angola-derived rattle known as ganzá (or canzá or xeque-xeque) is often made from a small, closed, tin-plated tube. That shakers were often made in Brazil ad hoc from such materials as lay to hand is suggested by a German visitor’s observation in 1833: ‘They are delighted when they are able to get hold of an old box, in which they place stones that fill out the sound when the box is shaken.’17
Notched scrapers or rasps are much played in African traditional music18and
were much used by Africans in Brazil. The Austrian botanist Pohl heard in Goiás in 1819 ‘a piece of bamboo about a yard long into which are cut grooves and against which another piece of bamboo is drawn lengthways up and down, producing a quite unique and unpleasant sound which, however, the Negroes love to hear’.19A writer in a German musical journal, who called the instrument
Kerbestock (‘notched stick’), described it as
a stave about three feet long provided with deep crosswise grooves, across which another stick is drawn. As far as I know this rasping kind of music is completely peculiar to them and the sounds they produce cannot be compared to any other kind of instrument, and it has a somewhat ghastly [Schauerliches] quality.20
Spix and Martius show (Fig. 10) a notched scraper accompanying a gourd- resonated xylophone.
Drums. A brief description of the hollow-log drum he saw in Jaguaribe, Ceará,
in 1812, was given by Henry Koster, who called it ‘a sort of drum, which is formed of a sheepskin, stretched over a piece of the hollowed trunk of a tree’.21
The observant Maria Graham wrote of
drums made of the hollow trunks of trees, four or five feet long, closed at one end with wood, and covered with skin at the other. In playing these, the drummer lays his instrument on the ground and gets astride on it, when he beats time with his hands to his own songs, or the tunes of the gourmis [i.e. lute].22
Karasch refers to the large drum called caxambu, ‘usually not seen and drawn by foreign artists, because police persecution led slaves to hide them and bring them out only at night in hidden locations’.23Stanley J. Stein describes how such a drum was made on the coffee plantations of Rio de Janeiro state, and his description probably holds good for many other African-type log drums in other regions of Brazil:
Great care went into the manufacture of the two or three drums used. First a red- leafed mulungú tree [coral-tree, Erythrina] was cut down and a section cut out. With an adze, the drum-maker hollowed out one end deep enough to hold castor oil which he then ignited. When fire had burned deep enough into the mulungú, it was extinguished and the inside scraped clean. Across the open end a piece of freshly dried and scraped cowhide was pulled taut and secured.24
The great war drum of the Egba people of Nigeria (a sub-group of the Yoruba), called batá-côtó in Brazil, was made from a large gourd, the upper part of which was covered with a piece of leather. It yielded a sound which some hearers described as ‘hellish’. This drum played a major part in the slave insurrections in Salvador in the early years of the nineteenth century, and its importation into Brazil was forbidden after the insurrection of 1835.25 A goblet-shaped drum with a long supporting leg and nail tension of the skin, called quinjengue in Brazil and found in southern Malawˆ i and northern Mozambique, is used in batuque in Rio Grande do Sul.26
The Brazilian friction drum known as cuíca in the north-east, as puita in São Paulo (it has many other names: roncador, socador, tambor onça, etc.), adds its characteristic querulous sound to much ensemble playing. It is made and played in Brazil much as it is in Angola. A skin is stretched over a hollow cylinder and AFRICAN MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS IN BRAZIL 167
through the centre of the skin is pushed a stick or a leather strip which is rubbed with a moistened hand.27
The mouth bow – i.e. musical bow resonated in the mouth – is widely distributed in Africa.28The benta mouth bow, said to have been taken to Brazil
by Ashanti slaves, was briefly described in 1833 in a German musical journal. It consisted of ‘a rod some three feet long which is strung into a bow with vegetable fibre or gut. The player grasps one end of the string with his teeth and strikes the other with a chip of wood, producing a sound not unlike that of a jaw’s harp [Maultrommel].’29The Angolan mouth bow known as umgunga was called umcanga in Brazil, where it was long supposed to be of Amerindian provenance. Theodor von Leithold, in a passage already quoted (p. 88) testified to the widespread use of the mouth bow in Brazil in the early years of the nineteenth century; he refers to it by two German words for jaws harp, Brummeisen and Maultrommel.30Schlichthorst wrote in 1829 of ‘an instrument
the Negroes frequently play, [consisting] of a single string stretching across a bow of flexible wood, one end of which is held against the teeth’ and adds that jaws harps [Maultrommeln] ‘are also very popular’.31 According to Richard
Graham, many African musical bows fell into disuse among people of African descent in the New World but entered Amerindian cultures, where their names reveal their African origins.32Kay Shaffer tells us that the mouth bow no longer exists anywhere in Brazil, not even in a museum. One was made for Shaffer in Sergipe, apparently in the 1970s, by a 73-year-old woman whose brother had formerly played the instrument. It consisted of a bow of flexible wood about a metre in length, with a string of imbe creeper, a wooden stick to strike the string, and a knife to stop it. It produced a reasonably loud sound. Two cuts were made at the ends of the bow where the string was fixed, and the end of the string was threaded through the cut, turned twice round the wood, and threaded through the cut again. At the other end the same procedure was used, except that before the string was threaded through the cut for the last time it was threaded above its own stretched part, so as to fasten it well. The finer the string, the better and sweeter the sound. The bow was placed on the left shoulder and held in the left hand, as was the knife. The stick with which the string was struck was held in the right hand. The player’s head was turned to the left, and the string passed between his lips, his mouth acting as a sound- chamber. The string was never held by the teeth. Changes in pitch had nothing to do with the position or form of the lips, or of the mouth, or of the knife in contact with the string. The instrument, however simple, seems to have been capable of some flexibility, since the brother of Shaffer’s informant could play on it the Brazilian national anthem and many other popular tunes.33
The basin bow, a kind of zither, is still met with in Brazil occasionally, according to Shaffer, who describes and provides an illustration of one consisting of a bow with a wire string placed above two large wooden blocks, which act as sound-chambers, and held in place by a helper. The player sits on the ground in front of the bow and slides a short cylindrical metal bar along
the string with the left hand so as to produce the note of the desired pitch; the player’s right hand holds another, slightly longer, metal bar with which the sound is produced. It is described as a pleasing sound, which consists not only of the melody but also of a percussive rhythm produced by the other metal bar hitting the wire. The melodic range is wide, and any tune can be played, depending on the player’s skill. Often a basin is slid along the string; hence