The enactment of the field of cultural and artistic production of popular music in Brazil: a case study of the ‘Noel Rosa Generation’ in the 1930s

Abstract

The electromagnetic recording system came to Brazil in 1927 – just about two years or so after its establishment in Europe and the United States. With its higher technical specificities and capabilities, the electromagnetic system provided an opportunity for high-pitch and low-voice interpreters of song to be recorded. It seems likely that these artists would not have been recorded at that time had the mechanical system still been in vogue. At least in Brazil, this was the ‘revolution’ associated with the electromagnetic recording system: a new artistic generation emerged from the poor and middle-class inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro – then Brazil's capital city – to help produce what most prominent popular music critics and historians dub the ‘Golden Age’ in Brazilian popular music (see, for instance, Vasconcellos 1974; Tinhorão 1981; Cabral 1996). In my view, this Golden Age coincides with and is tantamount to the inception of a field of cultural and artistic production of popular music. Despite an obvious contrast in proportion and impact, there are nevertheless clear sociological similarities between this decisive moment in the history of Brazilian popular music and those moments Bourdieu (1993) describes in nineteenth-century French literature, theatre and impressionist painting.