Abstract “The music of sorcery in Brazil” was given as a lecture by Mário de Andrade to the Brazilian Music Association (Associação Brasileira de Música), in Rio de Janeiro, in 1933. The author never managed to complete its revision for publication. This was undertaken by Oneyda Alvarenga, who published the text of the lecture and a series of related documents in Volume XIII - Música de Feitiçaria no Brasil-of the Complete Works of Mário de Andrade (Editora Itatiaia/Instituto Nacional do Livro, 1983, p.23-70). The author is in search for the role of music, with its distinctive rhythms and melodic form, in the mystical trance of Afro-Brazilian religions. The text combines the flavour of his direct research experience in the catimbó of the Brazilian Northeast; his erudite bibliographical studies that were strongly influenced by evolutionary and diffusionist anthropology at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the twentieth; and an analysis of the music of macumba in the Rio de Janeiro around the 1930s as found in the recordings that Andrade so much enjoyed collecting and listening to.
The music of sorcery in Brazil (Literary Conference)