Os sons de África nos primeiros anos do Estado Novo: Entre exotismo e «vocação imperial»

Abstract

This article attempts to clarify the way in which, during the thirties and forties of the 20th century, the musical elements connotated with what was then called «black music» were treated in Portugal. It starts with a discussion of the reception of Jazz and of black art during the twenties, followed by an analysis of the modes of presentation of African art objects and practices in the spaces of colonial exhibitions and in the discourse of the journal O Mundo Português, which are expressions of the imperial model produced by the Estado Novo. We finally examine in a comparative perspective the route followed by two composers who reelaborated in their music the images that the metropolis had built around African music: Frederic de Frets, who in his Suite colonial reproduced a soundscape which refers to a primitivist aesthetics, and Belo Marques, a composer who through the use of materials he had gathered in Mozambique, attempted to produce a synthesis between indigenous traditions and Western music.