{"id":212715,"date":"2016-02-24T19:06:31","date_gmt":"2016-02-24T22:06:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=212715"},"modified":"2016-02-24T19:06:31","modified_gmt":"2016-02-24T22:06:31","slug":"an-electric-guitarist-at-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/an-electric-guitarist-at-college\/","title":{"rendered":"An electric guitarist at college"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Professor

Ricardo Cruzeiro<\/span>Professor and guitarist Budi GarciaRicardo Cruzeiro<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Once maligned to the point of being the target of a 1967 protest march in S\u00e3o Paulo, the electric guitar now enjoys a peaceful coexistence with the more traditional instruments of Brazilian popular music, and this is not just on stage or in the recording studio, but also in college.\u00a0 One of the people responsible for this change in status is instrumentalist and composer Budi Garcia, a professor of music at the Art Institute of the University of Campinas (Unicamp), where he teaches musical structures and electric guitar.<\/p>\n

A Goi\u00e1s State native, Budi \u2013 born Hermilson Garcia do Nascimento \u2013 was part of the initial cohort of popular music at Unicamp back in 1989.\u00a0 Up to that point, he had completed two years of university studies in journalism in Goi\u00e1s, where he\u2019d begun aiming to cover the music scene.\u00a0 Embarking upon a university program in classical music had not appealed to him.\u00a0 When a program that matched his interests was finally established, he found a very lively cohort.\u00a0 \u201cIt was probably a sign of pent-up demand, as maestro Benito Juarez fully expected when he convinced the executive board to approve\u00a0 establishment of a space for popular music at Unicamp,\u201d Garcia says.\u00a0 \u201cIn Brazil, popular music has preserved its close ties to social reality, a fact that really distinguishes it from classical music.\u201d<\/p>\n

If there is any resistance to the popular repertoire in academic circles, the stigma is twice as bad with regard to the electric guitar.\u00a0 \u201cBrazil is the only country that uses different words to distinguish between acoustic guitar (viol\u00e3o<\/em>) and electric guitar (guitarra<\/em>),\u201d Garcia says.\u00a0 The word viol\u00e3o <\/em>came about as a way to differentiate guitarra<\/em> from the \u201chillbilly\u201d guitar (viola<\/em>).\u201d\u00a0 The distinction between acoustic guitar and electric guitar \u00a0came not from the instrument\u2019s electrification (which had already occurred back in the 1930s), but from the emergence of rock music, ideologically identified as undesirable foreign music.\u00a0 \u201cWhat was in play was an affirmation of musical identity, which was really a good thing because in the 1960s, MPB (Brazilian Popular Music) was able to show the world that it was something unique and different,\u201d the musician says.<\/p>\n

\"Heraldo

Eduardo Knapp\/FolhaPress<\/span>Heraldo do Monte, a Brazilian pioneer in electric guitar, Garcia\u2019s inspiration and research topic at UnicampEduardo Knapp\/FolhaPress<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

It was in the 1970s however that Garcia, then a teenager living in Belo Horizonte, became interested in electric guitar and rock music.\u00a0 He had played acoustic guitar since childhood, and the rock phase quickly became what was known at the time as fusion, a mixture of jazz and rock (with a component that also dialogued with the bossa nova and Portuguese-derived choro<\/em>) that had a huge impact on Brazilian musicians like Heraldo do Monte, H\u00e9lio Delmiro and Tonhinho Horta.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo through the electric guitar I was able to reconnect with Brazilian music,\u201d says the professor who is currently engaged in a FAPESP-funded study at Unicamp entitled \u201cThe Brazilian design of guitarist Heraldo do Monte.\u201d\u00a0 Monte, now 80, has always devoted himself to the electric guitar, largely bypassing rock.\u00a0 \u201cHis performances in the 1960s were the driving force behind the distinctly Brazilian style, heavily accented by Northeastern Brazil,\u201d says Garcia.\u00a0 One of Garcia\u2019s academic goals was to continue the work in Brazilian popular music carried out in the field of humanities (sociology, linguistics and particularly history) at a time when only symphonic music had a place in college.<\/p>\n

Although he had become a professor at the Federal University of Uberl\u00e2ndia (UFU) in 1994, Garcia resisted conducting academic research.\u00a0 He did not feel comfortable offering theorization and felt the environment was \u201cresistant to popular music.\u201d\u00a0 He was accustomed to performing at night in Goi\u00e2nia and Belo Horizonte alongside well-known musicians (trombonist Raul de Souza and pianist Wagner Tiso along with those already mentioned) and he was reluctant to get into a world that initially seemed restrictive.\u00a0 The research, although it limited his presence in recordings and live appearances, did not keep him away from big names. His 2001 master\u2019s thesis was about pianist Cust\u00f3dio Mesquita, a figure from Brazil\u2019s golden era of radio.\u00a0 For his dissertation, Garcia came back to maestro Cyro Pereira, an important name in the festival phase of the 1960s, who was his professor at Unicamp.\u00a0 Now he is studying Heraldo do Monte.<\/p>\n

Priorities have completely shifted for Budi Garcia and academic tasks now consume nearly all of his time \u2013 although, given the nature of music, practice and theory go hand in hand.\u00a0 The researcher ended up becoming skilled in reconciling the two activities.\u00a0 Production outside the university has been rather dormant since 2007 when he released his solo CD, Azul Marin<\/em>. \u201cToday, my approach is more impromptu,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

His attention is now on that place where, as an undergraduate, he was aroused by several aspects of music \u2013 among them the orchestral arrangements taught by Cyro Pereira and the inspiration that came from classical music when it \u201cinvaded\u201d classes such as those taught by composer Almeida Prado.\u00a0 \u201cI drenched myself in that environment.\u00a0 It was very transformative,\u201d Garcia says.\u00a0 His goal now is to expand his studies on Heraldo do Monte into a larger project that uses the notion of a Brazilian electric guitar to explore the development of new languages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unicamp professor, Budi Garcia, is rethinking Brazilian popular music","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[154],"tags":[248],"coauthors":[137],"class_list":["post-212715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts","tag-music"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212715\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212715"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=212715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}