Reshaping sound in the 1970s: fusion and experimentation in Som Imaginário’s album Matança do Porco
Maria Beatriz Cyrino Moreira
Maria Beatriz Cyrino Moreira is assistant professor at UNILA (Federal University of Latin American Integration). She holds a bachelor’s degree in piano performance and popular music studies from UNICAMP (State University of Campinas, São Paulo). Her primary research area is popular music studies focusing on Brazilian’s popular music of the 1970s with special attention to Som Imaginário (Masters’s Thesis) and the multi-instrumentalist composer Egberto Gismonti (Doctoral Dissertation). She has recently finished a post-doctoral research period at Sorbonne University in Paris during which she studied Audiotactile Musicology with particular interest in the relationship between popular and classical musics under this approach. She currently works on the research of Latin American music for piano, especially pieces written by women composers. She is also a member of the Latin American branch of the International Association of Musicology (ARLAC-IMS).
Matança do porco is Som Imaginário’s third album, released in 1973 by Odeon (an EMI subsidiary). The group had previously worked with Brazilian composer and singer Milton Nascimento, reshaping his sound and image, pursuing the new cultural trends of 1960s. Matança do porco is an entirely instrumental album with aesthetic unit due to the vignettes, short tracks that are interspersed with longer-lasting pieces. In them, musical themes present on the album are recreated through varied instrumental combinations. Since 1968, Brazilian popular music had gone through a new phase of “modernization” that called into question the models derived from bossa nova and the so-called MPB [Música Popular Brasileira – Brazilian Popular Music]. The album is the result of this context, arranged according to the material and technological possibilities within the Brazilian phonographic landscape of the early 1970s. Elements of rock and pop music were incorporated along with sambajazz, bolero, progressive rock, jazz fusion and symphonic music, resulting in hybrid musical pieces. The album has become a reference for other Brazilian groups and artists in the following decades. This presentation aims at introducing the group, its formation and its specific musical aspects, especially those that make Matança do porco associated with Brazilian progressive rock.
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References
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Matança do Porco
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-Zh-af1FIs&t=14s
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MOREIRA, Maria Beatriz Cyrino. Fusões de gêneros e estilos na produção musical da banda Som Imaginário. 2011. 266 p. Master’s Thesis – UNICAMP - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Artes, Campinas, SP.