
Publications and Research on Brazilian Music
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Forthcoming
Hearing Brazil: Music and Histories in Minas Gerais
University Press of Mississippi
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March, 2020: Milton Nascimento's and Lô Borges’s Corner Club.
Bloomsbury Academic, 33 1/3 Brazil.


My article "Musical Spaces and Deep Regionalism in Minas Gerais, Brazil," (see below) will appear as a chapter in the forthcoming book Musical Spaces: Place, Performance, and Power (Jenny Stanford Publishing, 2021)
2018 "Musical Spaces and Deep Regionalism in Minas Gerais, Brazil,"
Musicology Research Journal, No. 4, Summer 2018.
2017 “Calundu’s ‘Winds of Divination’: Music and Black Religiosity in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil,” Yale Journal of Music and Religion, Vol. 3 No. 2, 2017.
2007 Book review: Lorraine Leu’s Brazilian Popular Music: Caetano Veloso and the Regeneration of Tradition (Ashgate, 2006). Notes/ Journal of the Music Librarians Association.
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2006 Book review: Bryan McCann’s Hello-Hello Brazil.
Journal of Popular Music Studies (18.3, f).
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2004 “Conflation and Conflict in Brazilian Film Music,”
Popular Music, Cambridge University, 23/3
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2003 “Perspectives on Brazilian Popular Music: MC Orpheu and Pluralismo,”
Musical Cultures of Latin America: Global Effects, Past and Present. Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, volume XI. UCLA Ethnomusicology Department.
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1999 “Historical Field Recordings from Brazil:’ Endangered Music’ as Roots of National Idioms,”
Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology. UCLA Ethnomusicology Department.
2008 “Brazilian Popular Music and the Guitar in the Early Life of Heitor Villa-Lobos,”
Soundboard, journal of the Guitar Foundation of America (34/3).


Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais at sunset
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& the bandstand in the municipal park


Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais

Oneyda Alvarenga Historical Recording Archive (São Paulo Cultural Center)
& the Endangered Music Project of the Library of Congress/Mickey Hart’s 360° Productions



From the liner notes of these recordings:

In 1995, with José Eduardo Azevedo (center), & research assistant, at the Oneyda Alvarenga Historical Recording Archive, São Paulo Cultural Center, Brazil. This fieldwork was part of the Endangered Music Project collaboration between the Library of Congress and Mickey Hart’s 360° Productions, and assisted in the release of two Rykodisc CDs in 1997:
The Discoteca Collection: Missão Pesquisa Folclóricas &
L.H. Corrêa de Azevedo: Music of Ceará and Minas Gerais
The American Folklife Center in the
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
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Houses original recordings found on the CDs
The Discoteca Collection: Missão Pesquisa Folclóricas and
L.H. Corrêa de Azevedo: Music of Ceará and Minas Gerais
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The collection includes many more recordings from mid-20th-century fieldwork expeditions, including those representing the now defunct/disappearing work song genre known as vissungo that was specific to Central Minas Gerais. For work on vissungo featured in my forthcoming book Hearing Brazil: Music in Minas Gerais, I researched the audio files and photo documentation collected by L.H. Corrêa de Azevedo in Diamantina, MG.


American Folklife Center
Posing with an antique acetate disk recorder very similar to the one used by L.H. Corrêa de Azevedo in his 1940s-era Brazilian fieldwork
The Clube da Esquina (Corner Club)




Interviewing the accomplished
Minas Gerais musician Tavinho Moura:
composer, songwriter, guitarist ,and champion of the 10-string viola.
Belo Horizonte, MG 2016
With Clube da Esquina lyricist, poet, & writer
Márcio Borges, Santa Monica, CA 2017

The Levy Building in downtown Belo Horizonte, where Milton Nascimento met Lô Borges in the early 1960s. They joined with others to form the Clube da Esquina (Corner Club) collective, later collaborating on the 1972 LP Clube da Esquina, among many others
The Corner Club Museum in Belo Horizonte:
The bar that's a museum; The museum that's a bar
Visit these Clube da Esquina musicians (most sites in Portuguese)


Pilgrimage of sorts to the actual street corner of the Corner Club in the Santa Tereza district of Belo Horizonte, where in 1970, the music collective began to flourish. The Corner Club Museum plaque features lyrics to the song of the same name.

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Belo Horizonte is full of music:
Clube da Esquina legend Toninho Horta (r)
and young guitar virtuoso Thiago Delegado (l)
pictured in 2015

Trad jazz guitar virtuoso Juarez Moreira, a second generation Clube da Esquina musician based in Belo Horizonte.
Scenes from Congado in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais
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A 500-year-old Luso-African tradition of popular Catholicism, Congado is an important genre of Afro-Brazilian music in Minas Gerais and elsewhere. Since 2015, I have been documenting (photos, video, interviews) an Ouro Preto festival called "Faith that Dances and Sings." The ritualized events, parades, Mass, and celebrations commemorate the Virgin Mary, black patron saints such as Saint Ephigenia (of Ethiopia) and Saint Benedict, and a local hero named Chico Rei (King Francisco). A factual historical figure, Chico Rei purchased his and others' freedom, bought the mine he worked as a slave, and helped finance the construction of the Church of Saint Ephigenia.
His descendants live nearby in the Paraopeba River valley.

Guarda de Moçambique of the Alto da Cruz district of Ouro Preto entering the Padre Faria Church for the Missa Congado, a special Mass created for this Afro-Brazilian worship(January, 2015)
The five double-course viola in Minas Gerais

Master luthier Vergílio Lima, Sabará (Minas Gerais)



Luthier and viola collector Max Rosa sharing from his collection rare, late 19th-, early 20th-century violas de Queluz made by the Salgado family.
Precious musical treasures of Minas Gerais.
Nova Lima, MG.
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The viola is also known as the Brazilian ten-string guitar.
Above are violeiros at a Saturday morning gathering at the
Mercado Novo in downtown Belo Horizonte (2015)

Chico Lobo leads participants in a final song to end the first Minas Gerais Viola Festival,
held in 2014 at the SESC Auditorium, Belo Horizonte
Featured speaker,
UC Riverside Noon Lecture Series:
Music of Minas Gerais
