(Re)cantos de saudade da terra natal: a construção sonora do nordeste na obra de Luiz Gonzaga (1941-1968)

Abstract

The present paper proposes to discuss how a certain regime of audibility linked to the northeastern region was organized from the instrumentalization of a sound archive linked to this region in the work of the accordion player from Pernambuco, Luiz Gonzaga (1912-1989). To do so, we will concentrate the analysis on the artist's performance on the radio, more specifically on the program "No Mundo do Baião" (1950-1951), starring him and his main songwriting partners - Humberto Teixeira (1915-1979) and Zé Dantas (1921-1962) - on Rádio Nacional. Starting from this documentation and clipping, we seek to show how the construction of given spatialities is linked to a symbolic apprehension and composition of space, which in the case in question involves the articulation of elements, sound marks and fundamental sounds attributed to the Northeast and that confer on the region a pretended aesthetic, cultural and formal purity. A deeper analysis of Luiz Gonzaga's work will allow us to understand the historical conditions of possibility for the emergence of the baião and the other rhythms influenced by Gonzaga in the enunciation of a Northeastern soundscape through the mechanisms of radio production in Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s. In this sense, this paper will seek to narrate the process of composition of this spatiality in Gonzaga's work through the articulation of formal and aesthetic elements and the "sound archive" that tried to fix to the region its alleged authenticity and purity, with the material conditions of production, reception and circulation of music in the large centers of Brazil in the exposed cut, as well as the trajectory of the artist himself, his paths and mishaps until his consecration as an "artist from the brazillian Northeast".