Melodic Profiling in 1930s Brazil: Teaching Listeners to Racialize Melodies and Feel Them Accordingly

Just before his early death in 1931, music teacher Luciano Gallet finished a manuscript for a music textbook. In it, he explained that melodies could be read for their racial character. Melodies arising from the black mind were built on small intervallic jumps, featured frequent repetition, and were often interrupted by shouts. All of these served as evidence of a “primitive way” and “totemic survivals.” These and other lessons of the manuscript reinforced the principles that Gallet was then envisioning as a new way to teach music: he was right then redesigning the curriculum at Brazil’s premiere music conservatory, in Rio de Janeiro. The aim was nothing less than a “complete psycho-psychical education” of music that would bring “national regeneration” through “awakening irresistible anxiety for perfection” in the souls of the young music students.

Join Micah Oelze in this conference talk as he explains how melodic profiling became common curriculum in interwar Brazil, to the point of being common practice among composers and radio-orchestra arrangers. In some cases, composers tried to weave together convincing stories of racial mixing in Brazil by superimposing melodies built on racial logics. In others, composers intentionally associated dissonance, repetition, and shrills with black singers and dancers behind the mic or onstage. It was the beginning of Brazil’s forgotten history of a racialized hermeneutics of melodies, intentionally designed to conditioning listeners to associate specific physical and emotional states with racial and nationalist messages.