Composers of the Unconscious
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Composers of the Unconscious tracks a generation of music educators and composers across Brazil in the 1930s who partnered with ethnographers and psychologists in an ambitious nationalist project: they hoped to speed up the evolution of a Brazilian collective unconscious. The group believed convinced that music was the technology best suited to achieve the psychological evolution. The book uses letters, government documents, ethnographic recordings, and symphony manuscripts from some twenty different archives across the country to show how psychology permanently transformed Brazilian music.
The book offers musicologists new ways of analyzing Brazilian music and then offers musicians and historians the chance to hear music with new ears. All readers walk away with an understanding of the profound connection between sound and social engineering in the twentieth century. |