ASMAC (American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers) presents
Five Centuries of Music in Brazil
Jovino Santos Neto

I am looking forward to having you aboard our musical train that departs on 13 April 2024; one that crisscrosses the country where I was born over time and space. We will be listening through centuries of musical traditions mixed and blended by all kinds of circumstances: historical, political, religious, cultural. Our music reflects the passage of time like the rings inside a tree.

Brazil was the first large-scale ethnic miscegenation experiment of the world. A very interesting sequence of events gave rise to one of the most complex and multicolored musical cultures ever to exist on this planet. Blending banto, nago and yoruba rhythmic languages brought over by slave ships from all over the African continent with powerful Arabic and Persian modes and scales steeped over centuries in Iberia, Brazilian music continues to be seasoned in the deep tropics of South America, inspired by a native musical language that not only brought flutes and shakers, but also proved to be the perfect catalytic social enzyme, acting as the ideal glue to join these disparate elements.

In our session, we will contemplate the arrival of the Viennese court music of the 1800s, the modern American and European influences and how Brazilian musicians always managed to make their music sound uniquely Brazilian through 5 centuries of miscegenation and influences.

—Jovino Santos Neto
https://www.jovisan.net/