mony in longer note values. One of the distinguishing features of the ensemble is
the use of the guitars as the principal accompaniment. The early innovators of the
style developed a type of guitar virtuosity that has remained unparalleled in Latin
American popular music. Generally speaking, there are two guitars and a requinto ,
which is a type of small lead guitar. With regard to texture, the two standard guitars
perform an accompaniment, often in different registers, while the requinto either
supplies a melodic lead, or embellishes the sections between the sung verses. This is
demonstrated in Los Panchos recordings of “Caminemos,” “Contigo,” and “Sin ti.”
Another option is for the requinto player to play a melodic duet with the first gui-
tarist while the second guitarist plays a bolero rhythm underneath.
While it is not unusual for trios to perform without percussion, on recordings
and live performances a small Latin American rhythm section often accompa-
nies the group. The rhythm section evolved out of the Afro-Cuban practice of
layered percussion, which provides a composite dance rhythm (e.g., bolero, son,
etc.). Most often the rhythm instruments consist of maracas , bongos / timbals , and upright bass. The maracas generally play a common timeline pattern of steady
416 | Tropicália
eighth notes, while the timbal (if used) plays rhythmic variations of the other
timeline patterns. Sometimes the timbal player will strike the side of the drum
frame with the sticks, a technique known as paila or cascara. The identity of the
percussionists is generally unknown to us; the focus is on the three members of
the trio, and the rhythm section only serves as an anonymous backup. Neverthe-
less, the rhythm section of the tríos was important in maintaining a steady dance
rhythm, and their inclusion in recordings and in live performance was crucial for
the success of the sound.
Although the commercial success of the trío romántico largely ended by the
1960s, the trío romántico remains a popular ensemble for a variety of social occa-
sions including, serenatas, weddings, and restaurant engagements, where they per-
form al talon (that is, they take requests and charge by the song). The relative ease
of performance, due to the portability of the group, along with a shared repertoire
that was firmly established by 1960, makes it easy for trios to perform in a variety
of contexts. There are tríos románticos all over Latin America and in cities in the
United States that have a Latin American population. One can safely say that they
remain the most popular of all Latin American ensembles.
Further Reading
Ortíz, Ramos P. M. A Tres Voces Y Guitarras: Los Tríos En Puerto Rico. San Juan, P.R:
s.n., 1991.
Ortíz, Ramos P. M. El Trío Los Panchos: Historia Y Crónica. San Juan, P.R: P.M. Ortíz
Ramos, 2004.
Torres, George. “The Bolero Romántico: From Cuban Dance to International Popular
Song.” In From Tejano to Tango: Essays on Latin American Popular Music, edited by Wal-
ter A. Clark, 151–71. New York: Garland, 2002.
George Torres
Tropicália
Tropicália was a Brazilian musical movement in the late 1960s that was formed
mainly by Bahian composers and interpreters, such as leaders Caetano Veloso and
Gilberto Gil, composer Tom Zé, singers Gal Costa and Nara Leão, lyricists Tor-
quato Neto and Capinam, the group Mutantes, and arrangers Rogério Duprat, Dami-
ano Cozzella, and Júlio Medalha. The collective album-manifesto that these artists
collaborated on, Tropicália, ou panis et circensis (1968), is the ultimate Tropicalista
musical reference. Tropicália represented a major rupture in Brazilian esthetics due
to its behavioral, cultural and political implications, which is at a point of conver-
gence of several radical artistic vanguards (like the modernist anthropophagy of
the 1920s, and concrete poetry of the 1950s) and other turning points like bossa
Tropicália
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417
nova . Despite its short life, Tropicália
remained influential to many artists
who were in tune with its counter-
cultural, ironic, rebellious, and an-
tinationalistic sentiments. After its
antiestablishment start,
Tropicália
quickly became highly prestigious
and commercially successful, attain-
ing a ubiquitous status in the media.
It commemorated 30 years in 1998,
enjoying mainstream acclaim.
Tropicália emerged during a revo-
lutionary moment when Brazil was
being traversed by several contradic-
tory forces. While many Brazilians
wanted to join the transnational com-
munity that was enjoying the Bea-
tles’s rock music, antiwar protests,
and the counterculture movement, Gilberto Gil, a central fi gure in Brazilian Trop-
they also considered it necessary to icália, performs on stage during a concert in
actively oppose the rightwing mili- 2007. (AP/Wide World Photos)
tary dictatorship imposed by the
1964 coup. This contradiction is illustrated in a prevalent oversimplified opposi-
tion between MPB and Tropicália. According to this narrative, MPB songs repre-
sented an ideal of resistance against the dictatorship and the international political
and economic powers associated with it. As a consequence, in the esthetic field,
MPB drew mainly from Brazilian genres, which stood for the Brazilian masses.
Rock music and other Anglo-American styles, even musical instruments such as the
electric guitar, were associated with imperialism and the dictatorship, and conse-
quently banned from 1960s MPB. The artists of this movement were suspicious of
consumerism and the mass media, which they saw as a necessary evil. They wore
everyday clothes in their performances and tried to behave not as superstars, but as
average middle-class people. Due to censorship, their song lyrics relied heavily on
metaphor to convey hidden leftist oppositional messages, encouraging the masses
to resist the dictatorship.
Conversely, the Tropicalista composers made use of all of MPB’s forbidden
icons with the very aim of provoking scandal among the leftist nationalists. Their
music juxtaposed national and transnational genres (in which the electric guitar
played a prominent role) and their lyrics were not leftist but surreal and anarchic
(for example, those of “It is Forbidden to Forbid”). Juxtaposition was central to
Tropicália, which merged contradictions such as the modern/archaic, the national/
foreign, and high/mass culture; artists used star appeal, fashion, and the mass media
418 | Tropicália
to challenge MPB’s populist ideals of authenticity. In comparison to the didactic
approach of protest songs, Tropicalista production seemed chaotic, nihilistic, and
aimless when the genre emerged. The actual impact of this music’s critique was
only appreciated when its major innovators Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil were
arrested and exiled by the military in 1968 in the midst of the release of Institutional
Act 5 (AI-5), which opened the way for the most violent period of the dictatorship.
> Tropicália was not merely a rupture emanating from a small group of middle-
class musicians, but an organic movement embracing the entirety of Brazilian so-
ciety. In 1967, film director and writer Glauber Rocha launched his masterpiece
Terra em Transe, which became highly influential as a vision of Brazil for all those
who would propose Tropicália -like movements in the visual arts, theater, literature,
fashion, and music. Though similar in many ways, none of these movements was
consciously interrelated, and in the words of influential Tropicalista theater direc-
tor José Celso Martinez Corrêa, instead of a Tropicalista movement, there was a
confluence of anxieties brought by social movements that were being formed. This
draws the attention to the intense change of mentality that was happening among
the common people as opposed to the conservative romantic leftist idealism of the
intellectual leaders criticized by Rocha in his film. To agree with Corrêa adding
to a deeper understanding of the cultural struggles of the 1960s, new evidence
shows that MPB audiences were attracted by the genre and movement called Jovem
Guarda, which existed before Tropicália and was a Brazilian version of the 1960s
British neorock, complete with the accompanying generational criticism brought
by the new adolescent behaviors. As such, Jovem Guarda was harshly criticized
by nationalist-leftist ideologues, as Tropicália would be. When Tropicália came to
light, many listeners identified both with MPB and Tropicália, which relativizes
dichotomies, oppositions and neat categorizations, and establishes both denomina-
tions as two faces of the same process.
Tropicália’s music relies on a frenetic carnivalization of musical genres, fusing
the urban samba to Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” rural baião to Jimi Hendrix, martial marches to bolero (regarded as kitsch by the middle classes), and bossa nova to outdated styles from 1930s radio. Rejecting protest song’s epic, heroic activism, Trop-
icália adopted a cynical attitude through the mixture of discrepant elements. Instead
of proposing concrete answers for the end of the dream of economic development
of the 1950s, the Tropicalistas expressed hopelessness through ironic laughter. In
this vein, one of the icons appropriated by Tropicália from the start was Carmen
Miranda, who was generally taken by middle-class Brazilians to be an exotic and
incongruous mixture of Brazilian clichés for tourists and American colonialism.
A literary influence that was soon appropriated by the nascent Tropicalista move-
ment was modernist writer and critic Oswald de Andrade’s concept of anthropoph-
agy, which consisted in a critical appropriation of developed countries’ technology
and culture as a means to lessen the cultural and economic discrepancies between
Tropicália
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419
those countries and Brazil. Thus, the Tropicalistas assimilated international pop
music ironically, and that appropriation took hold in the national imaginary, raising
public awareness of imperialism. The Tropicalistas denounced Brazilian underde-
velopment and social injustice by juxtaposing, not opposing, the country’s archaic
and modern stages of development, including its transnational fluxes, thus denying
the possibility of any synthesis arising from the contradiction between thesis and
antithesis, as the Marxist intellectuals would have it.
Escaping definitions, the Tropicalistas produced an allegory of Brazil that was
very much attuned to posterior postmodern theorizations like indeterminacy, a chal-
lenge to the stable categories of reason. A look into one of the songs from the
Tropicália album, “Lindonéia,” illustrates these indeterminacy effects. Lindonéia,
the song’s protagonist, was inspired by a serigraphy by Rubens Gerchman, “Lin-
donéia, a Gioconda do Subúrbio,” which was, in turn, inspired by the life and dis-
appearance of an actual person, a 20-something girl from the lower classes, who
lived in a working-class neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. As a missing person, the
real-life Lindonéia hit the headlines and achieved notoriety after a life of obscurity,
which is, in itself, ironic, and prompted comments on mass media by Gerchman’s
work. The lyrics of “Lindonéia” juxtapose images of tropical violence (“Torn into
pieces/ Hit by cars/Dogs dead in the streets/Policemen watching/The sun hitting
the fruits/Bleeding”) with the insignificance of Lindonéia’s life (commenting on
prosaic, quotidian issues of her life). The juxtaposition of images of development
with images of death and mutilation make fail all attempts to a synthesis, explod-
ing the text into a multitude of significations. However, the music itself conveys
indeterminacy. The song plays with the conventions of the sentimental and outdated
bolero genre, opposing it to both bossa nova and iê-iê-iê styles (yeah yeah yeah a reference to popular songs by the Beatles such as “She Loves You”), associated
with modernization. Iê-iê-iê is a Brazilian genre produced by the Jovem Guarda
movement mentioned above that was inspired by 1960s Anglo-American rock, and
was taken to be an uncritical emulation of the colonizers’ music, which implies
irony. The ironic use of iê-iê-iê by the Tropicalistas also conveys “Lindonéia’s”
indeterminacy: the irony was a challenge to nationalist discourses and implied the
contradictions of Brazilian society, in which some people could be attuned to First
World culture and technology while others like Lindonéia would barely survive.
However, the meanings of the song’s text (both music and lyrics) were indetermi-
nate. In “Lindonéia,” there was no explicit political statement, nor any attempt to
construe a direct relationship between dictatorship and violence. Nara Leão’s ab-
solutely colloquial and bossa nova –like rendition broke away from dramatic styles
associated with unambiguous denunciation. The same can be said of the musical
sounds as a whole, which remind the listener of the protagonist’s alienation and so-
cial condition through an antiquated bolero. The bolero, one of the genres used in
“Lindonéia,” is appropriate for connoting sentimentality and a lack of middle-class
420 | Trova
Tradicional
sophistication. The critical intention only emerges from the decoding of the song,
which depends on each listener’s critical and cultural literacy in the conventions of
the genres utilized by the song; ultimately, however, the song’s discourse is inde-
terminate—as is that of Tropicália.
Further Reading
Dunn, Christopher. Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian
Counterculture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Veloso, Caetano, and Barbara Einzig. Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution
in Brazil. New York: A. A. Knopf, 2002.
Alvaro Neder
Trova Tradicional (Vieja Trova)
Trova tradicional is an old-style song genre that grew popular in Cuba at the end
of the 19th century. It takes its place within the history of Cuba’s tradition of po-
etic songs that express the feelings of their time. Song genres of the 20th century
that emanate from trova tradicional include nueva trova from the 196
0s, novisima trova, performed by the generation of song artists from the 1980s referred to
as generacion de los topos, and, from later in the decade, the younger trovadores
who met with poets at events such as live acoustic music series known as Guitarra
Limpia and Puntal Alto. Trova tradicional’s own antecedents are in the national-
ist song genre cancion cubana, exhibiting both patriotic and lyrical aspects. With
its birthplace in Santiago de Cuba, trova tradicional spread throughout Cuba with
important centers in the cities of Sancti Spiritus and Havana. Its popularity was at
its height between 1900 and 1925.
The Sancti Spiritus trova had its earliest origins in the choruses of claves and
tonadas . In Havana, the trovadores of the island popularized their work through
live concerts, radio, and recording performances. The Cuban comic theater troupes
took the trova into Central America and Mexico where it also grew in popularity.
Many types of trova songbooks, serving diverse aims, were published following
the turn of the century. These publications were commercially successful and en-
joyed wide distribution.
Trova singers were characteristically bohemian and festive in spirit. They tended
to come from the working classes, especially trades that were both social and prac-
tical such as barbers, tobaccanists, and tailors. The music also developed in social
settings as the singers performed serenatas for lovers and birthdays or for celebra-
tions of saints’ days. Trova did much to promote the figure of the singer with a
guitar, although it was common for two singers be accompanied by guitars. The
Trova
Tradicional
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421
practice of performing boleros with two voices ( prima and segunda voz ) is a genre that arose from this regional context of Spirit Sanctus trova.
Trova tradicional made use of an ample variety of musical expressions and the
trova singers incorporated into the core of their repertoire such important styles as
habaneras , criollas, guarachas , canciones, claves, sones, and bambucos . Trovadores have also been central to the practice of Carnival. Since the end of the 19th
century, trova singers had as their charge the words and music of district compar-
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