Tag Archives: interview

Postnationalism in the Street Carnival of Rio de Janeiro

Pre-carnival parade of Céu na Terra. Photo by Andrew Snyder.

For the next five days, the streets of Rio de Janeiro will fill with the sounds of diverse musical traditions. The music of carnival has traditionally played an important role in Brazilian national identity, explains Andrew Snyder in “From Nationalist Rescue to Internationalist Cannibalism: The Alternative Carnivalesque, Brass, and the Revival of Street Carnival in Rio de Janeiro,” from the Luso-Brazilian Review. Snyder shows, however, how new movements are expanding Rio’s street carnival repertoires, creating diverse new affinities and identities. In the following interview, he describes the ethnographic fieldwork that led him to write the article, including his experience playing trumpet among the four hundred musicians of Orquesta Voadora (the Flying Orchestra) in Rio’s street carnival.


How did you decide to pursue this topic?

This Luso-Brazilian Review article was part of my dissertation research for my PhD in ethnomusicology, and it examines the national and international repertoires of the brass movement known as neofanfarrismo (“new brass band-ismo”) that emerged from Rio de Janeiro’s street carnival. I came very haphazardly to write my dissertation on this musical community and its engagements in local activism. Though I had always loved and played Brazilian music and had majored in music and Romance languages, my earliest graduate studies were focused elsewhere. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street exploded, and I found at those protests the Brass Liberation Orchestra (BLO), a brass band in the Bay Area that emerged to play solely for protests during the 2003 Iraq War and is still going strong. Though I was also a music major focused on guitar and piano, I hadn’t been playing trumpet much, but I was quickly swept up into playing in the BLO during those exciting political times. Now trumpet is my main performing instrument!

In 2012, we played at the HONK! Festival of Activist Street Bands in the Boston area, where alternative and activist brass bands play on the streets for free in support of social and political causes. Through that festival network, I learned of a vibrant musical world in Rio de Janeiro where brass ensembles historically connected to the street carnival were experimenting with diverse global repertoires and playing on the front lines of protest. In search of a dissertation topic, I first visited Rio de Janeiro for a preliminary fieldwork trip during the momentous 2013 June protests, which these bands were musically supporting. Still, I couldn’t grasp the full, massive scope of what goes on in the neofanfarrismo community until undertaking fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro between 2014 and 2016 spanning two carnival seasons. This was a fascinating eighteen months between the World Cup and the Olympics and, in retrospect, it was the beginning of the end of the Workers’ Party and the Pink Tide, which had helped set the conditions for the street carnival revival to explode in the early twenty-first century.

What is one part of your research that surprised you, and why?

It would be quite an understatement to say that the neofanfarrismo community “surprised me”—more that it stunned me—but I would say that the biggest thing that stuck with me is the difference between a musical scene and musical movement, the street carnival and neofanfarrismo communities most certainly being the latter. I had no concept of the level of dedication and organization that could be put into community-led mass street music events. The scale of carnival beyond the samba schools, which I also participated in and are also amazing, is bafflingly awe-inspiring. The main group I worked with, Orquestra Voadora, the band that really pushed the neofanfarrismo community beyond traditional repertoires like the marchinha (traditional carnival songs), is a band of about 15 people who organize around 400 people to play for over 100,000 people on carnival day. That’s not even a really big bloco (carnival music ensemble). The more traditional brass bloco Bola Preta brings two million to the streets!

Despite, or because of, this enormity, the neofanfarrismo community is incredibly close-knit and collaborative, with musicians actively working through oficinas (classes or workshops) to teach music to other people. The “-ismo” suffix really underlines the fact that the bands are not just a loosely-connected scene but a social movement. Though the Bay Area also has a vibrant musical scene, I can’t say that there is anything that comes close to neofanfarrismo in the United States; though the international HONK! movement and New Orleans come to mind as related phenomena, they seem quite small in comparison. I certainly believe that this difference between the countries is especially due to the availability of playing in, and yes also drinking in, public space. I have come to see the ways public space is regulated as being a crucial part of the abilities of social movements, especially culturally defined ones, to thrive. Scenes are what evolve in a more splintered cultural worlds like the Bay Area where we are bound to celebrate most often in private clubs.

How did your role as a musician combine with your role as an ethnomusicologist to guide the direction of your research?

As a professional trumpet player, I was immediately “dentro do cordão,” or inside the cords that separate bloco musicians from the crammed audiences that would follow the musicians. It would certainly be possible to study street carnival and neofanfarrismo from alternative perspectives (which some are doing), focusing, for example, on the experiences of the audience or what it is like to be a new musician learning in the movement’s oficinas. But certainly playing trumpet was an asset in accessing “key informants,” getting the insider perspectives, and being a “participant-observer.” That research methodology language really does not capture my experience with the community, however, which could be summed up, with all due respect to more “sober” disciplines, by what I would tell people at the time: if you can’t do academic research while playing music and drinking in the street, is it really worth doing?

As a trumpeter, I was able to play in almost all of the bands and blocos I wrote about. I taught trumpet in the oficinas and participated in their movement of mass musical education. In 2016, I went on tour with the Carioca band Bagunço for five weeks in France. I helped organize the very first HONK! Rio Festival de Fanfarras Ativistas, which Mission Delirium, a band I co-founded, attended in 2015. The HONK! festivals are grass-roots international street/brass band festivals that originated in the US in 2006 and are spreading around the world. There are now five HONK! Festivals in Brazil alone! During preparations for that first festival, I and some co-organizers were robbed at gunpoint in Santa Teresa, and I lost my trumpet, my most crucial “fieldwork tool.” The local community took it upon themselves to organize busking events to help me, an American researcher, with the finances of my loss. I can’t speak for my informants, but I felt known first and foremost as a musician who was firmly part of the movement, rather than a researcher. I wouldn’t want to have done it any other way.


Andrew Snyder’s research explores the political and social impacts of mass public festivity, especially focused on brass and percussion ensembles in diverse locations including Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans, San Francisco, and beyond. He completed a PhD in Ethnomusicology at UC Berkeley in 2018 with a dissertation focused on the carnival brass band community in Rio de Janeiro, the basis for his current book project with Wesleyan University Press. Beyond his article in the Luso-Brazilian Review, his research appears in Journal of Popular Music Studies, Latin American Review, Yearbook for Traditional Music, and Ethnomusicology, and he is co-editor of HONK! A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism (Routledge 2020). An avid trumpet player in diverse musical groups, he is co-founder of San Francisco’s Mission Delirium Brass Band, which has toured to Brazil and throughout Europe. Currently a Research Associate at UC Santa Cruz, he has taught at UC Berkeley, University of the Pacific, and UC Davis.

Last Days of Theresienstadt

John Tortorice, Director Emeritus of the George L. Mosse Program in History, sits down with Skye Doney, the translator and editor of a new book in the Mosse Series, Last Days of Theresienstadt by Eva Noack-Mosse.

 

John Tortorice: Eva Noack-Mosse was a trained journalist who valued detail, distance, objectivity. She was related through her father to one of the most influential German Jewish publishing houses that was active throughout Germany prior to 1933. She came from a family of well-educated, strong, resilient, notable women, including her cousin Martha Mosse, a lawyer. How did her background affect her writing of the diary?

Skye Doney: One of the most impressive aspects of the Noack-Mosse diary is that it is so well-written. As a prisoner, Noack-Mosse renders her personal experiences of daily life in Theresienstadt in striking detail. At the same time, as a journalist, she is able to stand back from her own hardships to document the crimes and brutality around.

Throughout her ordeal, she identifies reasons not to despair. These range from engaging conversations with friends and family to small acts of kindness she observes among the inmates. Noack-Mosse also sees beauty in the nature both within and around the camp—most notably, the birds nesting outside her barracks window.

John Tortorice: This comes across as an authentic account of diary entries, yet you also note that it has been edited after the War. How did you deal with the juxtaposition of what sounds like on the spot observation and retrospective editing?

Skye Doney: The document from George L. Mosse’s archive is best understood as an annotated diary or as a hybrid diary-memoir. Noack-Mosse acknowledges that she typed up the work before sending it on to George L. Mosse. But her “supplemental text” greatly enriches the account. For instance, she writes in Theresienstadt of the agony of composing a thirty-word postcard home that must also survive censorship. Then, she interjects that after the war only one of the eight postcards she wrote made it home. Additions like these render the work a text that is both present and past. For readers, I have offset these retrospective interjections in italics throughout.

John Tortorice: Noack-Mosse gives a scrupulous account of what is happening in a world of great cruelty and death, yet without any self-pity. Her ability to empathize with herself and her situation is still intact, yet what happens is not “about” her?

Skye Doney: Right, yes, she actually resolves to document her experience before she learns she will be deported to Theresienstadt. From the outset, she notes that “I have written down how I experienced Theresienstadt in order that their [the those who died in Theresienstadt] sacrifice should not be in vain. So that there shall never be a second Theresienstadt anywhere in the world.” She is tasked with typing up endless lists for the SS, so she learns quickly that the Nazis have perpetuated an unspeakable crime. She writes so that no one will forget. Her own experience stood in for everyone unable to write their own story.

John Tortorice: How did you convey a nuanced voice in translation? Was your approach to interpret freely rather than attempt perfect transparency? The manuscript was jointly translated by you and Professor Birutė Ciplijauskaitė. How did this affect how you approached the translation? Did your translation styles, your translation “voice” differ?

Skye Doney: Professor Ciplijauskaitė began the translation before falling ill in 2016. She passed away in June 2017. She was a great friend of the Mosse Program and helped with many translations after her retirement from the UW-Madison Department of Spanish & Portuguese.

Yes, we had very different approaches. Professor Ciplijauskaitė completed the first portion of the translation and adopted a very literal approach. For example, she translated the ranks of German SS officers. I went back over her work to reintroduce the nuance and wit of Noack-Mosse’s language. And part of that “re-translation” work was to heavily annotate the text with explanatory notes. In the end, this was a collaborative effort, as the annotations were supplemented by your comments, by the then Mosse Program Project Assistant, Kilian Harrer, as well as by the anonymous peer reviewers. Together we have preserved Eva Noack-Mosse’s candid perspective and beautiful prose.

John Tortorice: Tell me about her correspondence with her second cousin, the historian George L. Mosse? What was their relationship like after the war?

Skye Doney: Very friendly. Noack-Mosse calls him “Georgie” in some of their correspondence. It is clear that they met frequently in Munich when Mosse traveled to Germany for research. They also shared many mutual friends and discussed the family efforts to get back property stolen by the Nazis after the war. You can read some of their correspondence at the end of Last Days of Theresienstadt.

 

Noack-Mosse also asked for help with getting her memoir translated and published. For the Mosse Program, we are honored to complete this request first made in the 1950s.

 

Skye Doney is the Director of the George L. Mosse Program in History and a Series Editor for the Mosse Series in European Cultural and Intellectual History. He received his PhD in German History from UW-Madison in 2016.

John Tortorice is Director Emeritus of the George L. Mosse Program in History and a Series Advisor for the Mosse Series in European Cultural and Intellectual History. He directed the Mosse Program for nearly twenty years before his retirement in May 2017.