Modinhas and lundus: (subtitle yet to be decided)

When studying Brazilian colonial music, two genres stand out as the most prominent

in the era: modinhas and lundus. Showcases of the intense miscegenation Brazil has gone

through since it became Portugal’s largest colony, these vocal genres are the roots of more

well-known song genres that developed in following centuries, such as samba and bossa

nova. By briefly analyzing the history of these genres—as well as their most prominent

composer, Caldas Barbosa—, the society that embraced them and the literary trends in vogue,

this work aims to understand how distant love sung in prose and verse during the colonial

period was from everyday life and whether it reflected or not the asymmetric practices

between the sexes, which have been discussed by various authors.

The endeavor of producing an academic work on Brazilian music of the eighteenth

century is always confronted with the scarcity of previous musicological works on that field.

A good number of accomplished scholars—such as Andrade1, Behague2, Kiefer3 and

Tinhorão4—have helped strengthen the corpus of musicological works on modinhas and

lundus, but, as Kiefer points out, they were only able draw their conclusions by resorting

almost solely to literary documents, travel journals, government acts and letters.5 The period

studied in this work, particularly, is even more deficient in studies of both genres, as opposed

to the works on the more italianized nineteenth-century modinhas.

It is reasonable to ascertain, however, that both modinhas and lundus are directly

connected to the history of the Portuguese overseas expansion. This translates to the necessity

1
Mário de Andrade, Modinhas Imperiais (São Paulo: Casa Chiarato L. G. Miranda Editora, 1930)
2
Gerard Behágue, “Biblioteca da Ajuda (Lisbon) MSS 1595-1596: Two Eighteenth-Century Anonymous
Collections of Modinhas,” Yearbook, InterAmerican Institute for Musical Research, 1968 (44-81).
3
Bruno Kiefer, A modinha e o lundu: duas raizes da musica popular brasileira (Porto Alegre: Movimento,
1986).
4
José Ramos Tinhorão, Os sons que vêm da rua (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2005).
5
Kiefer, A modinha e o lundu, 7.
of understanding that, as Lima puts it, to think about Brazilian culture is to reflect how

Portugal, over the course of several centuries, sought to instill in its colonies all over the

world a European, monarchical, capitalist culture based on its own desires.6 Lima relates the

popularity of modinhas—songs that would shock the most conservative members of

Portuguese society—to the ascension to power of the Marquis of Pombal¸ a liberal reformer

influenced by the Age of Enlightenment, in the first half of the seventeenth century.7

The word modinha is the diminutive form of moda, which primarily means “fashion”,

“fad” in Portuguese, but in this context is a generic term for any given song. As Lima

observes, before the Marquis of Pombal era, songs in Portugal were generically classified as

“romance”, “ária”, “cantiga”, or “moda”. However, after the second half of the seventeenth

century, the word “modinha” appears with increasing frequency in music and poetry

literatures.8

It is also commonly accepted, especially among Brazilian musicologists, that the

genre owes much of its importance to the work of one person, Domingo Caldas Barbosa, a

Brazilian mulatto priest, poet, composer, singer and viola player who left Brazil ca. 1770 for

Lisbon, bringing the genre to the metropolis9. Kiefer points out that many of the documents

of the time refer to the songs he sang as “modinhas brasileiras”. One of them, a testimony

from the Portuguese Antônio Ribeiro dos Santos, is quite revealing on how the new genre

was a break with the ancient forms of song and how the Portuguese conservative elite reacted

to the new fad: “Young men and maidens sang love songs so decomposed, that I blushed like

I was suddenly in brothels, or with women of bad character. In the old days, boys listened to

and sang cantilenas guerreiras, inspiring moral and courage; (...) Today, on the contrary, we

only hear loving songs of sighs, coquetries (…)”.

6
Edilson Vicente de Lima, “A Modinha e o Lundu: Dois Clássicos Nos Trópicos.” Ph.D. diss.,
(University of São Paulo, 2010), 15.
7
Lima, “A Modinha e o Lundu,” 15.
8
Lima, “A Modinha e o Lundu,” 17.
9
Kiefer, A modinha e o lundu, 9.
 While modinhas have a clear European origin and taste, the lundu originated from the

African drumming present in the culture of the many enslaved African people than inhabited

the country. This music had very ritualistic traits, as well as a substantial influence of

African-Brazilian dances, mainly the ones with umbigada moves.10 However, the lundu only

reaches the court and the bourgeoisie when it loses its choreographic and instrumental roots

and begins to be sung. This phenomenon reinforced the insertion of one social class into

another—and of one culture to another—, resulting in both modinhas and lundus coexisting

in different social levels of the time.11 As Araújo puts it, "the modinha moved from its courtly

environment to become more democratized, while the lundu insinuated itself in the halls of

the court, stripped of its foul and lascivious dance status and became a white people's song."12

Tinhorão corroborates with this argument by concluding that the lundu is an adaptation of the

choreography of the Iberian fandango with the African batuque (a generic term used in Brazil

for any rhythm produced with an African percussion13) performed by white people.14

The present study relies on the modinhas and lundus published in two major works

whose authorship is attributed to the aforementioned mulatto priest Caldas Barbosa: Viola de

Lereno and As Modinhas do Brasil. Domingos Caldas Barbosa was born in Rio de Janeiro in

1740 and was the son of the Portuguese merchant Antonio de Caldas Barbosas and a former

black slave named Antonia de Jesus. He received his education from the Jesuits and, after

joining the military in the city of Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay, he was sent to Portugal

to pursue his studies at the University of Coimbra. After the unexpected death of his father

and the subsequent inability to pursue his education and support himself, he became a
10
Waddey explains the move as follows: “the dancer opens her arms and extends her belly or navel (umbigo)
toward that of the person to whom she is passing the dance. The two may or may not actually touch.”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/779940.pdf
11
Fabiana Miraz de Freitas Grecco, “O amor mestiço nas modinhas e nos lundus de Domingos Caldas Barbosa
(1740-1800) e nas mornas de Eugénio Tavares (1867-1930).” PhD Diss. (São Paulo State University, 2010).
12
Mozart de Araújo, A Modinha e o Lundu no Século XVIII: Uma Pesquisa Histórica e Bibliográfica. (São
Paulo: Ricordi Brasileira, 1963), 13.
13
Kiefer, A modinha e o lundu, 31.
14
José Ramos Tinhorão, Música Popular de Índios, Negros e Mestiços. (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1978), 130, quoted
in Kiefer, A modinha e o lundu, 33.
minstrel, who used praise singing as a way to survive, and receive the patronage of members

of the court of D. Maria I for his career as an itinerant singer. He joined the literary academy

Arcádia de Roma, where he received his nickname, Lereno Selinuntino.15 The lyrics of his

compositions, which he would sing with the accompaniment of his viola, would be gathered

in the book “Viola de Lereno: coleção de improvisos e cantigas de Domingos Caldas

Barbosa”, which was only published in 1798. The manuscript of Modinhas do Brasil is in the

Biblioteca da Ajuda, in Lisbon and was first disclosed to the public in Gerard Behágue’s

article “Biblioteca da Ajuda (Lisbon) MSS 1595/1596: Two eighteenth-century anonymous

collection for modinhas.” In his research, Behágue concludes that all thirty modinhas in the

work were, most likely, composed by Caldas Barbosa.

Social and literary backgrounds

The social context in which modinhas and lundus developed in Brazilian colonial time

(1530 –1822) contrasts with the reality portrayed in the songs, which resonated the literary

trends in vogue. It is crucial, furthermore, to understand the role that the Catholic Church

played in forming the moral principles of that society. As Del Priore points out, Portuguese

colonization consisted of a true spiritual crusade that aimed to regulate people's daily lives

through ethical guidance, catechesis and education, in addition to exercising strict doctrinal

vigilance through confession, the Sunday sermon and the Holy Inquisition.16 Del Priore

relates the power relationship between slaveholders and enslaved people to the relationship

between husbands and wives: women existed to take care of the house and to serve the head

of the family with their sex.17

15
Lúcia Helena Costigan. "Domingos Caldas Barbosa (1740-1800): A Precursor of Afro-Brazilian Literature."
Research in African Literatures 38, no. 1 (2007): 172-80. Accessed April 25, 2021.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4618362.1
16
Mary del Priore, História do amor no Brasil (São Paulo: Contexto, 2005), 17.
17
Del Priore, História do amor, 17.
 Del Priore categorized love in Brazilian colonial society into two archetypes: love

within marriage, chaste and continent; and love outside marriage, characterized by passion,

lust and the sins of the flesh. The author’s research shows that in Portuguese America the

superiority of reason in marriage over the heart is a constant. The wife should love her

partner “as good, virtuous and well-done women of quality do.” This reinforces, among the

wives, a Portuguese tradition that interpreted marriage as a task to be endured: “getting

married sounds good and tastes bad”; “House of lovebirds, house of falls”, warned the

popular sayings.18

18
Del Priore, História do amor, 19.