Sons de banzo

Abstract

We begin by using both an important study dating back to 1793 and chronicles of foreign travelers, physicians and naturalists to launch a discussion on the way “banzo” was sketched by the colonial mentality in the first half of the 19th century. Skeptical to the idea that “banzo” is a continuation of Western melancholia, such as the notion appears throughout the period in which Brazil was formed, a different approach is suggested so as to both distinguish “Banzo” as an affect and grant it its own singular psycho-pathological statute as an infirmity produced exclusively by the colonial slave-based logic. It is, then, from an essentially clinical point of view, which questions the effects of the historical formation of Brazil in the forces making up its contemporary reality, that this study sets out to explore “banzo” artistically, as a sonorous affect reverberating for five centuries in all sort of everyday practices, being the operation of its logic most felt in Brazil's interior or what is commonly called “deep Brazil”. In the final stages of this study, the banzo affect and its sonorities are broached in terms of the relation between banzo and the state of ‘voicelessness’, in what leads us to an encounter with the modal system in music and the voice-related experimentations of twentieth century artists. These encounters and experimentations will lead us to propose the voice as a language immanent to itself (and not subordinated to speech). In line with such immanence we propose the creation of a “song of the voice” (in the wake of Demétrio Stratos) capable of calling forth the particles of the “Banzo” affect in an attempt to displace its own destiny, and present it in its affirmative, creative potency