The Mission for Folklore Research may not be just the musical archeology of
some Northern and Northeastern hinterland from the 1930’s, but rather
of the São Paulo Capital District that clearly missed something that
had been lost. Yes, the Mission may very well have been the symptom of something
missed. Back then, the city had already reached a population of one million,
it had already been scared by the coffee crisis depression period between 1930
and 1932, and had faced the turbulence from the nomination of 11 mayors running
it between 1930 and 1934 – a result of the unstable relation with state
temporary governors after the 1932 Revolution. Pedestrians – who in the
early 1930’s got used to seeing some hundreds of cars in the streets –
would have to fight for space in the overcrowded São Paulo streets that
counted on 25 thousand vehicles after only seven years – street cars,
buses, cars, and trucks. From mid 1930’s on, as many would say, São
Paulo was the fastest growing city in the world: the number of construction
sites practically doubled in three years. On the very border of Estado Novo,
in the heart of the São Paulo convulsion, the Mission for Folklore Research
came to be while breathing the humane verve of Fabio Prado, the mayor who not
only was aware of the relevant role played by culture in the municipal sphere,
but granted budget resources never seen before in that sector. A government
representative who was attentive to the different claims by Modernists, and
who sanctioned the Mission – a major project by Mário de Andrade,
his Director of Culture, who insisted: “It is a must – more and
more – that we get to know Brazil. And above all, that we get to
know Brazil’s people... We need young researchers to go from house to
house to collect – seriously and in full – what our people keeps
and soon forgets, so bewildered it is by invasive progress” 1. Secretary
of Culture1.
Mário de Andrade already suspected that progress had no memory. Or
rather, that the memory heritage he was building was not plural. Singular memory
was that of viaduct concrete, rather than the memory of game playing in the
parks, melody singing in the terreiros, children’s drawings, caboclo
sounds. This was the very inner memory he was interested in, the memory of
small, non-utilitarian, non-civilized things – all of them oral residues
of a culture, as brief as existence. Mário de Andrade believed the true
heritage of a people could not be materialized in those things that can bear
eternal copper plaques, but rather, in those less noble things that may vanish
as voice does: perishable, relational, and after all, living things. Not
only materials, but body techniques 2, all
worked on at craftsmanship, in dances, in songs. Opened up to capture
a diverse world, the Mission seems to have been wide-reaching contemplative
silence, the kind that current instrumental science has forgotten. In one allegory:
it was a generous ear, much more than an incisive eye.
Now, the sound recording carried out by Mário de Andrade and his Mission
gets out of the warehouse and is made available to the public in the collection
of CDs. Sixty years after the recording by the Mission, the commitment
is sealed for a new stage – that of dispensing knowledge. This is what
SESC has been doing for decades through projects such as “Coração
dos Outros – Saravá, Mário De Andrade” (1999), a
multimedia event that traveled to 69 towns and cities in São Paulo state
to spread Mário de Andrade’s poetics through the language of dance,
music, and the cinema; also through the most recent “Desenhos
de Outrora, Desenhos de Agora” (2005), an exhibit that has retrieved dozens
of children’s drawings compiled by Mário de Andrade, putting them
together with dozens of his own drawings. This has been SESC’s permanent
mission – to add to Mário de Andrade’s Mission – to
spread culture in its path towards cultural democratization in its widest sense.
Only by giving cultural access to all can one build the foundations for a society
that is truly democratic: a society that will be more humane as it is more
and more aware that citizens are not only entitled to utilitarian, functional
rights, but equally to those rights associated to the unpretentious world of
imagination. It should be reminded, therefore, that our Mário de Andrade
was a builder of bridges by politicizing poetics and poeticizing politics while
fighting against stagnation to favor dislocation among worlds:
Vamu
dançá minha gente
Com toda satisfação
Pra mandá nossa
cantiga
Lá pra civilização.
O
São Paulo vae uvi
Cosa qui nunca uviu
O côco da nossa terra
Qui daqui nunca saiu.
Seus
dotô, home do Sul
Nosso adeus vamu lhe dá
E leve nossa
cantiga
Lá pro vosso lugá 3
While listening to the CDs the memories of the past politicize our imagination that perceives progress deafness, feels something is missing, and summons all of us for a commitment not only with the Culture of Men, but also with the “low” cultures of those “lower” men that had no right to belong to Humankind, but have sung it voicelessly in between lines.
1. CARLINI, Álvaro. Cachimbo e maracá: o
catimbó da Missão (1938). São Paulo: CCSP, 1993. p. 20.
2. In reference to the concept by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss.
3. Lyrics
of a côco collected in Tacaratu, Pernambuco state, on March 10, 1938,
not recorded. Idem, p. 25.
Danilo Santos de Miranda
SESC São Paulo Regional Director