Regional and National Trends in Afro-Brazilian Religious Musics: A Case of Cultural Pluralism

One may wonder how music can be considered a reflection of cultural values and of worldviews in general. Ethnomusicology has taught us for some time now that musical styles are frequently the result of specific cultural determinants emanating from social and ethnohistorical factors of various kinds. Ethnomusicology concerns itself essentially with non-written musical traditions and attempts to integrate musical expressions of a given culture or community group with the whole cultural complex of that group. It relies consequently on both musicological and anthropological perspectives in its analytic approach. It seeks to explain not only the structure of the musical product of a given society but also all elements-ethnic, social, historical, economic-that combine to establish the uniqueness of that product. To use Charles Seeger's terminology (1977), the field of ethnomusicology is concerned with the analytical study of the process of variation of a musical text, on the one hand, and the social context for music making, on the other. The context is related to questions of musical behavior which reflect the complexities of the social organization of a given group or community. Because we have learned from cultural anthropologists that any substantial change in the organization of a society (or segment of it) is eventually reflected in the inheritance, cultivation and transmission of such traditions as folk music, we can assume that a folk or traditional music is, in essence, a synthesis of the worldview of a culture community, and in particular of the cultural values of that community. We firmly believe that because of its internally redundant nature, music is perhaps the most highly structured expressive behavior of mankind. As a means of non-verbal communication, it is one of the most powerful tools of human self-expression, self-assertion and selfawareness in relationship to a given social group's cosmovision. Music also operates as a strong agent of social cohesion, whether in terms of