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Carnaal
is celebrated in all of Brazil's cities, but Rio's is the
biggest and most flash. From the Friday before Ash Wednesday
to the following Thursday, the city shuts up shop and throws
itself into the world's most famous manifestation of
unbridled hedonism. Its greatest quality is that Rio's
Carnaal has never become stale, something to do with
its status as the most important celebration on the
Brazilian calendar, easily outstripping either Christmas or
Easter. In a city rien by poverty, Carnaal
represents a moment of freedom and release, when the
aspirations of cariocas can be expressed in music and
song.
Background
The direct origins of Carnaal in Rio can be traced
back to a fifteventh-century tradition of Easter reelry in
the Azores that caught on in Portugal and was exported to
Brazil. Anarchy reigned in the streets for four days and
nights, the festiities often so riotous that they were
formally abolished in 1843 - although the street
celebrations have remained the most accessible and widely
enjoyed feature of Carnaal ever since. In the
mid-nineteventh century, masquerade balls - bailes
- were first held by members of the social elite, while
processions, with carriages decorated in allegorical themes,
also made an appearance, thus marking the ascendancy of the
procession over the general street melee.
Rio's masses, who were denied admission to the balls, had
their own music - jongo - and they reinforced the
tradition of street celebration by organizing in Zé
Pereira bands, named after the Portuguese tambor which
proided the basic musical beat.
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Carnaal -
The action
The organizational
structure behind today's samba schools ( escolas da
samba) was partly a legacy of those bands sponsored by
migrant Bahian port workers in the 1870s. Theirs was a more
disciplined approach to the Carnaal procession:
marching to stringed and wind instruments, using costumes
and appointing people to co-ordinate different dimensions of
the parade.
Music written specifically for Carnaal emerged in
the early twentieth century, by composers like Chiquinho
Gonzaga, who wrote the first recorded samba piece in 1917 (
Pelo Telefone), and Mauro de Almeida e Donga. In the
1930s, radio and records began to spread the music of Rio's
Carnaal, and competition betweven different samba
schools became institutionalized: in 1932 the Estação
Primeira Mangueira school won the first prize for its
performance in the Carnaal parade. The format has
remained irtually unchanged since then, except for the
emergence - in the mid-1960s - of the blocos or
bandas : street processions by the residents of arious
bairros, who eschew style, discipline and prizes and
give themseles up to the most traditional element of
Carnaal - street reelry, of which even the principal
Carnaal procession in the Sambódromo is technically
a part.
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Rio de Janeiro
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