A note on the music of colonial Brazil

Summary

Brazil's known musical patrimony begins in the second half of the eighteenth century. The earliest music with a Portuguese text (found by Régis Duprat) is a cantata dated 1759 consisting of recitative and da capo aria for soprano, paired violins and continue. Sung at Bahia during the 6 July 1759 session of the newly founded Academia dos Renascidos, this cantata celebrates the recovery from an illness of the academy's patron José Mascarenhas Pacheco Pereira de Mello, who had recently arrived from Lisbon.

The veteran mestre de capela of Bahia Cathedral who presumably wrote this delightful cantata, showing complete command of the Italian style in vogue at Lisbon in 1759, was Caetano de Mello Jesus – a native of the Bahia region and a protégé of a rich elected official of the Academia dos Renascidos. In 1759–60 he completed his Escola de Canto de Orgao, the lengthiest and most profound music treatise written in the Americas before 1850. Mello Jesus argued for the use of all the key-signatures used in J. S. Bach's Das Wohltemperiertes Clavier (1722 and 1744). Unfortunately, however, none of Mello Jesus's music using seven-sharp or any other signatures survives at Bahia, where all colonial music seems to have perished.