The artist and the artisan in Mário de Andrade and Fernando Lopes-Graça’s musical journalism

Abstract

In the first decades of the 20th Century, the figure of the many-sided intellectual that discussed the relation between concert music and local traditions was central in many countries. Fernando Lopes-Graça (1906-1994) and Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) are examples of this role, respectively, in Portugal and Brazil. Based on selected articles by both authors, published in Brazilian and Portuguese press in the 1930’s and 1940’s, I present, in this paper, an analysis of their position regarding the artists’ formation and social engagement. Both authors bring together the notions of art and craft, pointing out the importance of a solid technical basis, criticizing virtuosity per se and the persistence of the romantic ideal of genius. We can say they understand art as a concrete, practical, daily, collective and contextual activity, critically distancing their views from approaches that value the notions of work, individual, autonomy, timelessness and objective value. We can also notice in their critical texts the defense of artistic freedom, in opposition of a strict adherence to aesthetical-ideological programs. It is possible to perceive, in Lopes-Graça, a tendency to compartmentalize work pathways, reinforcing, in his protest songs, a grandiloquent mobilizing ethos and, in his concert music, a fragmentary and anticlimactic writing, privileging critical distance in listening. Mário de Andrade, in turn, makes explicit his intern conflicts in his self-critical and propositive writing, frequently advocating an engaged and “interested” art.