ABSTRACT
Brazil's popular music industry, especially in the last 40 years, has enjoyed considerable success abroad as well as domestically. Brazilian national identity is further complicated by the existence of historically well-established regional autonomies, as well as by the diversity of the ethno-cultural baggage carried by successive waves of intercontinental immigration. One of the core tendencies of MPB has been a search for musical innovation through the incorporation both of Brazilian regional folk music material and of styles and motifs drawn from a variety of non-domestic contemporary sources. Sometimes obliquely, sometimes openly, Antnio Nbregas engages with a number of issues that have long provoked and continue to provoke debate in Brazil: race and class and culture, tradition and modernization, and their role in national self-definition. It considers what Nbregas approach to musical performance contributes to these debates and to the problematic question of national identity.
