ABSTRACT
The music of central and southern Brazil is as diverse as the one hundred million people that populate the area. Gross topological contrasts occur throughout the rural areas of central and southern Brazil, which cover about 2,224,000 square kilometers, and an equally wide range of musical activities occur in such urban centers as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. These and other cities provide opportunities for hearing many-kinds of Brazilian musics, including Brazilian popular music genres that have become known all over the world; traditional southeastern rural genres of medieval origin and their later developments; a wide variety of Afro-Brazilian traditions; northeastern traditional genres, brought by migrants searching for a better life in the south; and the musical traditions of the immigrant groups (Chinese, Germans, Italians, Japanese, Middle Easterners, Poles, Spaniards, and so on) that came to Brazil from the early 1800s on and particularly after 1888, when slavery was abolished in the country [see Music of Immigrant Groups]. Concerts of Western art music are given regularly, and outlets of mass communication bombard the Brazilian public with the latest popular hits from abroad.
