Abstract
Immersed in a lengthy study of Brazilian popular culture, the writer Mário de Andrade published two of his most remarkable works in 1928: Macunaíma - o heroi sem nenhum caráter and Ensaio sobre música brasileira. In the second, in a passage concerning rhythm, Andrade promises his readers a book on Brazilian music’s most striking rhythmic device: “syncopation, more likely imported from Portugal than from Africa (as I shall certainly show in a future book).” This ‘future book’ is a sibling of other uncompleted projects like Na pancada do ganzá (later organized and published by Oneyda Alvarenga) and the Dicionário musical brasileiro (organized and published by Oneyda Alvarenga and Flavia Toni). Not as developed as these, the book on syncopation was never edited for publication and survived only as a set of handwritten notes on the subject. The present article provides an analysis of this unpublished manuscript in its entirety, now held at the Arquivo Mário de Andrade of the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, IEB - Universidade de São Paulo.
Keywords
Syncope; Mário de Andrade; unpublished manuscript; Brazilian music
