From Greece to MPB: poetry, music and orality

Abstract

The greek world “mousiké” denoted a union of melody and verse and represented the principal manner to educate men, and used like a manifestation of a oral culture. By this way, through a oral discurse, in performance, the collective voice was realized. The orality continued to be the preponderant, inlcuding during the Medium Age. Characterisit of the medium songs, the orality was in the origin by the poetry, that was composed to be singing. Until 1400, in all Occident, the writing didn´t influence a lot the poets’ behavior or thought either the public expects, almost everyone illiterate. But the writing, slowly, fixed, like a necessary and natural product of orality. But the oral world satyed alive and in Renascense, several texts were musicated, and in the Simbolism, in the end of the 19h century, Baudelaire tryed to do the worlds had “an essencial musical value”. They looked for a music into the poetry. Times after, in our century, a strong inclination to recuperate the voice in the poetry message arised in the “poetry of the song”. And the musical poetry of five or six centuries of european history extended its effects in several arts of the popular music, in both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, until the 19th century, or until the 20th cenntury. That’s when, in Brazil, “(...) a group of good poets chose the music and not the book how a comunication canal” (SILVA, 1975, p.178)