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Mario de Andrade was one of the first to document the national folklore; a discoverer and  revealer of the actual Brazilian culture. Researcher, writer, poet – musician and musicologist, above all, musical. Present in more than half of his work, the music, explicit or implicitly, turns up as its conducting string. It is as if his view of the world started off with music. Musicality that culminates with Macuaníma.

"Macunaíma – the hero without a character" is a masterpiece of national recognition. More than just a clipping of fables, myths and Indian rituals, with African and Portuguese flavoring, it is the reading of the development of Brazilian culture. With the attempt to make the piece fit into a literary classification, the term "rhapsody", which for the author, "referred directly to instrumental fantasies that used themes and procedures of improvised composition, taken from traditional or popular songs." Music being the rawest means of expression and continuity of popular oral tradition, Macunaíma is full of songs and musicality. It is "the Tupi opera", a modern odyssey that, by the actual esthetic modernism, does not present itself in a metric and rime scheme pre determined by the traditional epics. At the end of the book this is clear. "I crouched on top of these leaves, caught my ticks, fingered the small guitar and in an effusive touch I raised a howl singing in the impure speech the phrases and stories of Macuaníma, the hero of our people."

I read Macunaíma for the first time in elementary school and for the second time at college (Linguistics – USP); this time, while reading the first part of the book, a melody stroke my ears like the image in 3D when it strikes ones eye. The prose showed its rhythm, its swing, full of rimes and alliterations, reverberations of sounds. In my head the music started to play and didn't stop anymore. Soon I got into contact with texts from Haroldo de Campos, Gilda de Mello e Souza and José Miguel Wisnik who, each with their own point of view, discourse about the music in this work, confirming my intuitions and supporting my wish to make the book into an album. I have been working since 1999 to form this songbook. There are three passages in prose of the text that I set to music, making some cuts but never adding any words. The rest of the songs were done with verses that the story presents – songs that have always been there, but quietly. And the forms of popular Brazilian folk music mixed with all kinds of contemporary music I've heard. So that's what I did: maintaining and corrupting the tradition, copying and recreating, very much like the poet and the whim of the book: "in an impure way of speech". 

Iara Rennó