A modinha e géneros relacionados desde as suas origens até 1833.

The present dissertation is centred in the study of the so-called modinhas, portuguese texted songs that developed in Portugal and Brazil in the 18th and 19th century. More than discuss these cultural products based on the diverse existing literature devoted to the subject and the indirect sources of the time, the aim of this research was to create a synthetic perspective from the comparative analysis of the musical sources. The main tool for the research was the creation of a specific database (in excel format) that would describe a great number of musical sources (some of them not yet discussed in previous studies). The database (with approximately nine-hundred entries analyzed through a grid of twenty-one fields) consists of a thorough description of the various musical pieces that were gathered and, afterwards, used as a mean to conduct musical and poetic analysis, mostly of a statistical nature. Several features of the songs were registered, like authorship, number of voices, instrumentation and types of accompaniment, among other, and special attention was given to the treatment of the poems that are set to music, particularly concerning their rhyming structure, strophic division, existence of refrain, and metric divisions used. An attempt was made to build a strong contextualization of the modinha phenomenon in the luso-brazilian scope, but also in a european range. In the wider outlook, common aspects between these Portuguese songs and their counterparts in other European cultures – like the romance, canzonetta, seguidilla, notturno, among others –were underlined, along with describing the circulation of these repertoires between several contexts (domestic salon, public theater) and through several media (manuscripts, publications – some of them periodical). That multi-directional circulation was also discussed in the particular scope of Portugal and its brazilian colonies. Knowledge of European forms and their circulation, together with the analysis of their particular context of development was applied in comparative research in the specific terrain of modinhas. In this manner it was possible to identify similar processes that are not too apparent due to lack of historical material. The wide description of the luso-brazilian context was also crucial to establish connections between the modinha phenomenon, and its praxis, and the poetic entertainments of the time which was often of improvisatory nature. These literary games and the modinha creation and performance were all part of the same world of social entertainment that characterized certain urban and bourgeois populations. The study is also completed with the discussion of practical approaches to the modern performance of this repertoire based upon my particular experience as a musician devoted to present this vast and captivating corpus of songs.