Learning Music as a Game: Resisting the Creative and Socioeconomic Crisis in Brazil with Education and Invention

This paper examines the creative strategies, novel concepts, epistemology and inventions that emerged from an international collaboration involving an anthropologist, a video producer, and a multi-instrumentalist musician forged to cope with and resist the socioeconomic and creative crisis in Brazil through actions in the realm of music education, including the design and release of a musical card set and various associated games.

For many, Brazil as a whole has been in a state of perpetual crisis, including socioeconomic, political, cultural-educational, and economic. With the rise of neoliberalism, the Internet and the growing accessibility of video production to online audiences with the potential for 'going viral' via social media, a new struggle in terms of creative practice, tradition, and education started taking shape among networks of professional and amateur musicians in Brazil. For many, the trendy musics being heavily promoted to young people is lacking in terms of lyrical, rhythmic, harmonic and melodic content, standing in contrast with the music traditions that once brought Brazil to the world stage, in particular genres like Chorinho, Samba, Bossa Nova, MPB, and the jazz and classical music infused instrumental musics of the 1970s.

Focusing on the trajectory of a music education project that I have joined in October 2016, this paper analyzes the combined crucial roles of collaboration, spirituality, intuition, epistemological and linguistic resonance, work as play, audiovisual production, and networking, in resisting the crisis spawned by mainstream musics during the current creative and socioeconomic crisis.

Source: Conference abstract ↗