PERRÉ, A MARKER OF INDIGENOUS IDENTITY IN PERNAMBUCO CULTURE

Abstract

In the everyday soundscape of Pernambuco, links are evident between the musical language of local indigenous peoples represented in the caboclinhos carnival groups. These links point to the presence of a local expressive pattern that influenced the development of the musical and expressive language of the Pernambuco people, even though literature has ignored this Amerindian cultural vector as a marker of the people's identity and local culture. The music, dance, and expressive language of the caboclinhos' singing express a common identity in the perré rhythm that can be observed as present in other local expressive forms of urban music, such as forró, baião, xote, coco, maracatu, embolada, ciranda, and other forms expressive of local identity. In this approach, perré emerges as an element that verifies the presence and importance of an indigenous language first identified around 1535 by Father Fernão Cardim. This expressive form, currently shared in the everyday lives of popular culture, both oral and media-based, represents markers that reveal vectors of nuances in popular culture that may have originated with the local Indigenous people. This paper focuses on a dialogical ethnomusicology that seeks to understand the intersections between media music and a possible Indigenous origin of common patterns in Pernambuco culture. This approach emerged inductively from the analytical intersection of testimonies and testimonies gathered in ethnographic fields since 2003, as well as from the examination of forms of representation as a musician, teacher, and researcher.