Carlos Drummond de Andrade and the beautiful gift

Abstract

In 1979, Carlos Drummond de Andrade sent, “with inexcusable delay”, a letter of thanks for receiving a “beautiful gift”. The letter was addressed to the musician Francisco “Chico” Mário de Sousa, from whom he had received the recently released Terra, in the poet’s opinion, an album “so Minas Gerais and so full of suggestions and sensations for those who hold Minas in their hearts”. In this article, I propose an analytical comparison of the musical compositions from the album Terra (1979), by Francisco Mário, with selected poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, adopting the theoretical support of Holanda (1982 [1936]), Candido (2023 [1987]) and Didi-Huberman (2010). The criteria for selecting the poems was that they dealt with nature and the historical processes associated with mining in Minas Gerais in the 20th century. The compositions on the album, in turn, were chosen according to the degree of thematic proximity to Drummond’s poems. The unfolding of such a comparison is to support the influence of the Brazilian modernist project on the aforementioned compositions, assuming that the Terra album was not only influenced by the folkloric inclination of the modernist musical project and by Drummondian provincial modernism, but also updates them with structured meanings in the field of enunciation of dictatorial Brazil.