Ilumencarnados seres
Dissonant Voices
The author discusses “Universal Music”, talking about the “Universal Sound”, the first term Caetano Veloso used for tropicalist songs. The name of the movement, Tropicalismo, had not yet been disseminated when the composer wrote this text.
I am aware that many late, even more blinded composers, languid echoes of more comfortable times, have pilfered the word internationalist, replacing it with another term. And they want to talk about universalist or universal music. That is the utmost sociological ignorance, as not even the urban proletariat, universal due to an economic and technical fatality, has ever produced popular music that could be called universal. (…) The so-called universal music is a hypothetical Esperanto; it doesn’t exist. I cannot deny, however, that there exists internationalist music, the boring and tired elite of the Transatlantiques of the famous comedy.
Revista Civilização Brasileira, n° 21, setembro de 1968.
