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Eric A. Galm. The Berimbau: Soul of Brazilian Music. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. 230 pp., with musical examples, photographs, glossary, appendix, endnotes, bibliography, discography, videography, and index. ISBN 978-1-60473-405-8.
The berimbau de barriga, commonly referred to as just berimbau, is one of Brazil's most recognizable musical instruments. It is a bow with a single steel string and a gourd resonator affixed near one end. The performer holds the instrument in a vertical position such that the hole of the gourd resonator faces the individual's midriff. With the free hand (typically the right), the musician strikes the string with a thin stick (baqueta), usually while holding a wicker rattle (caxixi). The other hand grasps the bow where the gourd is affixed, alters the pitch of the string or adds a buzzing sound by pressing a coin or stone against it, and may modify the instrument's timbre by moving the entire bow away from or closer to the pelvis. The result is a distinctive sound that has come to be especially associated with capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial art-dance-game typically accompanied by the berimbau, other percussion, and singing.
In The Berimbau, the first book-length study in English on the instrument, Eric Galm seeks to avoid thinking about the bow as "a static object" (8) associated with capoeira, arguing instead that it is "a metaphor for constructed notions of tradition, blackness, and Brazilian nationalism" (6). In his introduction, Galm provides an overview of key dynamics of music and national identity in Brazil, such as the modernismo movement of the 1920s and 1930s and the importance of discourses of mixture and miscegenation to the Brazilian self-image. For Galm, these dynamics help explain how the berimbau has been able to "thrive as a national Brazilian icon" (16). If Brazilian identity celebrates how things can "undergo a transformative process, and emerge as a uniquely Brazilian entity" (16), the berimbau may exemplify this capacity, he argues. It is a kind of synthesis of characteristics from different African musical bows, and it has been "reinvented" as a "Brazilian national instrument" (16). At the same time, however, the berimbau has come to symbolize...