Palco MP3 Forro
 |
| palco mp3, palco mp3 forro, palco mp3 avioes, avioes do forro, no palco mp3, funk, funk palco mp3, jorge e matheus, baixar musicas, palco mp3 sertanejo, forro do muido, |
Forro
Stylistic origins
Polka, Contradance, European partnered folk dances
Cultural origins
19th century, Brazilian Sertão
Typical instruments
Zabumba, Triangle, and Accordion
Subgenres
Xote Xaxado Baião Forro universitário Forro elétrico
Statues of Forro musicians
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2011)
Forro encompasses a number of Northeastern Brazilian dances as well as a number of different musical genres which accompany these dances. Although the music has gained widespread popularity in all of Brazil and is growing in popularity outside Brazil, the event most closely associated with Forro is the annual Festa Junina (June Festival), a part of Brazilian traditional culture which celebrates a number of Catholic saints. The most celebrated day of the festival is the day of São João.
Contents
1 Origin of the term
2 Popularity
3 Forro (the dance)
3.1 Dancing Styles
3.2 Steps
4 Forro (the music)
4.1 Lyrics and Themes
4.2 Instruments
5 References
5.1 Information
5.2 Videos
5.3 Music
Origin of the term Forro
There are several theories on the origin of the name.
"Forro" (written exactly the same) means "burning hot" in Hungarian. In the 1940s, there were thousands of Hungarian immigrants arriving to South America. This is thought to have led to the naming of this dance.
Another accepted theory puts forro as a derivative of forrobodo, meaning "great party" or "commotion". This is the view held by Brazilian folklorist Câmara Cascudo, who studied the Brazilian Northeast through most of his life. Forrobodo is believed to come from the word forbodó (itself a corruption of fauxbourdon), which was used in the Portuguese court to define a dull party.
Another theory often heard popularly in Brazil and elsewhere -- for example, Gilberto Gil provides it in concerts -- is that the word forro is a derivative of the English expression "for all" and that it originated in the early 1900s. English engineers on the Great Western Railway of Brazil near Recife would throw balls on weekends and classify them as either only for railroad personnel or for the general populace ("for all"). This belief was somewhat reinforced by a similar practice by USAF personnel stationed at the Natal Air Force Base during World War II, but it is unrelated because before the USAF went to Natal, the name "Forro" was already in use.
Popularity of Forro
Forro is the most popular genre of music and dance in Brazil's Northeast, to the extent that historically "going to the Forro" meant simply going to party or going out. Regarding the music, it is based on a combination of three instruments (accordion, zabumba and a metal triangle). The dance however becomes very different as you cross the borders of the Northeast into the Southeast. As part of the popular culture it is in constant change. The dance known as college forro is the most common style between the middle-class students of colleges and universities in the Southeast, having influences of other dances like salsa and samba-rock. The traditional music used to dance the forro was brought to the Southeast from the Northeast by Luiz Gonzaga, who transformed the baião (a word originated from baiano and assigned a warm-up for artists to search for inspiration before playing) into a more sophisticated rhythm. In later years, forro achieved popularity throughout Brazil, in the form of a slower genre known as xote, that has been influenced by pop-rock music to become more acceptable by Brazilian youth of Southeast, South and Central regions.
Forro (the dance)
Dancing Styles
There are three rhythms of forro: xote (a slower-paced rhythm), baião (the original forro) and arrasta-pé (the fastest of the three), and amongst these, many styles of dancing, which varies from region to region, and may be known by different names according to the location. Forro is danced in pairs, usually very close together, with the man's left hand holding the woman's right hand as in the Waltz, his right arm around her back and her left arm around his neck; Other styles may require to stay partially away, or in a considerable distance, only holding their hands up the shoulders. Influences from salsa and other Caribbean dances has given mobility to forro, with the woman - and occasionally the man - being spun in various ways, although it's not essential to spin at all, and more complex movements may prove impossible to be executed in the usually crowded dancing area of forros. Follows below a list of the most popular styles of forro in Brazil:
Xote
xote: a basic style, danced close together in a left-left-right-right movement, and has no spinning or variations;
forro-love: similar to xote, but with a strong influence from zouk-love;
universitário: the most popular style outside the Northeast, much like the xote, but with the partners moving forward and backward, much like traditional Bolero. It contains many variations of movements;
miudinho: the man dances with his left side slightly tilted, his left hand on the woman's waist and her both her hands around his neck. Danced in the same place (mobility can be gained through spinning), has a lot of hip movements;
puladinho/manquinho: is danced with the man's right leg still and his left leg marking the beats on the ground, while the woman with her left leg still and her right leg moving (the partners can exchange the leg positions, although it's not common);
merenguinho: the partners move along the sides, with movements similar to Merengue dance;
cavalguinho: much like the puladinho, but with man and woman marking both their legs on the ground in alternate tempos, as if riding a horse.
Xote originally has its roots in the schottische dance.
Baião
baião/pé-de-serra: basically a style of xote, but with the partners tilting to the sides and moving their legs less to follow the faster rhythm;
cacau: comes from Paraíba, in which the partners dance slightly away from each other in very fast leg movements;
amassa-cacau: a variation of cacau from Ceará, it's danced less close and demands a lot of hip movements, with the legs mimicking a person squeezing cacao
valsado: danced close together, consists of moving along the sides, crossing the legs in front of each other;
valsadão: same as valsado, but danced slightly away from each other. It is, together with universitário, the richest style in terms of movements and variations;
forrofieira: a newer style, mixes the traditional forro with steps and influence from Samba de Gafieira, and it has become quite popular in Rio de Janeiro and some parts of Northeast.
Arrasta-pé
arrasta-pé: can only be danced to its own style, much like a very fast xote, but alternately marking the beats on the ground with both legs.
Miudinho and puladinho can also be danced to baião music and even to arrasta-pé, but in the latter the leg work is so intense that it's impracticable. Some people also like to include brega/calypso in the forro category, because this dance has suffered much influence of forro throughout the decades, but it's danced to its own rhythm (not to be mistaken with Calypso music).
Steps
Forro dancing styles are informally often grouped into two main "families", simply for practical reasons: The older Nordestino (North-eastern) type of Forro and the Universitário (University) Forro that developed later in the South.
Nordestino forro is danced with the couple much closer together, with their legs often inter-twined and a characteristic sideways shuffle movement. Because of the intimacy, there are not as many step variations in this style.
Universitário forro, with its origins in the big southern cities of Brazil, is the more popular style outside of the north-east. Its basic step is forward-backwards - slightly similar to traditional Bolero or Salsa. With more space between the pair, many more moves, steps and turns are possible than in Nordestino styles. The more common steps include:
Dobradiça - the couple opens to the side;
Caminhada - simple step of the couple to the front or the back;
Comemoração - balancing step, with the man's leg between the ladies';
Giros - a variety of turns, both simple and ones involving both dancers;
Oito - a movement of both dancers around each other, side by side.
Universitário forro supposedly evolved from (and is still very similar to) the pé-de-serra/baião styles, while Nordestino is used to refer to the styles more like the original xote.
Forro (the music)
Forro, referring to the music and not the dance, encompasses today various musical styles. The musical style, which is at the origin of, and from which have grown out most musical styles today denoted as Forro, is the Forro of Luiz Gonzaga (and others such as Jackson do Pandeiro and Marinês).
This musical style, commonly called also Forro Pé-de-Serra, is usually based on a trio combination of
an accordion (with a dry tuning, as opposed to the wet tunings used more commonly in Europe) and a
rhythm section of a triangle and a zabumba (where the triangle keeps an ongoing pulse and the zabumba is responsible for the different syncopated rhythms in the Forro genre).
This combination of instruments was defined as the base of Forro by Luiz Gonzaga. Before Gonzaga other combinations have been commonly used. The combination of triangle with accordion is a combination that has already existed in European folk music before and is also used in Cajun music in the United States. Forro thus conserves a format of a small ensemble with multiple (in this case two) percussionists, something that also used be common in Europe and the United States before the invention of the growth of the popularity of the drum set.
This combination of instruments serves rather as a base and is not fixed, incorporating sometimes other instruments such as fiddle, flute, pandeiro, bass, cavaquinho and acoustic guitar.
The combination of zabumba and triangle is almost always part of the rhythm section of any Forro group.
The triangle keeps an ongoing pulse on all the four times of the (4/4) beat, while accentuating the third beat. In this sense, the function can be compared to the rhythm guitar or the hi-hat of the drum set in rock music, although the triangle accentuates the third beat more strongly with its high pitched metallic sound, being damped to give a fainter and drier sound on the other beats. The zabumba, which is played on both sides, on one side giving a grave sound and on the other a sharp whip-like sound, plays the syncopated rhythms essential to Forro.
From the melodic and harmonic point of view, Forro makes heavy use of the Escala nordestina (literally North-eastern scale), which could be characterised as being a mixture of the Lydian and Mixo-lydian modes. The North-eastern scale represents the basis of a large part of the more traditional Forro and the Forro Pé-de-Serra, in similar way as the blues scale is the basis for the music of the Mississippi Delta. The Escala nordestina is most evident in pieces such as Vem Morena, Baião of Luiz Gonzaga. The accordion is the typical melody instrument used in Forro, and is sometimes called the "Soul of Forro" or the "Soul of the Sertão", referring the region where Forro has originated.
As Forro diversified away from its roots, it has incorporated other influences, and more significantly, diversified into quite distinct musical styles.
Lyrics and Themes
Forro lyrics have changed with time and regarding the sub-genre, as the music moved from being a purely North-Eastern music genre to being a genre popular all across Brazil.
Traditionally, lyrics were about life in the rural North-East (in particular the Sertão and other North-Eastern themes, such as concerns about droughts, migration to look for work and thus about longing or homesickness (Saudade).
An example of this is the probably most emblematic (anonymous) song Asa Branca, made famous across all of Brazil in the 1940s by Luiz Gonzaga, sometimes also called the "Hymn of the Sertão" or "Hymn of the North-East". The lyrics are about leaving the rural home in the Sertão because of drought, and about hope to able to return when the rain will fall again on the dry, barren land of the Sertão. The rain will be announced by the arrival of Asa branca, a certain white winged bird, which only flies there if it rains (there is a recent American version played by the group Forro in the Dark featuring David Byrne).
In the more recent genre of Forro Universitario, lyrics have a much more urban flavour and relate more to life of a young urbanized middle class, as lyrics found nowadays in rock music.
As in many other musical styles, lyrics are also often about love and romance, passion, jealousy, or reminiscing about an ex-lover.
Instruments
Today various musical instruments are used in the various styles of Forro (although always with a reference to the traditional combination of accordion, triangle and zabumba) :
Accordion
Acoustic guitar
Bass guitar
Drum kit
Electric guitar
Fiddle
Pandeiro
Rabeca
Shaker
Triangle (instrument)
Zabumba drum
References
Information
Forro events in the world - Forroworld.com
Actualities of Forro in France - Braziu.fr
Forro in London - forro.co.uk
The European Forro Directory - Forrozeiros.eu
Videos
Brazilan Forro on Youtube - Forrobodologia
Brazilan Forro Dos Cumpadre on Youtube
Music
European Forro Group - Dona Fia
