Sociology of Arts

The medieval romances are songs of Provencal poetry (12th century), sung by minstrels in the Iberian Peninsula, who arrived in Brazil (16th century), the voice of the Portuguese colonizer. These novels were found in Rio Grande do Norte (18th century), northeast of Brazil, in the village of Alcaçus and kept in the voice and memory of lacemakers during their songs of work. In the 90's, the folklorist Deífilo Gurgel collected the songs from the lacemakers at the Alcaçus Romanceiro (1992). This material was used to compose the Missa de Alcaçus (1996). The novels found consist of texts taken from literature and popular poetry, with improvisations of medieval liturgical music, recognized through the scale of mixolídio mode. These novels were subjected to empirical analysis under the concept of collective memory (HALBWACHS: 2008), in which two aspects are observed, first the distinction between the concept of collective memory for historical memory, which according to Halbwachs, historical memory leads to memories and expand in the social consciousness, different from the collective memory; and the second aspect, that these medieval romances, although they remain in the historical memory, were invisible in the music of Rio Grande do Norte, until the composition of the work Missa de Alcaçus, when they appear their melodic themes resignigned in the work, becoming visible. In order to understand their insertion of the novels in the work of Mass, the methodological resource of symbolic cartography (SANTOS: 2000) was used to identify the melodic affinity between the novels and the songs of the Mass, according to a scale, projection and symbolization of each piece of the work. Under this procedure were found affinities and possibilities of amplification of the present (SANTOS: 2001), in which it aroused the interest in taking advantage of different musical experiences capable of contributing to contemporary music.