The music bands of Baixo São Francisco Alagoano: musical cultural practices in context.
Music band; Musicology; Baixo São Francisco Alagoano; musical practices in context.
The objective of this work was to study musical practices in the context of the music bands of Baixo São Francisco Alagoano, a region located near the mouth of the São Francisco River, in the stretch between the cities of Piaçabuçu and Delmiro Gouveia, along the Alagoas bank and which involved the cities of Piaçabuçu, Penedo, Porto Real do Colégio, São Brás, Traipu, Belo Monte, Pão de Açúcar, Piranhas and Delmiro Gouveia, cities where the presence of music bands was verified. Specifically, we seek to understand the process of disseminating the bands, as well as analyzing and discussing the historical and socio-cultural context of musical practices within the temporal process of permanences and changes since the 19th century. The research we undertook was peculiar because we used social science tools, such as the interview, and, for ethical reasons, had to submit to the Research Ethics Council, through the Plataforma Brasil. However, on another front of the research, referring to the area of musicology, we researched hemerographic, iconographic and musicographic archives related to music bands, which added to the documents concerning orality were able to better explain the studied phenomena. This was an explanatory-level research that is justified by the lack of detailed studies on music bands in the region and on cultural musical practices, in addition to the commitment to the precepts of research outside Brazilian metropolises since, in their particularity, this type of investigation can provide data on a little explored and, consequently, little understood Brazil. We theoretically resort to the works of authors that focus on cultural practices such as Chartier, Certeau and Bourdieu, in view of Certeau's premise that cultural practices can lose their symbolic reach due to the lack of articulation with social practices. Methodologically, we use the procedures of categorization, inference, description and interpretation of the collected data related to each of the documented types researched, that is, oral, iconographic, musicographic and hemerographic. In this way, we were able to cross the data in the pertinent discussion that resulted in safer information about the cultural musical practices of the Baixo São Francisco Alagoano.