Music is also a code, as any language is. It’s a basic observation, in fact, but I only incorporated this idea a few days ago, after a conversation with the director of the National Music Museum, Edward Ayres de Abreu, about an instrument called madimba, which had been acquired by a Portuguese in Angola in the first half of the 70s of the last century, and which is now on display in that collection. I realized, above all, that the aesthetic enjoyment when listening to a song can be different from the message that underlies it, in the same way that the composer’s intention may or may not be passed on to the listener. In the midst of all this – in a very superficial and non-academic evocation of the theory developed by Michel Foucault around the concept of authorship -, I realized that it is in the brain of whoever listens to a song that it happens and where all the explosions of beauty or ugliness end up coming to life. Can anyone hear a summer storm in the music L’estateby Vivaldi, known only as Summer? Of course yes, and it is even possible to notice that the summer wind is different from the others, because music is a language.
The madimba is a type of xylophone of rural African origin. There are several wooden bars, of different sizes, perpendicular to a structure that supports them and which are struck by drumsticks. The sound of each of them is easy to remember: dry, with several harmonics, without great prolonged vibration. It’s the same sound we associate with a certain skeleton that, in a Walt Disney film titled The Skeleton Dance (The Skeleton Dance) uses what looks like a pair of tibias to touch another skeleton. It was Edward Ayres de Abreu who alerted me to this, and it made perfect sense, especially because the director of the museum was explaining to me why that instrument was displayed alongside instruments associated with war.
This is how a certain collective imagination can hear bones hitting each other, but in a semiotic exercise that goes beyond the scope of Walt Disney. Edward Ayres de Abreu’s first reference to explain to me all the ideas that instrument conveys is a Renaissance engraving by Hans Holbein where you see a skeleton playing the xylophone, which, in turn, was evoked in Dance of Macabre by Camille Saint-Säes, completing an entire cycle of rattling bones, when, in fact, all that is behind is a xylophone or a marimba.
As if this were not enough to build an entire symbolism around solid wood to be struck with some subtlety, there is still one more story that the director of the Music Museum did not contain. Estado Novo commissioned a song from Joly Braga Santos with the aim of evoking the Portuguese colonial past (at that time, present) that the composer, unwillingly, created. He even went to Mozambique to get inspiration for the composition, which, in the end, involved using horns to simulate the sound of elephants and – surprisingly – a marimba to show a certain spirit of Africa, perhaps because that continent was associated with small wooden figurines that were brought to Portugal.
But the xylophone, within a Portuguese musical culture of a certain time, still showed more vitality, although, ironically, associated with death.