"Brasilhana": the creation of a cross-cultural musical sign

Abstract

This article focuses on a specific case of music regionalism within the multiple contemporary idioms of Brazilian popular music, namely the song repertoire of Gaucho/Nativist music, which has been produced in the stream of a revivalist movement in southern Brazil born in the 1970s. Departing from a music-biographic analysis of a specific song, the text brings forward the contextual character of music signs used as transnational/national/regional identity markers, the agency of music creators in social identity construction and the question of essentialism in music classificatory systems, especially in relation to matters of tradition/authenticity.