Tanto Mar (1975)

historical extension and profundity in a circumstantial song by Chico Buarque

Abstract

Composed under the impact of the Carnation Revolution, the song “Tanto mar” (1975) is sometimes considered a circumstantial song. Despite the deliberate simplicity of the formal result and the direct reference to the context, however, we will seek to show that music and lyrics make up a whole that reflects in depth on the long-lasting historical-social process of modernization, represented more directly by Colonization. In this sense, even though the song was created in the excitement of the initial moments of the Portuguese Revolution and refers directly to it, its structuring process is not limited to the immediate moment. On the contrary, its configuration includes a more extensive range of materials and the depth of its meaning depends on other mediations that situate such a revolution as a moment within a longer and more complex movement. To demonstrate this, we will approach the structuring process through the analysis techniques used to elaborate it, seeking to show, immanently, how historical materials are sediments in the form that configures them. It is as if the simplicity of artistic techniques and the abundance of materials were set up in a tense composition, in which the very contradictions of this relationship are responsible for formally exposing the extensive and profound socio-historical process that constitutes the contemporary.