The Private Canon: Barbatuques "Baianá"

This post is part of a series.

Why do certain chords make us feel a certain way? For starters, they don't make all of us feel any specific way at all, as music is an inherently subjective experience, and much of our musical tastes and expectations are culturally determined. Robert Schumann admired Mozart's wrenching 40th Symphony as a work of "Grecian lightness and grace," which tells you something about how black Romantic-era composers took their coffee. And some have noticed that pop music in recent years has developed a pronounced tendency toward minor keys, which are generally thought to convey sadness or pain, for possibly immutable physical reasons (you can go down a wormhole on this issue, and here is as good a place as any to start), while major keys are considered happy, triumphant, etc.

There's a kernel of truth in that binary, but it's never that simple in practice. Between the two (arguable) major-minor poles there's a lot of room for other sounds and feelings. To give the most obvious example, blues scales and chords, which are the basis for a lot (though not all) of rock music, often skip the third of the triad—the note which tells us if a chord is major or minor—or incorporate both major and minor thirds in the same song, sometimes stacked in the same chord (as in the money moment of this Doris Day track or as detailed in this whole post). It's in this liminal, not-quite-major-or-minor space where a lot of the harmony I love thrives—from the French composers to Janacek to Weill to Sondheim to Joni Mitchell—as I think I've made abundantly clear. Even apart from my own tastes, "happy" or "sad" scarcely captures the gamut of emotional colors and associations music conjures. Some of the most heart-rending music I know is in a major key; and if minor keys can't sound joyful, no one sent Galt MacDermot the memo—his score for Hair opens and closes with rousing, majestic minor-key chorales ("Aquarius" and "Let the Sunshine In”).

All this is preamble to today's entry in the Private Canon, which I happened upon a few years after tumbling down a YouTube wormhole of videos by the French body-music master Camille (a post on her unique genius is in the works). I saw her jamming with some fellow body musicians at a London gig. I learned that the group performing with her was a Brazilian troupe called Barbatuques, and soon after found my way to their biggest and best song, 2005's "Baianá." Go on: Try to get this out of your head after hearing it:

There's a lot of great stuff going on in the arrangement—the stamping and clapping, the oscillating jaw harp, the jagged rap break. But as the chart at the top of this post makes clear, it's blazingly simple musical material. It basically spells out the notes of an E-minor-seventh chord):

The second line of the main melody adds some variety, filling in notes along a Dorian scale:

And at :54 in the video above there’s an ear-snagging major second, a la the Bulgarian Women’s Choir:

I've learned that the song, whose lyrics are essentially a throat-clearing introduction of a singer from the Brazilian state of Bahia, is based on a contemporary folk tune by Maria do Como Barbosa (this is the only performance, and really only evidence, I could find of it, under the title "Boa noite povo"), and that Barbataques' recording (whose studio version is in Dm) is in turn the basis of countless remixes (this seems to be the most popular), and even a lively copycat version, made for the 2014 animated film Rio 2 , by the band itself, called "Beautiful Creatures." The troupe is still around (and making how-to body music videos during quarantine) and all their music is definitely worth checking out. But none of their work approaches the vigor and angular beauty of "Baianá," whose power consists in little more than repeatedly unspooling an evocative chord and coiling it back together. The song makes me feel a lot of things, and minor key or not, "happy" is unambiguously one of them.