The mid-twentieth century songs of popular singer Luiz Gonzaga include lyrics about northeastern Brazil’s traditional ecological knowledge. For individuals who predict rain and drought based on natural patterns in the region’s semi-arid backlands, Gonzaga’s music continues to lend credibility, clarity, and local significance to the practice known as rain prophecy. Through cultural history, lyrical and musical analysis, and ethnography, this article examines the process through which Gonzaga’s voice became a vehicle for the transmission of knowledge about the weather, suggesting that music produced through a profit-driven industry has played a role in the maintenance of local ecological knowledge.

Posthumanism, now in the mainstream of the humanities and humanistic social sciences, poses a challenge to ethnomusicology, a discipline inherently focused on the human and social aspects of music. Drawing from a survey of birds in the ethnomusicological scholarship and the author’s research on music and birds in Brazil, this article proposes an approach to ethnomusicology that emphasizes nonhuman factors and their own properties and effects as a method for better understanding music as a meaningful human phenomenon. O pós-humanismo, hoje no centro das correntes das ciências humanas e sociais, coloca um desafio à etnomusicologia, área intrinsecamente focada nos aspectos humanos e sociais da música. Partindo de uma visão geral das aves no campo etnomusicológico e da pesquisa do autor sobre música e aves no Brasil, o presente artigo propõe uma abordagem etnomusicológica que dá ênfase a fatores não humanos e suas propriedades e efeitos característicos como um método para entender melhor a música como um fenômeno humano significativo.

This article argues that Eletrocactus, a rock band based in Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil, attempts to construct a new regional imaginary by citing pre-existing musical signs of their city, state and nation while also creating new musical vocabularies. In doing so, they participate in various discourses concerning local, regional and national identity. For the members of the band, their music generates feelings of self-recognition and promotes the preservation and production of local culture. Engaging a theory of musical semiotics, this article analyzes recordings and presentations of the band Eletrocactus viewed in the context of Ceará’s regionalist musical history, including the role of vibrant v.8 n.1 danielle m. cruz, michael b. silvers the maracatu cearense tradition, the Pessoal do Ceará and the Movimento Cabaçal. As such, the songs of Eletrocactus re-imagine Fortaleza, Ceará, the Northeast, and Brazil.

Voices of Drought is an ethnomusicological study of relationships between popular music, the environmental and social costs of drought, and the politics of culture and climate vulnerability in the northeast region of Brazil, primarily the state of Ceará. The book traces the articulations of music and sound with drought as a discourse, a matter of politics, and a material reality. It encompasses multiple entwined issues, including ecological exile, poverty, and unequal access to vital resources such as water, along with corruption, prejudice, unbridled capitalism, and rapidly expanding neoliberalism. Each chapter is a case study: the use of carnauba wax, formed by palm trees as a protective climate adaptation, in the production of wax cylinder sound recordings in the late nineteenth century; the political significance of regionalist popular music, especially baião and forró, in the mid-twentieth century; forró music and practices of weather forecasting that involve listening to bird calls; the production and meaning of the soundscape of a small city as it involves musician Raimundo Fagner; social and musical change at the turn of the twenty-first century; and the cancellation of state-sponsored Carnival celebrations due to a costly multi-year drought in the 2010s. Demonstrating how ecological crisis affects musical culture by way of and proportionate to social difference and stratification, the book advocates a focus on environmental justice in ecomusicological scholarship.

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