Não mate a mata: visões ambientais precursoras na obra musical de Adelson Santos

Abstract

For at least 35 years, Argumento has become one of the best-known works of the Amazonian songbook by the name of Nao Mate a mata, since it received its first record in the Simple Compact LP Adelson (1980) and was played in the main Amazonian radios. Authored by the singer-songwriter, Adelson Santos, the work is recognized by artists and lovers of local music as a true ode to environmental conservation in the Amazon. The song reached social recognition only in 1980, positioning Adelson Santos as the most representative Amazon composer. The sociocultural context in which this artist began to reflect on the environmental problem through his music was marked by a series of important events for the consolidation of the Ecological Movement around the world. In its more than 40 years of creation, this musical piece has demonstrated its pioneering and timeless character, metamorphosing in arrangements from Boi-bumbá to instrumental jazz, re-readings performed by artists from different generations and different musical segments in the State of the Amazon. With the accomplishment of this study, we aim much more than to make just an inventory of the ecological songs of Adelson Santos, to analyze from the perspective of ethnomusicology and anthropology of the musical performance his most important work Argument, or simply to reconstruct configurative traits of his biography for prove its condition as an ecological subject. The radical critique of the environmental crisis contained in the work of Adelson Santos is seen by us as another possibility to reaffirm the position of centrality of Culture in the discussion on Sustainable Development worldwide in the post 2015. In seeking to establish an interface between the production of musical sounds, nature and sustainability, we are also creating a space for the valorization of multiple discourses and knowledge, as well as the many ecological subjects existing outside a naturalistic tradition, since Ecology, in present day, is assumed as a migrant idea, finding itself very close to social movements. In revealing these ecological subjects outside the areas of knowledge of naturalistic tradition, we want to provoke a discussion about the interdisciplinary and aggregating vocation of Environmental Sciences, as well as Music itself, based on the new theoretical orientation proposed by Ecomusicology and also of the already consolidated field of ethnomusicology. We promote a discussion of the ecology of knowledge and new perspectives for the reform of scientific thought and the deconstruction of the old models of technoscience that still prevent the existence of a reciprocity between the various forms of reproduce and know the world we live in.