Forró
[1][2] Their music genres and dances have gained widespread popularity in all regions of Brazil, especially during the Brazilian June Festivals.
From there, talented local singers began performing the songs at parties and gatherings, and sometimes they did informal competitions with competing viola (guitar) players in freestyle rap-like improvisations.
[citation needed] Originally the large metal triangle, zabumba (Afro-Brazilian drum) and guitar (called the violão) were the main instruments.
This word was carried by Portuguese migration waves to Brazil, and lost the light negative meaning and was slowly simplified by their children.
[citation needed] The traditional music used to dance the forró was brought to the Southeast from the Northeast by Luiz Gonzaga, who transformed the baião (a word originated from baiano and assigned a warm-up for artists to search for inspiration before playing) into a more sophisticated rhythm.
[citation needed] In later years, forró achieved popularity throughout Brazil, in the form of a slower genre known as xote, that has been influenced by pop-rock music to become more acceptable by Brazilian youth of Southeast, South and Central regions.
[citation needed] A compilation album titled Brazil: Forró - Music for Maids and Taxi Drivers was released internationally in 1989, and was nominated for a Grammy Award in the United States two years later.
Forró thus conserves a format of a small ensemble with multiple (in this case two) percussionists, something that also used to be common in Europe and the United States before the era of the drum set.
[citation needed] Forró makes heavy use of the escala nordestina (literally North-eastern scale), which could be characterised as being a mixture of the Lydian and Mixo-lydian modes.
[citation needed] The escala nordestina is most evident in pieces such as "Vem Morena", baião of Luiz Gonzaga.
[3] Traditionally, lyrics were about life in the rural North-East (in particular the Sertão) and other North-Eastern themes, such as concerns about droughts, migration to look for work and thus about longing or homesickness (saudade).
A forró music industry developed in Northeastern Brazil in that decade, when many new bands (with names like "Mastruz Com Leite" and "Limão Com Mel") were started, bands that used drums, electronic keyboards and electric guitars, and the lyrics of the songs became more similar to the lyrics of the sertanejo genre of Brazilian music, talking about romantic relationships and similar themes.
Especially in European forró communities, there is a trend to break and discuss the traditional gender roles[6] of leading men and following women.
Influences from Cuban salsa, Samba de Gafieira and zouk has given mobility to forró, with the follower— and occasionally the leader— being spun, although it's not essential to spin at all.
Nordestino forró is danced with the couple much closer together, with their legs often inter-twined and a characteristic sideways shuffle movement.
[9][10] *Guttural R, when spoken in the Central Northeastern Portuguese, is usually pronounced as a voiced or voiceless glottal fricative, in the beginning of words or "rr" digraph.
