Between the artist and the artisan

Abstract

The music nationalization proposed by Brazilian Modernism through the appropriation of cultivated musical elements of popular music and folklore by classical composers implies an identification with national musicality and involves the creation of a national sense and feeling within an art, which, according to a Kantian view, is considered unintelligible and uninteresting. Our goal is to understand the implications of the concept of aesthesis in Mário de Andrade’s nationalism. In Andrade’s work, aethesis recovers the etymological sense of “aisthesis”, by going against its subordination to the model of representation and contemplation, highlighting sensitivity, and, as a consequence, the body. As a refusal of representation and contemplation, aesthesis also indicates a reconciliation between art and life, eventually revealing a social interest. Andrade’s. By proposing a sense of community, Andrade goes against both the national ontology sustained by positivist racial theories, and the official nationalism of the Brazilian Revolution of 1930.