Forró


The term forró refers to a musical genre, a rhythm, a dance and the event itself where forró music is played and danced. Forró is an important part of the Northeastern Region of Brazil. It encompasses various dance types as well as a number of different musical genres. Their music genres and dances have gained widespread popularity in all regions of Brazil, especially during the Brazilian June Festivals. Forró has also become increasingly more popular all over the world, with a well-established forró scene in Europe.

Origin of the music

A theory on the origin of forró music is that it originated on the farms and plantations in Ceará and all over northeast Brazil, where farmers and workers used to sing to the cows and together with each other as they gathered coffee and other crops like sugarcane, corn, and vegetables. They had a different song for each crop, and for each phase of the collection. As the farmers and field hands corralled cows and carried crops from the fields into the houses and cafes, the songs came with them, and everybody joined in singing together. From there, talented local singers began performing the songs at parties and gatherings, and sometimes they did informal competitions with competing viola players in freestyle rap-like improvisations. Originally the large metal triangle, zabumba and guitar were the main instruments. Later on, with the French immigration between 1850 and 1950, the accordion was added to typical forró bands. The rabec, known as the Brazilian fiddle, joined the forró sound as well. The rebec has sephardic origins, and is possibly descended from the Arabic "rabeba" which may have arrived in Brazil by way of the Portuguese, who use the Rabeca Chuleira, or with the great Arab migrations to northeast Brazil in the late 1800s to 1930s from Syria and Lebanon.

Origin of the term

There are several theories on the origin of the name.
The main theory is that forró as a derivative of forrobodó, meaning "great party" or "commotion". This is the view held by Brazilian folklorist Luís da Câmara Cascudo, who studied the Brazilian Northeast through most of his life. Forrobodó is believed to come from the word forbodó, which was used in the Portuguese court to define a dull party. The word forrobodó is itself very common in Portuguese popular conversation to describe a fun, but almost depraved and limitless party. This word was carried by Portuguese migration waves to Brazil, and lost the light negative meaning and was slowly simplified by their children.
Yet another theory often heard popularly in Brazil and elsewhere—for example, Gilberto Gil provides it in concerts—is that the word forró is a derivative of the English expression "for all" and that it originated in the early 1900s. English engineers on the Great Western Railway of Brazil near Recife would throw balls on weekends and classify them as either only for railroad personnel or for the general populace. This belief was somewhat reinforced by a similar practice by USAF personnel stationed at the Natal Air Force Base during World War II, but it is unrelated because before the USAF went to Natal, the name "forró" was already in use.

Popularity

Forró is the most popular genre of music and dance in Brazil's Northeast, to the extent that historically "going to the forró" meant simply going to party or going out. The music is based on a combination of three instruments. The dance however becomes very different as you cross the borders of the Northeast into the Southeast. As part of the popular culture it is in constant change. The dance known as college forró is the most common style between the middle-class students of colleges and universities in the Southeast, having influences of other dances like salsa and samba-rock.
The traditional music used to dance the forró was brought to the Southeast from the Northeast by Luiz Gonzaga, who transformed the baião into a more sophisticated rhythm. 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.
A compilation album titled was released internationally in 1989, and was nominated for a Grammy Award in the United States two years later.

Music

Forró, referring to the music and not the dance, encompasses today various musical styles. The original musical style, from which have grown most of the musical styles today denoted as forró, was the forró of Luiz Gonzaga.
This musical style, commonly called also forró pé-de-serra, is played by a trio combination of
This combination of instruments was defined as the base of forró by Luiz Gonzaga. Before Gonzaga other combinations have been commonly used. The combination of triangle with accordion is a combination that has already existed in European folk music before and is also used in Cajun music in the United States. Forró thus conserves a format of a small ensemble with multiple percussionists, something that also used to be common in Europe and the United States before the era of the drum set.
This combination of instruments serves rather as a base and is not fixed, incorporating sometimes other instruments such as fiddle, flute, pandeiro, bass, cavaquinho and acoustic guitar.
The combination of zabumba and triangle is almost always part of the rhythm section of any forró group. The accordion is always part of a forró ensemble, apart from the sub-style of "forró rabecado", where the accordion is replaced by a fiddle.
The triangle keeps an ongoing pulse on all the four times of the beat, while accentuating the third beat. In this sense, the function can be compared to the rhythm guitar or the hi-hat of the drum set in rock music, although the triangle accentuates the third beat more strongly with its high pitched metallic sound, being damped to give a fainter and drier sound on the other beats. The zabumba, which is played on both sides, on one side giving a grave sound and on the other a sharp whip-like sound, plays the syncopated rhythms essential to forró.
From the melodic and harmonic point of view, forró makes heavy use of the escala nordestina, which could be characterised as being a mixture of the Lydian and Mixo-lydian modes. The North-eastern scale represents the basis of a large part of the more traditional forró and the forró pé-de-serra, similar to the way the blues scale is the basis for the music of the Mississippi Delta. The escala nordestina is most evident in pieces such as "Vem Morena", baião of Luiz Gonzaga. The accordion is the typical melody instrument used in forró, and is sometimes called the "Soul of Forró" or the "Soul of the Sertão", referring the region where Forró has originated.
As forró diversified away from its roots, it has incorporated other influences, and more significantly, diversified into quite distinct musical styles.

Lyrics and themes

Forró lyrics have changed with time and regarding the subgenre, as the music moved from being a purely North-Eastern music genre to being a genre popular all across Brazil.
Traditionally, lyrics were about life in the rural North-East and other North-Eastern themes, such as concerns about droughts, migration to look for work and thus about longing or homesickness.
An example of this is the probably most emblematic song "Asa Branca", made famous across all of Brazil in the 1940s by Luiz Gonzaga, sometimes also called the "Hymn of the Sertão" or "Hymn of the North-East". The lyrics are about leaving the rural home in the Sertão because of drought, and about hope to be able to return when the rain will fall again on the dry, barren land of the Sertão. The rain will be announced by the arrival of asa branca, a certain white winged bird, which only flies there if it rains.
In the more recent genre of forró universitario, lyrics have a much more urban flavour and relate more to life of a young urbanized middle class, as lyrics found nowadays in rock music.
As in many other musical styles, lyrics are also often about love and romance, passion, jealousy, or reminiscing about an ex-lover.

Instruments

Today various musical instruments are used in the various styles of forró :

Dancing styles

There are various rhythms of forró: xote, baião and arrasta-pé, and forró itself. Amongst these there are many styles of dancing, which varies from region to region, and may be known by different names according to the location. Forró is danced in pairs. There are two dance roles, one of the leader and one of the follower. Especially in European forró communities, there is a trend of leading men and following women. Unlike many other social dances it becomes more and more common to see same-sex couples on the dance floor or leading women and following men.
Forró is danced usually very close together, with the leader's left hand holding the follower's right hand, the leader's right arm around the follower's back and the follower's left arm around the leader's neck. Other styles may require to stay partially away, or in a considerable distance, only holding their hands up the shoulders.
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. The more complex movements may prove impossible to be executed in the usually crowded dancing area of forrós. Below is a list of the most popular styles of forró in Brazil:

Xote

Created by Gilson Joy Santos, Brasilia,Brazil.
Xote originally has its roots in the schottische.

Baião

Miudinho and puladinho can be danced to baião music and even to arrasta-pé, but in the latter the leg work is so intense that it's impracticable. Some people like to include brega/calypso in the forró category, because this dance has suffered much influence of forró throughout the decades, but it's danced to its own rhythm.

Steps

Forró dancing styles are informally often grouped into two main "families", simply for practical reasons: The older Nordestino type of forró and the universitário forró that developed later in the South.
Nordestino forró is danced with the couple much closer together, with their legs often inter-twined and a characteristic sideways shuffle movement. Because of the intimacy, there are not as many step variations in this style.
Universitário forró, with its origins in the big southern cities of Brazil, is the more popular style outside of the Northeast. Its basic step is forward-backwards — slightly similar to traditional bolero or salsa in line. With more space between the pair, many more moves, steps and turns are possible than in Nordestino styles. The more common steps include:
Universitário forró supposedly evolved from the pé-de-serra/baião styles, while Nordestino is used to refer to the styles more like the original xote.

International forró festivals

The first forró festival outside Brazil was in 2008; 'Forró de Domingo' in Stuttgart, Germany and since its last edition in 2018, it was the biggest forró festival outside Brazil. A dance performance from the 2014 edition has more than 53 million views on YouTube and is the most watched forró performance on this platform. Today, there are many more annually forró festivals celebrated in :de:Forró#Forr%C3%B3-Festivals_in_Deutschland|Germany and other parts of Europe. Since 2016, festivals have also been organised in North America, Russia, Oceania and Japan. In 2019, over 70 international festivals were planned outside of Brazil.