Traditional music and dance
Carnival is an essential part of Carioca's culture and soul, and the city's most famous event. It attracted over 7 million people in 2024. Descended from the entrudo, a historic Portuguese parade, to which African influences have been added, this uniquely important festival is a veritable gallery of traditional aesthetics and practices. Starting with frevo. Born at the end of the 19th century in Pernambuco, this feverish rhythm, all brass and percussion, is similar in its movements to a cousin of capoeira, also full of agility and color.
Also originating from the Nordeste are forró, a country-famous accordion-based music based on Africanized European dances, and maracatu, an Afro-Brazilian expression practiced since the beginning of colonization.
Among the gallery of traditional Brazilian instruments, the most common are the berimbau, a bow attached to a calabash, generally used to accompany capoeira fights; the cavaquinho, a small four-string guitar; and the cuíca, a drum rubbed from the inside with a stick, emitting the "laugh" typical of Brazilian music.
Apart from Carnival, Paraty events such as the Festa Do Divino, ten days of processions, or the Festival Da Pinga, featuring the local cachaça, present many folkloric practices. Year-round, the Club Finlândia de Rio offers traditional folk dances in costume.
Popular music
The emblematic music of the city, samba, in Brazil, is a masculine word. A Carioca genre par excellence, samba was born at the beginning of the 20th century in the port of Rio, among the freed slaves from the Nordeste who came to the capital in search of work. Characterized by its endlessly abundant percussion, choral singing and radiant joie de vivre, samba is also a dance as catchy as it is contagious, and is an essential part of every carnival in the country. Very popular, and therefore very much played, the genre earned its letters of nobility in the hands of mestre Cartola, founder of Mangueira, the most famous of the samba schools, Beth Carvalho, Paulinho da Viola and Zeca Pagodinho.
An excellent place to listen to samba in Rio is the Carioca da Gema, a typical venue featuring many local groups. Also worth mentioning is Cachaçaria Mangue Seco, a samba club as famous for its incredible bar as for the quality of its concerts.
An immediate descendant of samba, bossa nova has become one of the faces of the country. Born in the late 1950s, bossa nova is, very roughly speaking, a more intimate, jazz-infused form of samba. The birth of the genre is often marked by Chega de Saudade, the debut album by Bahian João Gilberto (1931-2019), one of the colossuses of Brazilian music with his angelic voice and bittersweet lightness. If this album is so important, it is undoubtedly also because it is a crossroads where several great minds of Brazilian music intersect, including the two Carioca cadors Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes.
The former, better known as Tom Jobim (1927-1994), was a composer, pianist and flautist, and is still considered one of the fathers of bossa nova. Author of some 500 songs, Jobim is forever linked with Girl from Ipanema, written in 1964, a true gem that exported bossa nova worldwide. The lyrics were written by... Vinicius de Moraes (no coincidence there). If Brazilian music has achieved such popularity, it's largely thanks to this generous personality, as poetic as he was radiant. A prolific composer and lyricist of bossa nova, Vinicius de Moraes (1913-1980) is directly or indirectly associated with many of the country's greatest hits. A legendary artist if ever there was one. Unsurprisingly, the Rio institution of the genre bears his name: the Vinicius Bar. Located on the street that also bears his name, this is by far one of the best places in town for a bossa concert, its mythical stage having welcomed such luminaries of the genre as Baden Powell, Wanda Sa, Dori Caymmi... On the same street, a little further on, you'll also find Toca Do Vinicius, a bookshop and (above all) a veritable bossa nova cultural center.
An extension of bossa nova, música popular brasileira - literally meaning "Brazilian popular music" and often referred to by its acronym "MPB" - marks a turning point in national music. Not a codified aesthetic per se, MPB is rather a protest movement combining sophisticated melodies, traditional influences, protest lyrics and samba, bossa, jazz and rock in a single movement.The genre came to life under the impetus of two of Rio's greatest musicians: Chico Buarque (1944), composer, singer and writer, author of numerous Brazilian standards, and Baden Powell (1937-2000), guitar virtuoso and composer of instinctive, luminous, sometimes surprising, always warm and tender music. His album Os Afro, composed in collaboration with Vinicius, is widely regarded as a pillar of the genre.
Less popular today, MPB nevertheless enjoyed a second youth in the 2000s with a group of artists who, for the most part, bore surnames already familiar to the general public: Moreno Veloso (son of Caetano), Leo Maia (son of Tim Maia), Maria Rita (daughter of Elis Regina) or Jairzinho and Luciana Mello (sons of Jair Rodrigues).
Classical music
In the second half of the 18th century, the Minas Gerais region attracted a large number of colonial gold and diamond miners, bringing with it a large population. Numerous composers were active at the time, some of whom have gone down in history, such as Lobo de Mesquita, Francisco Gomes da Rocha and Marcos Coelho Neto, who wrote mainly sacred music. With the impoverishment of the mines at the end of the century, musical activity shifted to Rio, the city having become the residence of the Portuguese royal family from 1808 onwards - and the latter ordering Portuguese composers and musicians to join them. It was during this period that a number of important Brazilian composers appeared: José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767-1830), strongly influenced by Mozart and Haydn, and Antônio Carlos Gomes (1836-1896), a composer of operas based on Italian codes but imbued with Brazilian national themes. These include Il Guarany and Lo Schiavo, two of his greatest works, which were both performed at La Scala. In Brazil, too, opera was enjoying a golden age, and it was during this period that many important buildings were constructed, such as the stunning Theatro Municipal do Rio De Janeiro, a direct inspiration from Garnier and home to the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra (one of the country's leading orchestras).
As in many other parts of the world, the desire to establish a national music scene emerged here in the early 20th century. Genuinely Brazilian, it had to be free of European influences and steeped in the country's folklore. Although Alberto Nepomuceno (1864-1920) is considered the initiator of this musical nationalism, it was the man from Rio, Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), who was its great herald. Brazil's most famous composer, he brilliantly blended the classicism of his masters (Bach first and foremost) with the country's traditional sounds. After eight years of ethno-musical research in the remotest regions of the country, the artist was able to create a singular and profoundly Brazilian body of work. His masterpiece is Bachianas Brasileiras, the apotheosis of the fusion between folklore and Bach influences.
Lovers of his music should not miss a visit to the Museu Villa-Lobos in the Botafogo district. This small late 19th-century house houses a collection of personal objects belonging to the famous Brazilian composer, including scores, correspondence, photographs, videos and a few instruments, including his Gaveau grand piano.
And speaking of pianos, it's impossible not to mention one of the greatest pianists of the second half of the 20th century: Nelson Freire (1944-2021). A native of Boa Esperança in Minas Gerais, this close friend of Martha Argerich is remembered as a performer of rare sensitivity and expressiveness.
Electronic music
In recent years, a style that originated in Rio has put Brazil on the global electronic music scene: baile funk. In fact, if it's called that outside the country, it's usually referred to as carioca funk in Brazil, or simply funk in Rio. But don't let the name fool you, this purely electronic music bears little relation to James Brown, Stevie Wonder or George Clinton. Dating back to the 1980s and drawing its inspiration from Miami Bass (a danceable and highly licentious variant of hip-hop), carioca funk differs from rap in its minimalist, mechanical coldness, harshness and savagery. Generation after generation, it has become the most popular music of the country's youth, driven by stars such as singer Anitta, nicknamed the "Beyoncé do Brasil", MC Kevinho and MC Fioti (who has had a small success in France).
