CLEARINGS AT NIGHT. CROSSINGS AND RESISTANCE IN THE CLUBE DA ESQUINA'S SONGS
Clube da Esquina. Brazilian Military Regime. Music Semiotics.
This work aims to analyze the dialogue between the songs of Clube da Esquina and the forms of artistic and political repression engendered by the Brazilian military regime (1964-1985). Based on the theory of Music Semiotics by Luiz Tatit (1997; 2002; 2007) our reflection outlines the songwriters' work that allows us to identify three distinct moments in their artistic trajectory, which begins in the second half of the 1960s and continues until the enactment of the Brazil’s Amnesty Law (1979). In our studies, we aim, above all, to understand the language mechanisms present in the songs and how such constructions allowed the establishment of a politicized and critical work, even within a context of high artistic censorship. Thus, we observe that Clube da Esquina's work outlines a kind of global narrative program in which the notion of crossing, represented in the lyrics mainly through the opposition between the signs "night" and "day", is assimilated as an aesthetic of the group’s resistance in parallel to the historical and political moment in which the songs are inscribed.