A caneta e a tesoura: dinâmicas e vicissitudes da censura musical no regime militar

Abstract

HEREDIA, Cecília Riquino. Pen and scissors: dynamics and vicissitudes of musical censorship during the military regime. 2015. 150 f. Dissertação (Mestrado) – Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2015. Since music is considered one of the performing arts most open to changes in behavior and political patterns, song censorship has singularities that interfere in the production of the censor’s report and augment the processes experienced by the Censorship Division of Public Entertainment. From a group of documents constituted by organs linked to censorship and censorship legislation, this study intends to examine how the vicissitudes and tensions that are a part of musical censorship activity during the military regime are present in the speech of these technicians and, at the same time, analyze how these documents demonstrate their insertion in the repressive apparatus of the authoritarian State. For this purpose, we propose a new approach to this musical censorship, conducting, alongside qualitative analyses, a serial and quantitative reading of the sources produced by the censorship service, establishing tendencies, repetitions, ruptures and gradual changes in the activity’s dynamics. These oscillations, aside from reflecting the State repression policies, also shed light on the relationships the technicians developed with the censorship tradition, artists and cultural industry, as well as on the construction of an image of this service as supposedly being missionary and a bastion of morals, to a society increasingly influenced by new values and groups opposing the regime.