The vocal investment of the People from Ceará

a singing as crooked as a knife

Abstract

With this reflection, we aim to describe the constituent elements of the innovative vocal qualities of Belchior, Ednardo, and Fagner, which appeared on the Brazilian music scene in the 70s as components of the so-called People from Ceará. From the Discourse Analysis outlined by Maingueneau, in addition to the concepts of positioning and investment applied by Costa (2012) to Brazilian literary music discourse, we adapted the interdiscourse and metadiscourse concepts to the analysis of the vocal dimension of the songs, which resulted in intervocality (constitutive and shown) and metavocality (MENDES, 2013). We compared four phonograms of the music "A Palo Seco" (Belchior, 1974, 1976; Ednardo, 1974 and Fagner, 1976) and concluded that a strident voice could be heard in Fagner and Ednardo's vocal qualities and a hypernasality in Belchior, whose vocal intensity is camouflaged by lower harmonics, besides showing a less defined articulation, with syllabic accentuation closer to the spoken voice, when compared to the other two people from Ceará. As for the scansion of the verses, there is a more significant number of pauses and vowel stretches in the first recording by Belchior, which are replaced by sighs, in Fagner, and erased in Ednardo. This shows that, despite the particularities of each one, we can think of a vocal arch-investment that identifies the three singers to the Personal position of Ceará.