O intérprete de histórias inventadas: Minas Gerais setecentista na balança da musicologia

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation aims to comprehend and evaluate the strategies used by Brazilian musicologists in constructing narratives about 18th-century Minas Gerais, during the 20th and 21st centuries. The thesis explores a set of methodologies that includes a non antagonistic taxonomic organization of sources, into musicographic and non-musicographic groups. The approach is based on two pillars: (1) editorial recomposition of musical manuscripts, and (2) contextual/significative exploration of notarial, accounting-financial, administrative, census, and legal documentation. Therefore, the thesis is structured into four chapters following the itinerary of conceptual nuclei named as choosing, editing, inventing, and liberating. It argues for the critical reassessment of historiographical musicological practice by proposing a direction toward a paradigm of inventive freedom. The concept of inventiveness is defined as an integral part of the narrative process, grounded in the construction of an interlocus between the analyst and object(s) through the activities of observation, translation, and comprehension. Moreover, the thesis recognizes the link between the musicologist/analyst, sources, their relationships with the narrative development, and historiographical-musicological practice as an integral part of critical analysis. It argues for the awareness of subjectivity as the engine of memory elaboration, as the thread sewing together imaginaries across various procedural and methodological fields. In this scenario, the analogy of Eros and Midas is used as a strategy to understand the development of this historiographical path in musicology, conceived as articulated by a thaumaturge Narcissus. In conclusion, the thesis suggests that a potential alternative to this musicological-narrative context lies in a movement towards a pluriverbal historiographical-musicological practice that acknowledges the analyst's self-subjective foundations in the constitution of imaginaries and, therefore, recognizes inventive freedom as an agenda for musicology.