Religião e música: uma análise da fé e da experiência religiosa em canções da MPB

Abstract

This dissertation, entitled "Religion and Music: An Analysis of Faith and Religious Experience in MPB Songs," analyzes faith (a material object) and Brazilian popular music (a formal object and source for the study of religion), as an instrument of faith expression. Its problematic seeks to answer how composers understand what they call faith. Through a theoretical-methodological discussion, after identifying a concept of faith in Mircea Eliade in connection with Paul Tillich's concept of faith, we intend to contribute, through an articulated approximation of these concepts, to the understanding of the notion of faith and its typologies (Human Faith and Religious Faith in Popular Songs), as well as religious experience as a category. Thus, in light of Eliade and Tillich as references for analyzing the songs – but without making them arbitrary or superior instances for evaluating the type of faith ex- pressed by the composers –, the aim is to show that, in the authors' concepts of faith, there is a characteristic element in common, that being “creative freedom”, in which we will make a connection with a creativity inspired poetically and artistically in the compositions of the songs. Thus, we consider that religion and music, in a dimension of the human spirit culturally speaking, as well as in the existential and ontological dimensions, from the imaginary to the symbolic that reveals the sacred, through expressions of faith in MPB, manifest a type of revelation poetically inspired by the process of musical composition. Chapter 1 will present the conceptual keys of faith in Tillich and Eliade concomitantly with musical art, in a theoretical-methodological discussion of the main authors, supported and mediated by secondary ones in the realms of religion and its languages, in the phenomenological and philosophical dynamics of religion. In chapter 2, we will analyze the songs by Zé Geraldo, "A fé" (from the 1984 album Sol Girassol) and Diogo Nogueira, "Fé em Deus" (from the 2007 album Poder da Criação), in light of the concepts of faith and its typologies in Tillich and Fowler. Chapter 3 concludes the research by analyzing the context of religious experience in Eliade and Libânio, presenting the hypotheses raised as a result of the reflections considered on the relationship between Music and Religion, reverberated in the songs by the group O Rappa, "Anjos" (from the 2013 album Nunca tem fim), Gustavo Miotto, "Melhor versão" (from the 2023 album Melhor Versão), and Silvanno Salles/Grelo, "Só fé" (from the 2024 album Só fé).