Pessoal do Ceará: A identidade de um percurso e o percurso de uma identidade

Abstract

In this work, we intend to examine a set of ten songs (melody and lyrics) of Pessoal do Ceará, a group of songwriters from Ceará who migrated to the Central and Southestern part of Brazil, in the beginning of the 1970’s. Our purpose is to investigate if a general enunciator image emerges from the analysis of the selected texts. Besides, if this image supplies and identity to the route of the group and justifies the referred designation, which has had a lot of controversy. For this purpose, we choose the Semiotics of the Discourse approach, since it deals with the discourse in act notion, through which the enunciator-subject of each text or discourse may be followed along its becoming, that is, it appears continuously in the enunciative act itself. Two other key-words of the selected theoretical approach which favor this dynamic apprehension of the enunciative act and the subject who enunciates consist of enunciative praxis and enunciative instance. These concepts suggest a new relationship between text and social historical context and give them a dialectical feature in regard to the ways of semiotic existence. In this theoretical perspective, we investigate if the route of “Pessoal do Ceará” makes sense, that is, if there is a narrative coherence that joins the different phases of the route and their enunciative subjects. Afterwards, we conclude if the designation is relevant or not. In order to analyse the song as a syncretic semiotic object based on the fundamental relationship between melody and lyrics, we use the semiotic song theory, that was worked out by the semiotician and musician Luiz Tatit. He suggests a set of categories which not only can be applied in the expression level but also in the content level, such as Hjelmslev conceived. From this point of view, it was possible to describe the imbrications between linguistic and musical dimensions which are typical to the song. Also, this partnership helps the construction of a unique meaning effect, that is lost every time that melody and lyrics are set apart to study only one of them.