In the 1970s, the Brazilian singer-guitarist João Gilberto developed a highly personal style of phrasing, often dropping beats or declining to sustain long notes. When the accompaniment closely follows his altered phrases, these techniques lead to a compressed version of a song. When the accompaniment continues normally, they can lead to a shifting of the melody’s metric structure in relation to that of the accompaniment. An example of the latter modification is strikingly displayed in Gilberto’s 1973 recording of Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Aguas de março” [“Waters of March”], a song which features comparatively minimal pitch and rhythmic content.
Gilberto takes Jobim’s minimal materials and applies an almost minimalist aesthetic. His most dramatic alteration is to truncate sustained notes and to elide many unstressed syllables and articles, such that his vocal line is repeatedly transposed in anticipation of his own guitar accompaniment. Unlike the phase-shifting music of Steve Reich, however, Gilberto’s arrangement doesn’t cycle automatically through the various available metric transpositions. In this paper, his metric displacements are considered from the perspectives of beat-class complementation and maximally even beat-class sets, and are then analyzed by means of transformation networks that illustrate his transpositional syntax. Gilberto’s choice of transpositions may be interpreted as projecting onto higher metric levels the device of harmonic anacrusis that is fundamental to the idiomatic performance of much Brazilian samba and bossa nova.