Esperanza Spalding: ‘Samba Em Prelúdio’ (from
the album Esperanza)
(for component 3: Appraising)
Background information and performance circumstances
Performer
Esperanza Spalding was born in Portland, Oregon, USA, in 1984. Active in music from an
early age, she graduated from violin to double bass, studying at the Portland State University,
and later at the Berklee School of Music. She has worked as a soloist and session player in a
variety of musical styles, but is best known for her four solo albums Junjo (2006), Esperanza
(2008), Chamber Music (2010) and Radio Music Society (2012). She has won four Grammy
awards, including ‘Best new artist’ in 2011, where she was in competition with Florence and the
Machine, Mumford and Sons, and Justin Bieber. Esperanza has wide musical tastes, and her
own compositions show influences from jazz, blues, funk and Latin-American music – especially
Brazilian styles. On the album Esperanza she sings in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
Composer
Roberto Baden Powell Aquino (1937–2000) was a Brazilian guitarist and composer who
played a major part in the bossa nova ‘explosion’ in the 1960s. His music mixed Brazilian
rhythms with complex jazz harmonies.
Lyricist
Vinicius de Moraes (1913–80) was not only a famous poet and the lyricist for some of the best-
known Brazilian popular songs, but also a career diplomat. During his long career, he wrote the
Oscar-winning film Black Orpheus and worked with composers Joao Gilberto and Antonio
Carlos Jobim, creating the lyrics to bossa nova classics such as ‘The Girl from Ipanema’.
The song and its genre
‘Samba em Preludio’, written in 1962, is a bossa nova. ‘Bossa nova’ means ‘new trend’ in
Brazilian, and was one of the most popular musical styles of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The style mixes elements of Brazilian samba with jazz.
Lyrics
The lyrics are in Portuguese. (In some versions, verse 1 is sung by a man and verse 2 by a
woman.)
Translation
Verse 1
Without you, I have no purpose
Because without you, I don’t even know how to cry
I’m a flame without glow, a garden without moonlight
Moonlight without love, love without being given
Without you, I’m just lovelessness
A ship without sea, a field without flowers
Sadness that goes, sadness that comes
Without you my love, I’m no one
Verse 2
Ah, what saudade, what desire to see our life reborn
Come back, my dear
My arms need yours, your embraces need mine
I’m so alone, my eyes weary of staring into the distance
Come, behold life
Without you, my love, I’m no one
Performing forces and their handling
The forces used here are simple – female voice, acoustic guitar and acoustic bass guitar.
The acoustic bass guitar is a larger version of the acoustic guitar, but with four strings, tuned to
E, A, D, G (like the double bass and bass guitar). Esperanza Spalding sings and plays the bass
here, but there is no specific credit for a guitarist. A second acoustic guitar part appears in the
guitar solo, although it is simplified and played by one guitarist in their live performances.
The vocal line is low in the female range, using the chest register. It covers a range of a minor
tenth (an octave plus a minor third) from E below middle C to the G above. The words are set
syllabically, with one musical note to each syllable of text. The vocal line contains many leaps,
and also some quite complex rhythms – triplets, semiquavers, rests. Esperanza’s
performance keeps closely to the printed pitches of the score, but there is variation in the
performance of the rhythms and of the tempo – a performance technique known as rubato.
The bass part is active and does much more than play the root of the chord. The very opening
of the piece features a virtuosic bass solo with use of double stops, wide leaps, rapid
semiquaver passages, a mordent and a harmonic. In places, during verse 1 (before the
acoustic guitar enters), the bass appears to be playing two parts, with lower bass notes
alternating with higher chords, rather like a ragtime piano accompaniment.
The acoustic guitar joins the accompaniment from bar 23 onwards and plays a virtuosic solo
between Verse 2 and bar 89. In its accompaniment role, the guitar pays a mixture of plucked
chords and small melodic passages, some of which cover the long notes at the end of vocal
phrases. There are also passages (bars 25–27) where the guitar line seems to imitate the vocal
part.
Structure
Bars 1–3 Introduction Florid bass guitar solo.
Bars 4– Verse 1 (A) An eight-bar idea repeated with changed ending the
19 second time. The last note overlaps into the next section.
Bars 19– Link Bass solo picks up the tempo to move into the ‘bossa
22 nova’ rhythm for verse 2.
Bars 23– Verse 2 (B) A 16-bar idea, repeated and changed the second time.
54
Bars 55– Guitar solo Played over chords of verse 2.
88
Bars 89– Voice and bass duet Bass plays vocal part from 4–11 (A) while voice sings
104 bars 23–38 (B).
D.S. to Coda section Second half of verse 2 followed by repetitions of the last
end line. Guitar and bass play florid riffs during the last held
vocal note.
Tonality
The key of the piece is B minor.
Many bossa novas use minor keys.
Despite the complexity of some of the harmony, the music does not modulate (change
key).
Texture
The introduction is monophonic (a single line of music) – apart from a couple of double-
stops (two notes or more at once).
The texture here is mostly homophonic (tune and accompaniment), but note that the bass
part at times becomes almost melodic enough to be a melody in its own right.
The passage at bars 89–104 is polyphonic (two or more separate melodic lines at once)
as the two melodies of the piece are combined.
Harmony
The harmonies are essentially tonal.
They show the influence of jazz and of American popular song in being quite complex.
Despite this, the movement of the chord roots is still based around chords I, II, IV and V.
There are frequent chord extensions – where extra thirds are ‘piled up’ on top of the triad
to produce sevenths, ninths, elevenths and thirteenths.
Other types of chords are used – diminished seventh (bar 35); flattened fifth chord (bar
44).
Chromatic chords (containing notes outside the scale of the home key) are used – C♯7
(bar 31) and C and F major chords (bars 27/28).
Although cadences are not used here in quite the same way as in classical styles, the ends
of sections tend to land on either chord V (bar 11) (at the halfway point of the verse), or on
the tonic with a more conventional V–I perfect cadence (bars 52–53).
The chord progressions sometimes create a descending chromatic (by semitone)
movement in the bass line (bars 30–38).
Melody
There are two main melodies in this song, heard separately at first, and then combined at
bars 89–104.
Verse 1 (A) bars 4–19
o An eight-bar idea (bars 4–11), repeated with a different ending, in bars 12–19.
o A series a phrases, linked by a common rising arpeggio (broken chord) shape
(bar 4).
o The first (or second) note of each phrase descends by a semitone or a tone in a
long downward sequence.
o The music descends almost beneath the female vocal range, to a low E, at bar
11.
o The melodic line moves, unusually, mostly by leaps of a third and occasionally of
a seventh, in bars 8–9.
o All phrases have a span of a seventh, apart from the first, which spans a minor
sixth.
o Bars 12–17 is a repeat of bars 4–9, however, the melody is developed through
rhythmic changes.
o The melody changes in bar 18, where a jazzy flattened fifth (F♮) is used to
prepare for the descent to the tonic.
Verse 2 (B) bars 23–54
o The note values have doubled here, with the increase in tempo at bar 19, so the
apparent increase in phrase lengths is false.
o A 16-bar idea (bars 23–38), repeated (like (A)), with a different ending, in bars
39–54.
o In contrast to (A), this melody is almost entirely conjunct (stepwise) in
movement.
o Bars 23–26 descend to the leading note (raised seventh note of the scale –A♯
here), answered by a rising and falling idea in bars 27–30, which in itself is
related to the ending of verse 1 (see bars 17–18).
o Bars 31–34 are in sequence with 23–26, a fourth higher.
o Bars 34–35 repeat the flattened fifth idea (from the end of verse 1) twice, the
second time in sequence, a note lower (this is to move away from the tonic, in
order to set up the repeat).
o Bars 38–54 repeat 23–38, but with the last phrase (36–38) omitted.
Tempo, metre and rhythm
The tempo during bars 1–3 bars is very free and it is difficult to recognise a strong pulse.
Verse 1 has a slow tempo, with much rhythmic rubato (freedom taken with the tempo).
The tempo almost doubles at bar 19, where the bass guitar begins the bossa nova tempo.
A free tempo returns at bar 114.
The piece is (apart from two bars) wholly in 4/4 quadruple time, although the change of
tempo from bar 19 onwards tends to make the piece from there on sound as if it is moving
in two minims to a bar (2/2).
The rhythms of the vocal melody in verse 1 are quite complex, although never syncopated
enough to lose the sense of beat.
There are frequent triplets, and rests effectively separate most of the phrases here.
The bass part in verse 1 is complicated, making more use of syncopated rhythms than
the vocals and only occasionally (bars 6, 9, 10, 14 and 17) using a typical bossa nova-type
rhythm.
In verse 2 the vocal line is mostly in longer note values, but the start of the notes tend to be
off the beat, syncopated a quaver before the beat sometimes.
There are fewer triplets in this section.
From bar 23 the bass part plays much closer to the ‘standard’ bossa nova rhythm – dotted
crotchet and quaver pairs – although still with some syncopations and quaver movement.
The guitar part also adds to the rhythmic interest, with both syncopated and un-syncopated
passages.
From bar 89 the vocal rhythms of verse 2 are less syncopated, perhaps in order to fit in
more easily with those of verse 1 (in doubled note values).
