Where are you from?
Talk about your country =)
I’m from Brazil, Sao Paulo…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil
Brazilian culture is a culture of a very diverse nature. An ethnic and cultural mixing occurred in the colonial period between Native Americans, Portuguese and Africans formed the bulk of Brazilian culture. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Italian, German, Spanish, Arab and Japanese immigrants settled in Brazil and played an important role in its culture, creating a multicultural and multiethnic society.
Brazil’s cultural tradition extends to its music styles which include samba, bossa nova, forró, frevo, pagode and many others. Brazil has also a large contribution to the genres of classical music, which can be seen in the works of composers José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767-1830), Antonio Carlos Gomes (1836-1896), Elias Álvares Lobo (1834-1901), Alberto Nepomuceno (1864-1920) Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), Francisco Mignone (1897-1986), Camargo Guarnieri (1907 - 1993), Cláudio Santoro (1919 - 1989), Osvaldo Lacerda (1927) and Eli-Eri Moura (1963), among others. Some of the most famous Brazilian classical performers are the soprano Bidu Sayão, the pianists Nelson Freire and Guiomar Novaes and the conductors Eleazar de Carvalho and Isaac Karabtchevsky. Brazil is also the land of the São Paulo State Symphony, regarded as one of the outstanding orchestras in Latin America and in the world.
Antônio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto popularized the Bossa Nova sound, which was followed by Música Popular Brasileira (literally “Brazilian Popular Music”, often abbreviated to MPB). In the late 1960s, Tropicalismo was popularized by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil.
Within the last 20 years, Brazil saw a dramatic increase in diversity in the music they express. Ever since 1985, when Brazil became democratic, popular music, such as hip hop, became a widely “unprecedented fashion” However, social classes developed between the poor, middle class, and wealthy. Music was influenced by race and equality facts. For example, poor people would talk about how corrupt the government is, the violent and low class life the live in, unequal wealth distribution, and drugs Nevertheless, traditional music, such as samba, managed to keep the country’s music scene united as one.
Literature in Brazil dates back to the 16th century, to the writings of the first Portuguese explorers in Brazil, such as Pêro Vaz de Caminha, writer of the fleet of navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral. During the colonial period, many writers produced chronicles, poems, and plays detailing the events in the colony. A notable early writer was father António Vieira, a Portuguese Jesuit educated in the Jesuit school of Salvador, Brazil, who became one of the most celebrated Baroque writers of the Portuguese language. The period following the Independence of Brazil in 1822 coincided with the Romantic Period of literature, and the first Brazilian national writers like Gonçalves Dias and José de Alencar gave prominence to the native peoples.
