Música e primeiras letras no Recife colonial: Luís Álvares Pinto, mulato, músico e professor régio

Luis Álvares (or Alves) Pinto was the first Brazilian to receive a musical formation in the Europe following the erudite rules. A man of singular trajectory, the mestizo musician and teacher were born in Recife in 1719, where also he died in 1789. In 1740, with the aid of his family, friends and trade companions of the Brotherhood of Our Lady of Livramento (deliverance), he goes to Lisbon to study with Henrique Negrão, famous organist in the city cathedral, arriving as a musician of the Royal Chapel. In Portugal he becomes a requested player and teacher in the noblemen houses, but its ascending career was brusquely interrupted by the economic and cultural shortage restored in the Metropolis after the catastrophic earthquake of 1755, that lets him without work and compelled his return to the native land, where he followed military career as his father and became, years later, master-of-chapel of the churches of Our Lady of Livramento and of Saint Peter of Clergymen. In 1784 he has published in Lisbon the „Dicccionario Pueril Para o Uso dos Meninos, ou dos que principião o ABC, e a soletrar dicções‟, a spelling-book directed to the teaching of first letters, complementing his performance as a teacher in the field of music, where he also writes two manuscripts dedicated to the solfeggio art. This paper intends to approach, through this peculiar trajectory, the strategies of social insertion and affirmation used, in the second half of the 18th century, by members of the subordinate layers to become informing in a colonial society marked by the slavery stigma, but in which there‟s breaches for which mestizos, as Luis Álvares Pinto, can change their daily limits as historical subjects, constructing a place of privileged speaks from the field of the arts and the culture.