The puzzle of "Construção" and the orchestra that recorded twice

01How the arrangement was written

Rogério Duprat wrote the orchestral arrangement for the song "Construção". In other words, he wrote what the orchestra would play. The musicians recorded it in the studio. The album was produced for Philips by Roberto Menescal, with musical direction by Magro of the vocal group MPB4.

Decades later, in an interview, Duprat told the story himself. He already knew the song but did not remember exactly where he had heard it, perhaps at a show. He found it interesting: to him it was a game with proparoxítonas. When he was called in to do the arrangement, he went straight to the Canecão, a large concert hall in Rio, where the song was being rehearsed. He listened to the rehearsal and asked them to get him a tape so he could work. There was a rush, because the recording was about to start. So Duprat went to his brother's place in Rio and wrote the arrangement there. He left it all with the production team and went back to São Paulo.

02Menescal's story

Menescal says some tracks on the album used about 60 musicians. According to Menescal, a studio assistant pressed the wrong button during the mix and wiped the orchestra recording for the song "Construção". There was no money to call the orchestra back, Menescal says, so without telling the label he took some of the budget set aside for other albums he was producing, Elis Regina's among them, and had the orchestra record its part again.

Menescal also recalls that the length of the song "Construção", about six and a half minutes, worried radio people.

03A word game

Chico told Status magazine in 1973 that the song "Construção" was nothing more than a formal experiment, "a game of bricks", with nothing to do with the problems of workers. In the same interview he said that "the emotion was in the word game", in which all the closing words are proparoxítonas.

A proparoxítona is a word stressed on the third syllable from the end, the way "architect" is in English. Chico ends every line of the lyric of "Construção" with one. The lyric has 41 lines. The first 17 tell the story of a construction worker. The next 17 repeat that story line by line, changing only the last word of each. The final 7 sum up the story.

On the LP, the full lyric of "Construção" was printed on the back cover. Menescal says he was the one who put it there.

04How the lyric was put together

In February 1972, a report in Realidade magazine described how Chico put together the lyric of "Construção". First came loose lines, already in the rhythm of the final version. With them, Chico finished the first half of the lyric, the first telling of the story. Only then did he work out the alternative last words: the proparoxítonas that take the place of the original ones when the story is told again. The magazine compared those last words to pieces that can be swapped around at will.

The report also pointed out a contrast. The lyric is complicated, but the music has only two chords, which repeat the whole time while the lyric piles up its images. Realidade compared it to laying one slab on top of another in a building.

The trick had been played before. Decades earlier, the Brazilian country duo Alvarenga & Ranchinho had a comic song, "Drama de Angélica", in which almost every line ends in a proparoxítona. In a 2018 profile of the duo for Sesc São Paulo, the poet Fabrício Corsaletti told the poet Angélica Freitas that the song is "the grandmother of 'Construção'".

05In times of censorship

The song "Construção" passed censorship without cuts. Other songs on the album did not pass so easily. In August 1971 the lyric of "Deus lhe pague" was stamped as vetoed. A handwritten note beside the stamp said it looked like a message with a double meaning, aimed either at someone or at something abstract. "Deus lhe pague" still opens the album Construção.

In "Cordão", one line had to be changed, according to censorship records reported by BBC News Brasil. In "Samba de Orly", a song about exile, the lines Vinícius de Moraes had contributed were changed to get past censorship, and he kept his co-writing credit.