Ciranda

A traditional Brazilian children's round dance-song in which participants form a circle and sing while moving. The ciranda is associated with the folk music traditions of northeastern Brazil, where the songs are typically pentatonic or modal and often deal with the natural world, games, or simple narrative subjects. Villa-Lobos's sixteen Cirandas for piano (1926) are based on folk ciranda songs collected or known to the composer, each transformed into a concert piano piece that retains the song's melody as its core while surrounding it with varied harmonic and rhythmic elaboration.

The folk melodies at the heart of the Cirandas should remain audible and simple even in the most elaborate settings — Villa-Lobos never loses the song. The rhythmic character of the original round dances gives many of the pieces their fundamental energy; allow this dance quality to inform the rhythmic approach even in the more harmonically complex settings.