The word chôro is Portuguese for "weeping", "cry", and came to be the name used for music played by an ensemble of Brazilian street musicians using both African and European instruments, who improvise in a free and often dissonant kind of counterpoint called contracanto. In this context, the term does not refer to any definite form of composition, but rather includes a variety of Brazilian types. Villa-Lobos described the basic concept of his Chôros as a "brasilofonia"—an extension of the popular street-musicians' chôro to a pan-Brazilian synthesis of native folklore, both Indian and popular. The tenthwork in the series is for mixed choir and large orchestra, and quotes at length from a popular song, originally composed as an instrumental schottische, Yará, in 1896 by :pt:Anacleto de Medeiros|Anacleto de Medeiros. In 1907, :pt:Catullo da Paixão Cearense|Catullo da Paixão Cearense transformed it into a popular song by adding words to the melody, retitling it "Rasga o coração". The Villa-Lobos work bears this phrase as a subtitle.
History
The series of Chôros was composed between 1920 and 1929, but the pieces were not all composed in numerical order. Sometimes, when Villa-Lobos was working on one piece in the series, an idea would occur to him for another that seemed to him to belong much further along, and so he would compose a new Chôros around that rhythm or theme and assign it a higher number, in the expectation of writing pieces to go in between. For example, whereas Chôros no. 7 was written in 1924, the Chôros 3, 4, 5, and 6 were not composed until 1925 and 1926, and the Introdução aos Chôros was written only in 1929.
The ''Chôros'' series
Introdução aos Chôros: Abertura , for guitar and orchestra or
No. 8 for large orchestra and 2 pianos "Dance Chôro"
No. 9 for orchestra
No. 10 for chorus and orchestra "Rasga o coração"
No. 11 for piano and orchestra
No. 12 for orchestra
No. 13 for band and 2 orchestras – score lost, except for a short-score fragment consisting of the first page of a piano reduction, held by the Museu Villa-Lobos.
No. 14 for orchestra, band, and chorus – score lost
