The immense output of the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos is highly amenable to the music historians' popular game of dividing works according to their authors' "style periods." There are a few early pieces written while he spent eight years between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five sojourning through Brazil and discovering its wealth of highly diverse popular musical styles and ethnic music. Then there are the works of increasing mastery written between around 1915 (when he organized his successful debut concert in Rio de Janeiro) and 1923, when he left Brazil under sponsorship by wealthy music lovers and a government grant so he could make a name for himself in Paris.

This first mature phase included two symphonies and a ballet (Uirapurù) before Villa-Lobos wrote this brief (just over five minutes) dance for orchestra. By then he had met Darius Milhaud, the young French composer who was the secretary to the French Ambassador in Rio and had an opportunity to make himself familiar with new musical ideas that were going on in Paris.

Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was only five years old when Villa-Lobos wrote this piece, which shows the Villa-Lobos knew it. The work has polytonality—the simultaneous playing of separate musical lines in different keys—and some passages of pounding rhythms as well as an air of primitivism, all of which are the indicators of a kinship with The Rite.

The Dança frenética is primitive sounding—or, to be more precise, a work that sounds sophisticated in its attempt to sound primitive. It pictures the busy and tangled growth of the rain forest in its profusion of simultaneous musical lines running riot but it is not (aside from the opening idea) particularly frenetic. The title leads one to expect an unending rhythmic orgy. But Villa-Lobos' unending ability to find long, attractive melodies asserts itself and calms the music down, and the ending of the dance, though fast and active, is exhilarating rather than exhausting (which is what one expects from frenetic activity). This is not a criticism of the piece, by the way; rather it is an observation of what it is really like: an infectious rhythmic piece that pleases despite its dense polyphonic scoring and high dissonance level.

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