Fado and the Place of Longing: Loss, Memory and the City

Ethnomusicology, 2007

This paper presents research carried out on Portuguese fado music and its role in the interlacing of mythology, history, memory and regionalism in Portugal over the second half of the twentieth century. I concentrate on the so-called ‘new fado’ which emerged in the 1990s and gained considerable popularity both domestically and internationally, acting as a cultural product for reaffirming local identity via recourse to social memory and an imagined community while also providing a distinctive cultural export for the dissemination of a ‘remembered Portugal’ on the global stage. In reflecting on the mediation of fado’s ‘memory community’, I will focus on the role of transference in fado songs. Crucial to my thinking here will be a theorising of witnessing whereby I set out the connections between the desire to remember and the imperative to testify to what one has remembered. Witnessing is here thought of as a kind of carrying and I pursue the implications for such a carrying on the writing, memorisation and voicing of song texts. The theory presented is one that has resonance beyond fado music, yet fado provides an exemplary case study given the number of song texts in the genre that focus on notions of carrying and unburdening. Bearing witness and bearing up are crucial themes in fado lyrics, while fado performance style places special emphasis on the carrying-on of tradition and the carrying-out of cathartic tasks. Keywords: Portugal, fado, memory, witnessing, testimonial

Migrações Journal – Special Issue Music and Migration, organized by Maria de São José da Côrte-Real, Lisbon: ACIDI, no. 7, Oct. 2010., 2010

This paper discusses the various ways in which music and cities interact, in a context of increased inter-connectedness between the local and the global. On the premises of the existence of a so-called ‘global culture’, cities tend to reinvent themselves by promoting various (and eventually competing) self-definitions. In the case of Lisbon, this tendency is accompanied by a seemingly increased desire to connect (or re-connect) with the Lusophone world, eventually informing Lisbon’s self-images as an inclusive and multicultural city. In this process, new forms of ethnicity may gain visibility in the marketing of Luso-world music (or world music as practiced in the Portuguese-speaking countries). At the horizon of imagined cities as ‘transcultural megacities’, music tends to gain agency in the promotion of senses of place and belonging, in and to the city.

2018

This textbook offers a refreshing vision of music from the Iberian Peninsula, delving into its complex diversity by addressing the multiplicity of regional genres, going beyond the well-known genres of fado and flamenco. The shift in perspective is immediately perceptible from the front cover illustration, a photo of bagpipers and drummers accompanied by a female gigante (giant) in medieval dress during a patron saint celebration in Cantabria. Throughout the first three chapters, the authors provide a broad overview of Spanish and Portuguese music that gives the reader a kaleidoscopic understanding of the rich and diverse musical genres existing across the two countries, contextualised through a range of historical, social and cultural backgrounds. The last two chapters do, however, concentrate on fado and flamenco, thus addressing the main themes that might interest a lecturer introducing their students to Iberian music. The richly illustrated book includes numerous activities and ...

BUALA - african contemporary culture, 2011

Music, City, Ethnicity Exploring Selected Music Scenes in Lisbon and Beyond, BUALA, 2011

Popular Music, 2014

Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 31, Number 1, pp. 109–130, 2019

Beside Portugal's iconic fado genre, recognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO in 2011, music scenes in Lisbon have diversified throughout the 2000s along with the affirmation of Portugal's capital city on the stage of global attractiveness. This paper examines some music scenes in Lisbon in the late 2000s and early 2010s-especially hip-hop and Angolan kuduro played by the Luso-Angolan bands Buraka Som Sistema, and Batida, based in Lisbon. It discusses the ways in which the sampling technique has allowed for diverse forms of musical cosmopolitanism, performing connections with Africa, and the tentative affirmation by some Portuguese media in the late 2000s, of a musical Lusofonia.

Portugal has been an administratively centralized country for various centuries. Culturally, it has been in the shadow of Lisbon, and to a secondary extent Oporto, that a number of provincial towns have thrived, both inland as well as on the coast. Their provincial status, often described as non-cosmopolitan, backwards, marginal, peripheral to development, and constructed in various forms, has created a frame of mind that persisted in time. This exploratory paper looks at cultural life through music in North Portugal at the turn of the nineteenth century, in particular at the city of Guimarães and attempts to provide some details of the transformation of music landscapes in the city.

2014

Carlos Saura’s 2007 film Fados follows the director’s earlier works Flamenco (1995) and Tango (1998) by showing musicians performing a vernacular music genre while accompanied by dancers. This approach to Portugal’s ‘national music’ attracted consternation from fans of the genre due to the fact that, unlike flamenco and tango, fado does not have an associated dance form. For some commentators, Saura also took liberties by including a number of musicians from outside Portugal (including Spain, Africa and Latin America) and mixing traditional fado forms with other music genres (including rock, hip hop and Cape Verdean morna). Despite these potential distractions, Saura seems keen to depict the history of fado from its tangled roots to its present position as an urban folk music par excellence, a music that both evokes and inhabits the contemporary Portuguese city (in particular, the city of Lisbon). Through evocative use of light and shadow, Saura offers up a series of highly ‘photographic’ scenes in which fado’s poetics of urban haunting are made prominent. Therefore, rather than critiquing the director for his ‘inauthentic’ depiction of fado, I respond to Saura’s provocation by considering his film as a strategy for setting fado’s poetics of time, space and history in a new light. Taking a cue from the use of choreography and urban tableaux in the film, I offer a spatial reading of Fados that draws upon the work of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. I argue that the film makes visible a ‘production of space’ that complements existing fado mythography.