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Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life by Lila Ellen Gray

2015; Music Library Association; Volume: 71; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2015.0077

1534-150X

Danielle M. Kuntz,

Philippine History and Culture

Reviewed by: Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life by Lila Ellen Gray Danielle M. Kuntz Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life. By Lila Ellen Gray. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. [xvi, 309 p. ISBN 9780822354598 (hardcover), $89.95; ISBN 9780822354710 (paperback), $24.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Lisboa é sempre Lisboa. Lisbon is always Lisbon. Fadistas (fado singers) sang out this impassioned refrain many times during the years that I lived in Lisbon doing research (2012–13). Fado, Portugal’s celebrated genre of popular song, had just been added to UNESCO’s World’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list (November 2011), and the city proudly displayed the new honor on banners and billboards emblazoned with dramatic images of Portuguese guitarra players and fado’s central figure, Amália Rodrigues. It is precisely the intangibility of this music that makes the refrain “Lisbon is always Lisbon” work: its meaning cannot be taught, only understood. Fadistas often summarize fado’s exceptional claims to place, space, memory, and identity, as reflecting an authentically Portuguese expression of “soul.” Fado Resounding, Lila Ellen Gray’s illuminating ethnographic study of fado, draws together over ten years of field-work from both long- and short-term periods of research (1999–2010) to interrogate fado’s claims to Portuguese “soulfulness,” grasping hold of the genre’s seeming intangibility and questioning the ways that the genre transforms sound and performance into meaning. Fado Resounding takes its place in a growing body of literature that seeks to include fado in sociological and anthropological studies of genre as lived experience and expressive cultural form. In this study, Gray focuses on fado vadio (amateur fado), an improvisatory practice of fado in which performance often intermingles with pedagogy and practice in restaurants and taverns (tascas). Through a series of animated vignettes, Gray mixes together her firsthand experience as a student of fado vadio (personal stories about lessons, conversations, and performances) with careful theoretical analyses of those interactions. Taking this approach, Fado Resounding does not aim to contribute a broad survey of the historical foundations of the genre, a focus that is still lacking in English-language scholarship and has only recently gained ground among Portuguese-language scholars. Drawing on critical theories of genre, intertextuality, cultural history, sociology, anthropology, and sound studies, fado vadio becomes the site of wide-ranging investigations into affect and meaning in fado performance. Six chapters follow an introductory explication of the study’s theoretical framework. The first four chapters together argue that “fado as genre serves as nexus of gathering (and releasing) for historical narratives, embodied practices, for ways of feeling and remembering, for sensing place, and for affect” (p. 159). In chapter 1, Gray’s ethnographic experience as a student of fado vadio serves to interrogate both the implicit and explicit practices of learning fado performance aesthetics. Contrasting the implicit learning achieved through rituals of listening and singing in amateur contexts with the explicit pedagogies of institutionalized fado instruction, the author illuminates what she calls a “ubiquitous imaginary of the essentially unlearnable” (p. 45). Chapter 2 links this imaginary to fado’s self-reflexive engagement with the past, which fadistas reimagine through the present. The past is interanimated by place in chapter 3, which centers on “fado’s city,” Lisbon, and examines the ways in which the city is both experienced and imagined through fado performance. Chapter 4 rounds out the opening part of the study with a more traditional ethnomusicological analysis of the sonic structure and vocal style of fado performance. Concerned primarily with the performing voice, the author examines the influence of improvisation (and the memory [End Page 719] of prior improvisations) in shaping musical signification. Together, these four chapters make an evincing argument for fado as genre in the ethnographic interrogation of the “soulful”—one of fado’s most exclusive claims to meaning—in terms of learning and pedagogy, conceptions of past/ present, locality and place, and stylized performance. The final two chapters work in tandem to explore the gendered discourses and practices that shape fado’s meaning. In chapter 5, Gray explores the “gender of genre,” focusing on the different kinds of labor that male and female fadistas perform. Examining, in particular...