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Fado, Portugal's most celebrated genre of popular music, can be heard in Lisbon clubs, concert halls, tourist sites, and neighborhood bars. Fado sounds traverse the globe, on internationally marketed recordings, as the "soul" of Lisbon. A fadista might sing until her throat hurts, the voice hovering on the break of a sob; in moments of sung beauty listeners sometimes cry. Providing an ethnographic account of Lisbon's fado scene, Lila Ellen Gray draws on research conducted with amateur fado musicians, fadistas, communities of listeners, poets, fans, and cultural brokers during the first decade of the twenty-first century. She demonstrates the power of music to transform history and place into feeling in a rapidly modernizing nation on Europe's periphery, a country no longer a dictatorship or an imperial power. Gray emphasizes the power of the genre to absorb sounds, memories, histories, and styles and transform them into new narratives of meaning and "soul."
List of contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1. Pedagogies of the Soulful in Sound 27
2. Affects of History 70
3. Fado's City 105
4. Styling Soulfulness 139
5. The Gender of Genre 158
6. Haunted by a Throat of Silver 179
Afterword: The Tangibility of Genre 227
Appendixes: Fado Vitória
Transcriptions 231
Notes 243
References 281
Index 295
About the author
Lila Ellen Gray is Associate Professor of Music at Columbia University.
Summary
This ethnography of fado, Portugal's most celebrated popular music genre, shows how a musical genre can sediment, circulate, and transform affect, sonorously rendering history and place as soulful and feeling as public.
