Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life

fado Resounding fado Resounding Affective Politics and Urban Life Lila Ellen Gray Duke University Press • Durham and London • 2013 © 2013 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper . Typeset in Minion Pro by Westchester Books Group. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gray, Lila Ellen Fado resounding : afective politics and urban life / Lila Ellen Gray. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8223-5459-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8223-5471-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Fados—Portugal—History and criticism. I. Title. ML3718.F3G73 2013 781.62'691—dc23 2013018963 Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the ams 75 pays Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which provided funds toward the publication of this book. Frontispiece: A guitarrista and viola player in Alfama on the way to a shit. Lisbon, July 2008. Photograph by the author. To John Barbour Gray and Nancy Orsage Morley and to José Manuel Osório in memoriam Contents List of Illustrations • ix Acknowledgments • xiii Introduction • 1 one Pedagogies of the Soulful in Sound • 27 two Afects of History • 70 three Fado’s City • 105 four Styling Soulfulness • 139 five he Gender of Genre • 158 six Haunted by a hroat of Silver • 179 Aterword: he Tangibility of Genre • 227 Appendixes: Fado Vitória Transcriptions • 231 Notes • 243 References • 281 Index • 295 Illustrations Figures figure 1.1. Laura Candeias during an interval at the Tasca do Jaime, Lisbon • 33 figure 1.2. Jaime Candeias in front of the Tasca do Jaime, Lisbon • 34 figure 1.3. List of fadistas to sing at fado session at the Tasca do Jaime, Lisbon • 35 figure 2.1. Baixa district signage, Lisbon • 71 figure 3.1. he neighborhood of Mouraria in 2003, Lisbon • 115 figure 3.2. Urban renovation scafolding in Alfama in 2002, Lisbon • 120 figure 3.3. Exterior of an Alfama restaurant in 2007, Lisbon • 123 figure 6.1. Newsstand in Lisbon’s Baixa district • 182 figure 6.2. Amália Rodrigues as an airliner, Lisbon airport • 184 figure 6.3. Altar to Amália in the home of an admirer, Lisbon • 207 figure 6.4. Stereo system adorned with a photograph of Amália in the home of an admirer, Lisbon • 208 Plates plate 1. Fado diorama at the Tasca do Jaime, Lisbon plate 2. “Tourists: Respect the Portuguese Silence!” Graiti in Alfama, Lisbon plate 3. “Estou sozinho, estou triste, etc.” (I am alone, I am sad, etc.). Graiti in the Chiado district, Lisbon plate 4. “Vielas” (Alleyways), by Rui Pimentel, Museu do Fado, Lisbon plate 5. Fado venues in Alfama, Lisbon plate 6. Olga Rosa de Sousa singing at the Esquina de Alfama, Lisbon plate 7. Fernanda Proença singing at the Tasca do Jaime, Lisbon plate 8. Amália Rodrigues’s grave in Prazeres Cemetery, Lisbon plate 9. “Rua Amália” (Rua de São Bento), Lisbon plate 10. “Amália Rodrigues,” street art by MrDheo, Lisbon x • List of Illustrations Musical Examples example 4.1. “Fado da Meia Laranja,” three performances by José Manuel Osório, transcription, measures 3–5 • 148 example 4.2. “Fado da Meia Laranja,” three performances by José Manuel Osório, transcription, measures 11–13 • 149 example 4.3. “Fado da Meia Laranja,” three performances by José Manuel Osório, transcription, measures 32–34 • 150 example 4.4. “Fado da Meia Laranja,” three performances by José Manuel Osório, transcription, measures 27–29 • 151 example 4.5. “Fado da Meia Laranja,” performance by José Manuel Osório, three consecutive strophes, transcription, measures 27–29 • 152 example 4.6. Fado Vitória, comparison of performance by José Manuel Osório, “Fado da Meia Laranja,” measures 3–5, with measures 1–3 in recording by Amália Rodrigues of “Povo Que Lavas no Rio” from 1962, transcription • 153 example 4.7. Fado Vitória, excerpt of composition by Joaquim Campos • 154 example 4.8. Fado Vitória, comparisons of performances by José Manuel Osório and Amália Rodrigues with Campos’s notation, transcription • 154 List of Illustrations • xi ac know ledg ments To the fadistas, instrumentalists, aicionados, and fado listeners in Lisbon who shared with me their voices, their friendship, and patience, I thank you. I irst learned how to listen to fado and how to value it in Lisbon’s Tasca do Jaime. I did so through the assistance of so many there, but I am particularly grateful to Fátima Fernandes, Maria José Melo, Fernanda Proença (Pimpona), Olga Rosa de Sousa, and Álvaro Rodrigues. I gratefully acknowledge the institutions and organizations that made long-term ethnographic research inancially possible. he International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council, with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Luso-American Development Foundation, in conjunction with the Council for European Studies; the U.S. Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies program; and Duke University (Department of Cultural Anthropology, Center for European Studies, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Center for International Studies) supported ield research and language study conducted in Lisbon between 2000 and 2003. Subsequent follow-up research (2006–10) was supported by two Columbia University faculty summer research awards, a grant by the Luso-American Foundation for Development, and funding from the Center for Race and Ethnicity, and from the Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. Numerous fadistas, instrumentalists, fans, and music industry professionals participated in recorded interviews during 2001–2003 and in informal conversation and dialogue over the past decade; I am grateful for their generosity. My research was facilitated by the goodwill of multiple proprietors of casas de fado and fado venues in Lisbon. Jaime and Laura Candeias, owners of the Tasca do Jaime, graciously accommodated my regular presence and welcomed me warmly when I returned. In addition, I am grateful to the following venues that opened their doors to me: A Baiuca, Bacalhau de Molho, Café Luso, Tasca do Careca, Taverna do Embuçado, and the Grupo Excursionista Vai Tu. he Associação Cultural o Fado in Marvila encouraged me to participate as a member and as a singer and allowed me to record rehearsals. António Rocha permitted me to record the series of fado “lessons” I took with him at Lisbon’s Fado Museum. Sebastião de Jesus accommodated my research within the spaces of Vai Tu and Tasca do Careca and, through conversation and his artful presentation of the fado, helped to teach me what it means to respect it. Numerous institutions in Lisbon granted me access to their collections and assisted me with multiple queries. I am indebted to José Carlos Alvarez, the director of the Museu Nacional do Teatro, and his staf; to Alda Gomes of the Fonoteca Municipal de Lisboa; to Sara Pereira at the Museu do Fado; to Maria do Carmo Pacheco at Rádio Difusão Portuguesa; to José Jorge Letria and his staf at the Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores; and to Carmo Gregório and João Pimentel of the bookstore Fabula Urbis. I am appreciative of the academics and writers in Lisbon who met with me to discuss this project in its earliest stage: Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, Rui Vieira Nery, José Moças, António Firmino da Costa, Joaquim Pais de Brito, Rui Mota, and Ruben de Carvalho. I thank K. David Jackson for his initial encouragement. Virgílio Santiago helped to teach me Portuguese. Ana Gonçalves carefully transcribed some of my earliest taped interviews. Helena Correia and Ana Gonçalves assisted with the Portuguese orthography for this book. his project began while I was in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, where I had wonderful mentors and colleagues. I am particularly grateful to Louise Meintjes, Charles Piot, Kathy Ewing, Ralph Litzinger, and Sarah Beckwith for their feedback. To Louise Meintjes I owe a tremendous debt for her mentoring and her friendship, and for the exceedingly high bar she sets through her own ethnographic commitments, inspiring through fearless example. xiv • Acknowledgments At Columbia University, I have been grateful for the intellectual community that my colleagues Aaron Fox, Ana Maria Ochoa-Gautier, and Chris Washburne, and our graduate students in the ethnomusicology program, have provided. James Napoli and Melissa Gonzalez assisted with the digital transfer of my ield recordings from digital audio tape. he composer Yoshiaki Onishi brought his sharp ears and a meticulous eye to his labor on the musical transcriptions for this book. Two residencies— one at the John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University during 2004–2005 (“Knowledge and Its Institutions”) and the other at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis during 2009–10 (“Vernacular Epistemologies”)—provided me with invaluable writing time and energetic intellectual communities with whom to think through some of the project’s central questions as they evolved. I thank Julie Livingston and Indrani Chatterjee at Rutgers for their support and dialogue. he seminar participants at Rutgers, the Ethnomusicology Working Group at Duke in the summer of 2008 (Alessandra Ciucci, Louise Meintjes, Amanda Minks, and Jenny Woodruf ), Paul Berliner, Virginia Danielson, Ana Maria Ochoa-Gautier, and Christine Yano ofered insightful critiques on earlier versions (spoken and written) of some portions of this book. Audiences at presentations I gave at Harvard University and Wesleyan University and at panels on musical celebrity I organized for the American Anthropological Association (2007) and the Society for Ethnomusicology (2008) meetings helped me sharpen my arguments in chapter 6. he book has beneited from the attentiveness and insights of my readers from Duke University Press: Kimberly DaCosta Holton, who read the irst version; Steven Feld, who read the second; and an anonymous reader who read them both. Working with Ken Wissoker and the staf at Duke University Press, particularly Jade Brooks, Liz Smith, Susan Deeks, Courtney Baker, and Bea Jackson, on this book has been a great pleasure and privilege. Stephen Miles introduced me to the tools through which to think politics and music in the same frame, and Robert Knox introduced me to the tools through which to understand narrative and poetics. Kató Havas, my former violin teacher, taught me about the power of the voice and about multiple pedagogies of the soulful in sound. My gratitude to her exceeds all eforts to write it on the page. I thank Christina Gier, Jennifer Fitzgerald, Jessica Wood, Kelley Tatro, Acknowledgments • xv and Netta Van Vliet for intellectual debate and sustaining grace. Matt Goodrich, Davida Singer, Isabelle Deconinck, Iris Zmorah, Nuno Morais, and Ana Rosenheim Rodrigues, through the generosity of their friendship and the exuberance of their play, kept me writing. Julie Kline sent me my irst cassette tape of fado that got the project going. Wim Jurg has lent his ears and eyes to my stories since this project’s earliest beginnings and steadfastly kept the faith. I thank my parents, John Gray and Nancy Morley, and my sister, Rebecca Gray, for their boundless love. he fado researcher and performer José Manuel Osório shared with me his knowledge, his friendship, and his fados. he memory of his voice continues to remind me what is possible. an earlier version of chapter 3 appeared in Anthropology and Humanism 36, no. 2 (2011). Portions of the introduction and chapters 1 and 2 appeared in earlier form in Ethnomusicology 51, no. 1 (2007). I thank the American Anthropological Association and the Society of Ethnomusicology for permission to include this work in Fado Resounding. he Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores kindly granted me permission to include the fado lyrics that appear in excerpt. I am grateful to the Museu do Fado and to Rui Pimentel for permission to publish my photograph of Pimentel’s “Vielas”; to the street artist MrDheo for permission to publish my photograph of his mural “Amália Rodrigues”; to Editorial Avante! for granting me permission to publish “Alfama” by Ary dos Santos; to the poet José Luís Gordo for permission to include his poem “Fado da Meia Laranja”; to the poet Álvaro Rodrigues for permission to include the lyrics to “Alfama Eterna”; and to Edite B. de Medeiros Tomé for permission to publish the lyrics to the fado “Lisboa Não Mudes Assim” by her late husband, Manuel Calado Tomé. he musical transcriptions in chapter 4 and in the appendixes are by Yoshiaki Onishi, and the layout and design are by wr Music Ser vice. Scott Smiley made the index. All translations are mine. I made every efort to fairly represent the communities and people with whom I worked. I have changed the names of some of my interlocutors in order to respect their privacy. Any errors or misrepresentations in this book lie in the challenges of ethnographic writing and are fully my responsibility. xvi • Acknowledgments Introduction Placing Fado Resounding In the city of Lisbon, there are stories built upon stories about what fado is, is not, was, should be. Urban legends, oicial and unoicial histories, vestiges of totalitarian regime-making propaganda, and academic discourse come together in the fado origin tales and variants I hear on the ground.1 It came from the troubadours. No, it began in the 1800s and was inluenced by European salon music. Or, It came from the Moors; it is Arab. he Moors were so far from their home and they felt saudade. hat feeling, that feeling of saudade is where fado comes from. Or, Fado came from the streets, from the brothels of Lisbon, from the bars or tascas; it started with the working class. It has always been a revolutionary song. Or, Fado came from the sung voices of homesick sailors on boats during the Discoveries. (he Portuguese discovered the world, you know.)2 hose sailors made the sea salty with their tears. Or, Fado came from Africa, then from Brazil, and it used to be a lascivious dance. But almost always, Fado is from Lisbon; fado is sung with a Portuguese soul (alma); fado is ours and is about the longing of saudade, expressing what is lost and might never be found, what never has been but might be. In the city of Lisbon, fadistas (fado singers) sing fado in out-of-theway clubs, on concert-hall stages, in tourist-oriented restaurants and in professional casas de fado (lit., fado houses), in neighborhood recreation centers, and in small neighborhood bars. Fado can be heard as ambient sound in many restaurants, and through loudspeakers on city streets, and can sometimes be heard on television commercials that promote Portuguese products. A fadista might sing until her throat hurts, the voice hovering on the break of a sob; the accompanying guitarra (Portuguese guitar) might vibrate a note thus making it weep (gemer); in moments of sung beauty, listeners sometimes cry.3 Fado gathers stories and feelings about histories and places in its movement and charges scenes with afect.4 One feels how to sing based on a personal experience of history and locality, as felt in relation to neighborhood, to the city of Lisbon, and to a sense of Portugal’s past and to its place in the rest of the world. Fado travels the world on internationally marketed recordings by star igures as the sound and “soul” of Lisbon, as the voice of Portugal, circulating sonic imaginaries of a soulful periphery. Fado Resounding argues for the power of a musical genre to sediment, circulate, and transform afect, sonorously rendering history and place as soulful and feeling as public. Its ethnographic focus is on the social life of the sung poetic genre of fado, and some of its listeners, singers, instrumentalists, and cultural brokers in the city of Lisbon during the irst decade of the 2000s, concentrating primarily on the years of sustained ethnographic research I conducted between 2001 and 2003.5 While the research for this book spanned diverse and overlapping Lisbon sites and social worlds, including museums and archives, professional fado venues and small amateur bars, neighborhood fado associations, Amalianos (fans of the fado diva Amália Rodrigues), recording studios, and the day to day on Lisbon’s streets, it is primarily grounded in ethnographic work on fado amador, or amateur fado practice. Fado Resounding foregrounds the knowledge embedded in and transmitted by the expressive performing body and musical sound, knowledge that simultaneously engages habits of memory alongside inventive improvisation; knowledge that oten opens issures in narratives of history as oicially told and ruptures the order of things; knowledge that is transmitted from one body to another via aesthetic power and that in making itself heard is felt. It asks questions about the afective labors of forms in circulation, the intertwining of genre and feeling, senses of place and history; it works with a popular song genre as a form of possibility for ways of being in the world. It locates these questions ethnographically in a time that both European “belonging” (through the practical instantiation of a common currency) and belonging writ large (via the attacks of September 11, 2001) were buzzwords both in international media and in Lisbon’s bars. It situates these questions in a place 2 • Introduction on Europe’s farthest southwestern margins, a place that for centuries has been cast from the perspective of Europe’s North as “the South,” as peripheral to the kinds of access to resources and power that count, with laments simultaneously resounding from within, already for centuries, about the waning of Portugal’s own centrality as center of the world that discovered the world, laments for an empire lost, about being “behind,” while at the same time spectacular projects of urban development and renewal beckoned optimistically toward the future. In narratives cast from Europe’s North and in identity-making discourses from “within,” one resource abundant in this periphery is sentiment. Sonorously, in these discourses, this capacity for feeling, this abundance of the soulful, takes persuasive form in the genre of fado. Fado developed in Lisbon in the early 1800s as a sung poetic genre voiced from the city’s socioeconomic margins, with originary narratives linked to prostitution, criminality, Portuguese colonial expansion, and a musical legacy of the “Moors.” It was later embraced by the upper classes (Brito 1999; Nery 2004). During Portugal’s dictatorship (1926–74), the state’s role in the development of casas de fado facilitated fado censorship, sanitization, and professionalization. Meanwhile, some singers sang revolutionary lyrics behind closed doors. Following the revolution in 1974, there was a backlash against fado due to its supposed relation to the dictatorship; many fado venues shut down. Fado’s success on the international “world music” market over the past two decades, a newly thriving Lisbon fado scene, recently increased attention to fado by international media, and a globally realigned music and heritage industry (Ochoa-Gautier 2006) have recast the political stakes attached to fado from a genre of “deviance” and protest to a “national” genre of the late dictatorship, then to an underdog genre of the post-dictatorship era, and now to an “expedient” cultural resource (Yúdice 2003). In November 2011, the United Nations Educational, Scientiic, and Cultural Orga nization declared fado an “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.” Lisbon is a place with a dynamic and rich history of cross-cultural encounter and inluence. As the point from which the irst colonizing expeditions departed and returned; as a formerly active site for slave trade; and as a place to which immigrants from former Portuguese colonies (particularly Angola, Mozambique, and Cape Verde) now come to inhabit, Lisbon is a place of gathering and convergence for Introduction • 3 multiple sounds, performance styles, and histories. Fado style and talk engage with a re-presentation of a history that is hybrid, gendered, illicit, and raced. In contemporary Lisbon, fado is performed and enjoyed by local actors from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, although particular venues and styles may be marked by class, with the distinguishing characteristic that in a city with a large and ever-growing immigrant population, the majority of participants continue to be white Portuguese. For those who sing and listen to fado, the polemic around origins is charged. his history is oten foregrounded in fado lore—for example, in pamphlets distributed in tourist clubs—yet fado has come to represent quintessential Portugueseness. Simultaneously, alternative histories, particularly those of Africans and Muslims in relation to Portugal, are increasingly voiced ater years of repression under the dictatorship. Amateur singers sometimes claim that fado’s improvisatory vocal turns (voltinhas) were inherited from the Moorish “occupation” centuries ago; others argue that fado is “uncontaminated” and belongs to Portugal. I take the charged nature of discourse on fado’s origins as one point of departure for theorizing relationships between musical experience and the shaping of the ideas about history on which belonging and locality are oten predicated in postcolonial Portugal (Gray 2007). How might fado shape the ways in which Lisbon places are felt and imagined in relation to the vestigial burdens of Portugal’s long-standing dictatorial regime and colonial past? How does fado igure afective geographies of Lisbon and Portugal in a contemporary dialectics of North and South? From the perspective of the listener or the performer, might musical experience accumulate history in ways diferent from other expressive aesthetic forms? From the perspective of an anthropology of the senses, what might a “musical” history mean? In tracking articulations of these questions through the poetics and politics of ethnography, I put in conversation theoretical work from across the social sciences and the humanities that grapples with relations between sound, listening, and vocality to social life; aesthetic form to feeling; genre to afect; music to language; performance to politics; and, inally, memory, history, and place to the senses. I gloss briely here some of the most salient arguments and theoretical approaches that in turn scafold or provoke those in this book. 4 • Introduction genre Fado Resounding is premised on a dynamic model of genre. It is a social analysis through the prism of musical genre; it examines the socioaesthetic labors of fado as genre. hus, I follow the lead of recent scholarship in the humanities and social sciences that argues for the need to take seriously the power of aesthetic form or genre in rendering communicative and afective the implicit narratives that shape one’s sense of self and place in the world (Berlant 2008; Frow 2005; Holt 2007; Ramaswamy 2010). Arguing for genre as sociohistorically contingent (Bakhtin 1986: 12) and against a notion of genre as formally i xed is not to undermine the importance of formal features to what deines genre; rather, it is to understand form itself as at once socially shaped and emergent (Bauman and Briggs 1992). It is to understand the labor of shaping and contesting genre’s formal characteristics as undergirded by questions of value, ethics, and personal reputation (Meintjes 2003); it is also to locate some of the social power of genre in its “porosity” and intertextuality (Bauman and Briggs 1992; Berlant 2008).6 Finally, it is to be attentive to genre in relation to the “cultures of circulation” (Lee and LiPuma 2002) through which it moves and in which it thrives, both as it is transformed along and by the circuits through which it travels and as it shapes them in turn.7 h roughout the text, I grant genre a certain agency, a circulatory power. Fado as genre is sticky; unoicial and oicial histories, rituals, sounds, styles, afects, memories, and biographies attach to it, circulate, morph.8 Fado as genre is relexive; its own lyrics comment back on it, endlessly remaking it as object. Fado as genre is a lashpoint, a catchment of afect and of story: of afect that binds people to place and to one another, and a sounding board through which actors hear their own voices and are heard. Lauren Berlant (2008) has written about ways in which afect nests within genre and circulates, providing forms for belonging. I work with fado as genre as a nexus of gathering, as an afective aesthetic force ield, as a scene of engagement and attention (Berlant 2008) through which listeners, musicians, and policymakers play “serious games” (Ortner 1996: 12).9 I cast fado as genre in a wide net to include both its formal aesthetic features as practiced and talked about and its scenes, its places, its iconographies, its aesthetic forms, its poetics, its meta-discourses, its repertoires of feeling, and most of all, its sounds. Introduction • 5 Sound and hearing are powerfully linked to the experience of emotion (Feld 1996b).10 he ways in which one makes emotional sense of sound (I refer speciically to para-linguistic features of vocal sound and to instrumental sound more broadly) are at once shaped socially and physiologically. By virtue of being musical, fado as genre foregrounds the signiications that accrue and circulate that are sensuous, pleasurable, and embodied as they are felt and heard, meanings that actors often have a hard time pinning down exactly in words. Fado as genre, as a prism for analysis, also foregrounds how any given musical moment or genre “makes sense” to listeners, in part by its capacity to point to diverse memories, places, and histories while saturating these memories, places, these histories, with feeling and with sound. music, language, and voice Fado Resounding works from a premise that poetics about music making are inseparable from music’s social life. It draws on approaches to musical signiication in recent scholarship in musical-sociolinguistic anthropology that argue for music and language as co-constitutive domains of meaning (Feld and Fox 1994; Feld et al. 2004; Fox 2004; Meintjes 2003; Samuels 2004). his research foregrounds some of the productive ambiguities in how music “makes sense” to listeners. One of the ways in which it does so is by taking seriously the poetics practitioners and listeners use when talking about music—for example, when describing (oten in highly metaphoric language) the notoriously inefable and afect-laden modality of timbre (or “tone color”). Another is by attending to indexical relations with respect to how musical meaning is made in relation to any given listener or community of listeners (Samuels 2004; Turino 1999). In other words, in the ears of one person, one musical moment might simultaneously point to multiple memories or feelings, senses of place or of history. Among a group of listeners, the same musical moment might accrue indexical meanings grounded in shared histories of listening while at the same time have other meanings speciic to the individual.11 In the case of fado performance in Lisbon, one musical moment might simultaneously index multiple meanings for the same listener or performer; a fado style that some listeners might point to as proof of fado’s “African” origins might, for others, unequivocally index “Portugueseness.” Attention to music’s indexical relations opens up possibilities for thinking about relationships between aesthetic 6 • Introduction forms, practices, and social belonging that complicate identity-based analyses of expressive culture (Samuels 2004) and a homologous mapping of musical genre onto identity or belonging (national or otherwise). Fado Resounding thus works from an understanding of both music and language as essentially interconnected domains of signiication and along these lines is attentive to speech and song as residing on a continuum of expression rather than as two distinct modes of communication (see Feld 1982; Feld and Fox 1994; Feld et al. 2004; Fox 2004; List 1963; Samuels 1999, 2004). Likewise, it works with an idea of performance as existing on a rich and oten intertextual continuum (Bauman and Briggs 1990), with performances of the everyday at one end (Frith 1996; Gofman 1959) and highly framed, formal, or staged performances at the other. In fado’s worlds, speech and song, performances of the everyday (such as telling a story), heightened per formances (such as getting up to sing a fado during an amateur fado session), and mediatized performances (such as sound and audiovisual recordings via multiple forms of circulation and playback) interanimate one another. Listening can also be considered as a type of performance (Frith 1996; Hirschkind 2006; Valverde 1999), signaled on its own continuum of markedness, by its own rituals and repetitions. For many participants, the term “fadista” refers to both one who sings and one who knows how to listen; through listening, one enters into the afective, poetic, and performative sound world of fado, mind, body, and soul. his continuum of the fado voice sounding (and re-sounding), and the ways in which people listen, forms a central analytic of this book. As the voice resonates within the body, it is experienced as intensely personal, its timbre marking the “uniqueness” (Cavarero 2004) of an individual. Yet as a primary vehicle for expression, voice is intrinsically linked to both subjectivity and sociality. To focus on the voice is to be attuned to the ear, to listening: “the voice is always for the ear, it is always relational” (Cavarero 2004: 169). he sounded voice might be understood as a juncture at which “nature” meets “culture” (Dolar 1996, 2006), at which physiology meets sociality (Feld et al. 2004); the voice might be thought of all at once as index of an interior self, a physical self, and a social self, standing in for a trope of both agency and social power. I privilege the voice, sound, and listening as key sites through which to understand the shaping of the subjective and the intersubjective, the intimate and the public.12 By analyzing speciic instances of the fado voice Introduction • 7 as both collectively and singularly inlected, as both rhetorical and expressive, I connect theorizations of the voice as trope to the voice as embodied foregrounding their co-production. Recent anthropological and historical scholarship on vocality emphasizes the role that technologies and ideologies of the voice play in shaping notions of “tradition” and “modernity” (Bauman and Briggs 2003; Sterne 2003; Weidman 2006). Indeed, particular ideologies of “voice” have been critical to shaping the “interior” of a subject, and an “essence” of a collectivity of subjects, on which some modernities (or alternative modernities) have relied (Fox 2004; Ivy 1995; Weidman 2006). I track both technologies and ideologies of voicing, examining how through genre they are given form; circulate; spin out into story; shape senses of self, place, and history; and render particular ways of feeling public. feeling fado: affective musical subjects Fado provides both a form for feeling and a form for its contagion.13 For some practitioners and aicionados, fado is also a form for living (uma forma de vida, a vida fadista), a way of being (uma maneira de ser), a cosmology with a distinct ontology to which the word “music” fails to do justice. Many described fado to me as a faith, as a religion. Fado listeners, musicians, and fans talk about being “caught by the fado” (apanhados pelo fado); one world music fado diva told me that fado has a will. Seven months or so into my ield research, people began telling me, “You are completely caught by the fado.” “Fate” and “destiny,” the literal meanings of “fado” in these usages, blur with fado’s designation as a musical/poetic genre. Aesthetic form provides a framework for feeling— literally, a structure for feeling—conditioning expectations, teaching one how and when to feel in relation to gesture, to style, and to ritual (Cumming 2000). One of fado’s primary labors as a genre is afective (Hardt 1999).14 Fado Resounding takes a cue from recent Americanist work in literary and cultural studies on afect that extends Raymond Williams’s (1977) “structures of feeling” into the domain of “public feeling” and intimacy, arguing for the sociopolitical shape to the forms feelings take and how they move through worlds, oten in ways that are mercurial and diicult to map.15 In other words, “We ind ourselves in moods that have already been inhabited by others, that have already been shaped or put into circulation, and that are already there around us” (Flatley 2008: 5). Sara Ahmed (2004: 11) works with a concept of “stickiness” for theo8 • Introduction rizing the circulation of emotions as social: “It is the objects of emotion that circulate, rather than emotion as such. . . . Such objects become sticky, or saturated with afect, as sites of personal and social tension.” I argue here for the stickiness of fado as a genre in circulation and for genre as an object around which afects, histories, life worlds, and social practices coalesce. I use the term “afect” to foreground the social, historical, and corporeal (sensed) dynamics of feelings.16 I work with feeling in this book as afect communicated through musical and sonic form. he genre of fado forms the object around which are shaped communities that involve particular kinds and ways of feeling (Rofel 2007; K. Stewart 2007) and of being “soulful,” ways of feeling that are simultaneously locally, geopolitically, and historically situated. I treat the interanimation between diferent registers of feeling that fado accrues—feeling as embodied, feeling as simultaneously of the social and of the subject, and feeling as discursive trope. a “ history of the present ” by way of the senses Fado listeners told me how sometimes when moved by a particular performance, goose bumps might rise on the lesh, the skin might vibrate (vibrar), how one might tremble or cry. “History” in these moments gains coherence, is organized via its afective mediation by the sensuous palpability of music as genre, as voice, as sung story. And both history and place, through fado, in being given sound, are granted “soul.” Fado Resounding argues for fado’s work as a genre in circulating and transforming oicial and unoicial historical narratives and for the ways in which in moments of fado listening, history is rendered as a feeling. In these moments, tidy chronologies and oicial historical narratives are sometimes displaced, giving way to a version of history that is such because it feels so. History in these moments also becomes entangled with personal memories lodged in habits of the body (Connerton 1989; Gil 2007; Taylor 2003; Trouillot 1995), memories connected to the speciicity of places (Feld and Basso 1996; K. Stewart 1996; Tsing 1993, 2005).17 Memory and history might come together, rising to the surface, as in a taste (Seremetakis 1996) or as evoked by a fragrance, a streetscape, a photograph on the wall, in a phrase of music sounded. Memory and history as felt through fado oten come together in the aesthetic poetic ethos of saudade, a nostalgia that is one of fado’s most pervasive tropes. Literature on the Black Atlantic has emphasized the ways in which Introduction • 9 memories and histories accrue and circulate through embodied ritual and cultural performance; in one performance lies always the potential to evoke residues of performances that preceded it, harkening back to an ever elusive point of origin (Gilroy 1993; Matory 2005; Roach 1996). Any given fado performance bears historical traces of contact between cultures, traces of prior performances. It has the potential to evoke memories of places, people, of situations long gone, and bring them sensuously to the present. Fadistas and fado aicionados note that no one performance of the same fado is ever identical to another, even when sung and played by the same musicians. hey credit this endless variation to both singing with soul (com alma), and to a highly valued act of creative improvisation, or “composition in performance” (Lord 2003 [1960]), which they call “styling” (estilar). While in traversing the international stage through industries of “world music” and in locally inlected discourses of “cultural patrimony,” the metaphor of soul may link fado to a timeless essence, the climactic moments of the performance of soul are anything but unchanging. Rather, the music and lyrics contain inventive improvisations and new compositional twists. If each moment of per formance contains the embodied traces of history, a study of these soulful stylized moments, precisely because they mark the convergence of heightened creativity and feeling, can help us to understand the shaping of the contemporary historical imaginary as registered in relation to a sense of place in which place is continuously imagined, transformed, and produced. Yet I was oten cautioned by fans and singers to respect the mystery of fado and fado’s origins. his book is attentive to the productive power of that mystery, to music’s embodied pleasures and meanings, while at the same time unsettling the “secret of sound” (Taussig 1999: 183). Fado Resounding unsettles relationships of musical genre, music, and the singing voice to “identity,” to interiority, to place, and to “soul.” hrough an ethnography of listening and voicing—an ethnography of the sonorous—it also “unsettles” (Lubkemann 2005) the former colonial metropole of Lisbon.18 I work with contemporary actors’ sentient and discursive making and remaking of a musical genre in light of memories and imaginaries of a history of a recent past in which relations between the genre of fado and the long-standing Portuguese dictatorship were ambivalently fraught, a regime that relied on the colonial—as myth, as reality, as episteme— 10 • Introduction for its maintenance. I posit that there is rarely a one-to-one relationship between musical performance/genre and political resistance or domination and argue that what makes a musical genre such as fado so compelling as a prism for an analysis of the social is precisely its power to reveal relations of ambivalence (Berlant 2008) through which abstractions like “nation,” “history,” and “soul” are igured and felt by both individuals and publics. Finally, I argue for this “soulful” as never reducible to the “purely” local (Matory 2005) but, rather, as always, in any given historical moment, entangled in and shaped by more widely circulating cultural forms that inform what it might mean to be “social,” what it might mean to feel “human,” and what it might feel like to belong.19 Placing Genre: Origins, Forms, Histories Perhaps because of fado’s power, its beauty, or its ritualized repeated forms; perhaps because of its importance in shaping the life worlds of my interlocutors; perhaps because it makes and remakes itself as object through the stories it tells about itself; or perhaps because it is “music,” people oten assumed that my goal as a researcher was to learn and to write about what fado is and where it came from—its forms, its histories, its origins.20 For many, fado had that kind of agency and presence, that kind of omnipresent and weighty “thingness.” You will never get to the bottom of it, you know! Fado is endless. It is a universe; it is the world. It is a mystery. Or, It is good that you are studying our music. All they do around here is disrespect the fado. Or, Academics don’t understand anything about fado; fado is something you sing, you feel. Or, Let me tell you about fado: this is its story, and this is my life. It was never my plan to chart what fado “is,” not only because I did not wish to chase the ghost of an immutable aesthetic form outside of the realm of the emergent that is social life, but also because I was interested initially in questions I believed were more directly related to fado as social practice: questions about memory and history, afect and belonging, place and corporeality. But it was precisely through chasing the “object” as practiced—the formal, musical, aesthetic, stylistic, and historical parameters of the constitution of the genre for diferent actors in multiple scenes—that the social and afective life of fado as genre made itself heard: the “law of genre”; the play of genre; the elusivity of genre. Afect moves through form. Genre opens into stories. Introduction • 11 “ origin ” Alberto Pimentel (1989 [1904]: 66), in his classic text, A Triste Canção do Sul (A Sad Song of the South), writes, “Fado is perhaps the bastard son of the landum, but is many times more beautiful.21 Bastard children, I don’t know why, are almost always more beautiful than legitimate ones.” Pinto de Carvalho (1992 [1903]: 42), in História do Fado (History of Fado), claims, “For us, fado has a maritime origin. . . . Fado was born on board [on ships] to the ini nite rhythms of the sea, in the convulsions of this soul of the world, in the murmuring intoxication of this eternity of water.” Finally, Luiz Moita (1936: 195), quoting the French critic Emílio Vuillermoz in O Fado: Canção de Vencidos (Fado: Song of the Vanquished), states, “A wise Portuguese musicologist airmed that fado was of Afro-Brazilian origin. But many of his compatriots rebel against this explanation, as it lends an undesirable pigment to an eminently national genre.22 I confess that, for a foreigner, an African [negra] origin in fado is entirely credible.” Why is it that musical performance and experience oten elicit such impassioned and polemical claims to origin? Polemic surrounding origins has been central to published fado discourse at least since the beginning of the twentieth century (Carvalho 1992 [1903]; Pimentel 1989 [1904]). While the main strains of this polemic argue for Africaninluenced derivations via the black slave trade and Lisbon’s positioning as port city vis-à-vis colonial contact and expansion, Arab derivations due to the long-standing presence of the Moors in Portugal, or a combination of the two, others link fado to the music of the medieval troubadours, to expressive traditions from rural Portugal, to the Celts, or to the “gypsies.” he theory of origins granted the most currency by contemporary academics situates fado’s “birth” in the irst half of the nineteenth century and locates its primary inluences as Afro-Brazilian. hese inluences were heightened by the light of the Portuguese court to Brazil during the Napoleonic invasions and the court’s subsequent return to Lisbon (Nery 2004; Tinhorão 1994), bringing back to the metropole dances, sounds, styles, and songs from Brazil. he Brazilian historian José Ramos Tinhorão (1994) links the evolution of the sung fado in Lisbon to a conluence of Afro-Brazilian and Iberian inluences in relation to the traic in African slaves; colonial relationships between Portugal and Brazil; and intercultural exchange via the port cities of Lisbon, Seville, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador. According to this thesis, the sung 12 • Introduction fado emerged in Lisbon in the 1800s from the fandango, an Afro-Spanish popular dance genre; from the Afro-Brazilian dance forms the lundum and the fofa; and later from a fado that was danced in Brazil. Scholars have also argued for the inluence of eighteenth-century European urban song forms (Nery 2004: 51) and of the modinha, a melancholic improvised vocal genre accompanied by the guitarra that circulated via Brazil (Castelo-Branco 1994; Moita 1936; Nery 2004) and was popular in the late 1700s to early 1800s in Lisbon, where it was performed in the streets, in homes, and in upper-class salons. Scholars widely agree that fado initially thrived in the early decades of the 1800s among Lisbon’s dispossessed, at the social margins—particularly in Lisbon’s brothels, cafés, and prisons—but then socially “ascended” early in its “development” to salons and bullights frequented by the aristocracy.23 To this day, fado bears traces, in its performance practices, repertoires, venues, and discourses, of these earlier class and political histories. Discourse on fado’s origins from a range of sources, historical and contemporary, as well as from actors from varying subject positions, is marked by its excess. his excess makes itself felt in the continuous production of new variations on originary themes, in the afective energy with which actors stake their claims and with which these claims circulate, and in the frequency in which origin themes serve as the subject of fado lyrics themselves.24 Music is made in movement. It is shaped in its circulations and performative iterations, emergent. he per for mance theorist Joseph Roach reminds us that remembering necessitates forgetting. “he relentless search for the purity of origins is a voyage not of discovery but of erasure,” and that performance—particularly the type of performance he labels “circum-Atlantic”—is a “monumental study in the pleasures and torments of incomplete forgetting” (Roach 1996: 6–7).25 From a scholarly perspective, some theories regarding fado’s early histories have more credence than others. Yet rather than be concerned with the veracity of these multiple claims, this book focuses on the excess of originary discourses attached to fado and on the passion through which those discourses are voiced as objects of critical analysis. ordering genre Among the fado listeners and musicians with whom I worked, fado as genre was argued, debated, defended, embellished, made afective, and also historicized by reference to fadistas, recordings, and fado locales of Introduction • 13 the past. Fado genre in these discussions had dimensions that were performative, qualitative, ritualized, localized in terms of space and place, and temporalized. Fado genre talk included discussions about form (e.g., the number of syllables per line or number of lines per strophe for a speciic traditional fado; harmonic and melodic parameters); discussions about how a particular fado had been named or the subgenre into which it it; about the authorship of both music and lyrics; and about the words to fado poems. Fado lyrics also oten comment meta-discursively on fado itself; these poetics in turn sometimes elicit musical commentary, such as text “painting,” ornamentation, or musical citation. Keeping in mind genre’s lexibility and porosity, particularly at its fringes (Bauman and Briggs 1992), and also that “center” and “margin” are relative categories, I sketch in broad strokes some of the key contours that shape deinitions of fado form for practitioners, listeners, and researchers. Lisbon fado is performed most oten with one vocalist (fadista), male or female, and accompanied by one or two guitarras, a viola (Spanish six-string acoustic guitar), and sometimes a viola baixo (acoustic bass guitar) or, as is becoming more common, a stand-up acoustic bass.26 he instrumentalists are almost always male. Generally, the guitarras igure the harmonic counterpoint while the viola rhythmically marks the bass and outlines the harmonic progressions. he instrumentalists and the fadista, in the most skilled performances of fado, perform in improvised “dialogue” with one another (Castelo-Branco 1994). In terms of its musical parameters as practiced, fado to the present day has been largely an oral/aural tradition and does not depend on musical notation for its transmission. Yet fado practice and transmission, in terms of both music and poetry, foreground intricate interrelations and histories between orality and literacy in Portugal, or the “archive and the repertoire” (Taylor 2003), with respect to both musical notation and written language. While most fadistas and fado instrumentalists I met did not read music, musical notation has played some role in fado transmission since at least the mid-nineteenth century. Notated fado songs circulated in scores for nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century revistas (musical theater or vaudev ille revues). Sheet music versions of fados for piano, oten with elaborately designed covers, circulated in the early twentieth century to be played and sung in well-to-do Portuguese homes. A musically notated fado can be submitted to the Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores (Portuguese Society of Authors, spa) as proof of in14 • Introduction tellectual ownership of the musical composition (although in popular musical practice, this notation is not consulted when performing the fado in question, and the musical parameters of a given fado in practice may difer substantially from what is oicially notated and registered at the society). Fado lyrics are almost always written down. hey circulate on paper and online. hey might be handed over in person by a poet to a fadista or by one fadista to another; they are also found in old fado serials and in some liner notes that accompany compact discs (cds). Both lyrics and music are i xed in sound on recordings. Some practitioners identify speciically as fado poets, and poets may submit their work for registration with the spa. Yet fadistas, in performance, sometimes substitute words or phrases of a poem with their own. hese substitutions or variations can subsequently take on lives of their own and come to be popularly identiied with the poem as “correctly” interpreted. Fadistas and instrumentalists sometimes also write fado lyrics, and on occasion, fadistas choose to set poetry not initially intended for fado, to fado musical forms or styles. Fado lyrics are extraordinarily rich in expressive scope. Some common themes include heterosexual romantic love in multiple manifestations (e.g., betrayal, lost love, death of a loved one, unrequited love), loss, saudade, love for the igure of the mother, Marian themes, politics, the city of Lisbon and its neighborhoods, the Tagus River, the “nation” of Portugal, the Portuguese colonial Discoveries, fado itself (venues, sounds, forms, histories, biographies), and fadistas. Fado as genre foregrounds story and feeling, the telling of stories rendered afective through musical performance and poetic form. Fadistas, instrumentalists, aicionados, and scholars generally break the fado repertoire into two categories: fado tradicional (traditional fado) and fado canção (fado song).27 I found these classiications to be commonly used among listeners and singers in both amateur and professional contexts and to be widely referred to in the discourse of fans. Traditional fado is strophic and follows a variety of set poetic forms with regard to the number of stanzas and lines (Carvalho 1999). It can be set to an ininite number of lyrics and foregrounds the inventive styling and improvisation of the fadista and the guitarra over a relatively i xed harmonic and metrical base. hus, it is the base musical (musical “base”) that diferentiates one traditional fado from another; the lyrics are uni xed. he fado researcher José Manuel Osório estimates that over four Introduction • 15 hundred traditional fados exist.28 Yet the standard performed repertoire is in practice substantially smaller.29 he three fados of Fado Menor, Fado Corrido, and Fado Mouraria are commonly cited as being the oldest, are of anonymous authorship, follow a basic I-V harmonic scheme, and use stock instrumental igurations; the vocal line is highly improvised. Some also refer to these three fados as the raízes do fado (“roots of fado”) (Castelo-Branco 1994: 134). Fado Menor, which is in a minor key and is oten performed at a slow tempo, is considered by many instrumentalists, singers, and fans to be the oldest fado, the saddest fado, and the most afectively charged. Many of my interlocutors cited the twentieth-century fado diva Amália Rodrigues for naming the Fado Menor “the mother and father of fado.” hus, the fetishization of origins found in discourse about fado’s history is also manifest in relation to fado form. In the discourse on Fado Menor, the saddest, the most highly improvised, and the most authentic merge in the concept of the original, in afect as embodied in sonic form. Fado practitioners discuss the musical bases, and sometimes the melodies, of traditional fados (with the exception of the three root fados) as “authored” or “composed” by an individual. However, in practice the ascribing of rights and authorship to some of these fados can be ambiguous. here is oten substantial variation in the names practitioners give to particular traditional fados. he name of a traditional fado (again, with the exception of the three root fados) generally refers to its musical/ poetic structure, and sometimes refers to the person who is believed to have “composed” the harmonic/melodic base. However, the name of well-known lyrics might supplant the name of the “composer” of the musical base or a name for a traditional fado might be linked to a place name. Alternatively, the name of a fado might refer to the person to whom it was originally dedicated (Castelo-Branco 1994: 135). Names indexically connect the form to social relationships, memories, places, and histories.30 Many practitioners diferentiate fado canção (lit., fado song) from traditional fado by noting that rather than being strophic in form, it contains stanzas juxtaposed with refrains and that each fado song has set lyrics.31 Researchers point to the inluence of the revistas that came into vogue in Lisbon in the mid- to late 1800s as playing a central role in the development of fado canção (Castelo-Branco 1994; Nery 2004). he voice and career of Amália Rodrigues (referred to by some as the “Queen 16 • Introduction of Fado”) also had an impact on the recognition and consolidation of fado canção as a form. A number of fado songs were written speciically for her; many circulated via ilms in which she starred. Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco (1994: 133), on the basis of her study conducted primarily with professional instrumentalists, suggests that traditional fado and fado canção might be understood on a continuum on which the former represents the “minimum of i xed elements,” thus allowing for the most lexibility and improvisation in performance, and the latter represents “maximum i xity.” he discourse my interlocutors used when referring to these two fado subgenres generally followed that understanding. Both musicians and listeners generally drew sharp evaluative and afective distinctions between the two categories that went beyond explications of musical, harmonic, or poetic form.32 Singers and instrumentalists commonly spoke to me about traditional fado as both enabling and demanding more improvisation, and I oten heard fado canção referred to as musically “scored” or marked as “less” fado, farther from the “soulfulness” of lived story and more “musical” (see chapter 1). Yet in sung practice, particularly in amateur performance, I also oten heard creatively improvised and dramatically reconigured performances of what might be generally classiied as fado canção and fados canção set to new lyrics; I also heard particular traditional fados to which multiple fadistas set the same lyrics. hus, the continuum as practiced was luid. hroughout this book, I argue that an accretion of memory and afect occurs in the practices of listeners which is linked to fado form. he syncretic, reiterative form of traditional fado (which, to some extent, fado canção shares) allows for hearings and musical experiences that become saturated by past renderings yet that are always newly inlected through individual improvisation. Fado form works as a ground upon which afect and memory accrue and are igured, one performance stacked upon another, one listening overlapping with a previous listening of the same fado. One fado becomes multiply populated with memories of people, of places, of stories, of histories, but these are all grounded in and facilitated by musical form. Certain traditional fados are oten thought to convey par ticu lar afective states, and poets or singers sometimes use these associations when deciding on which fado to set their text to. In traditional fado, the hearing of one story set to music potentially indexes previous hearings of diferent stories set to the same musical base; it might remind one of diferent singers, voices, contexts, and Introduction • 17 locales in such a way that histories, places, and voices become stacked one upon another, this excess made emotionally salient through musical sound and aesthetic form. he relationships between fado’s forms and the afects they transmit to communities of listeners are always in process; these relationships are at once socially and historically contingent (Bakhtin 1986). An amateur fado aicionado, a man in his sixties, lamented to me in 2001 that “there is not much sad fado, the real fado, the fado fado these days. he tourists don’t like it.” At the same time, a heightened afect of sadness, of saudade, a sentimentality, became attached to certain fado forms and practices in particular ways throughout the Estado Novo (New State) as a result of censorship, of cultural policy, the cultivation of fado tourism in the late dictatorship, and of shiting approaches of the state to an unruly genre (Côrte-Real 2001; Leal 2000b; Nery 2004). Fado’s soundings in the present circulate afective traces of these histories in its forms. At the same time, fado’s forms are continuously repurposed in oicial and unoicial discourses and practices to respond to a dynamic politics of the present. networks, venues, and practices: amateur– professional distinctions Fado performance in contemporary Lisbon moves through interrelated sites and social networks that mutually inform and inluence one another.33 he density of tourist-oriented professional fado venues, both casas típicas (lit., “typical houses”) and casas de fado, in the “traditional” Lisbon neighborhoods of Bairro Alto and Alfama delimit and mark spaces of the “real Portugal” for an international tourist market; some of these sites also feature performances of “folkloric” dancing.34 Elite fado art-house venues, which cater to tourists and to “in-the-know” aicionados who can aford to pay steep prices, boast ine dining and professional fado, oten sung by fadistas who have international careers and recording contracts with multinational labels. Both types of venue have contracted instrumentalists and an elenco (group of contracted professional fadistas) and almost always require minimum consumption or cover charges from audience members. Simultaneously, fado lovers and musicians continue to imagine and reproduce their everyday lived neighborhoods and social networks through engaging with fado, oten within the context of “amateur” fado. Amateur fado sessions occur in a 18 • Introduction handful of tascas (small neighborhood bars), in some restaurants that are not classiied as oicial fado houses, at neighborhood associations, and at private functions. Distinctions between fado amador (amateur fado) and fado proissional (professional fado) are central to how people navigate and participate in Lisbon’s fado networks; these distinctions are myriad and are made by practitioners, aicionados (tourists and locals), venue owners, and policymakers. In the most general sense, the amateur–professional distinction with respect to fadistas refers to those who are paid to sing and those who are not. (Instrumentalists are almost always paid, regardless of the type of venue or performance context.) But the distinction as practiced is equivocal. Actors might invoke the amateur–professional distinction to mark aesthetic standards, singing style, performance practices, political histories, repertoire, class positioning, and diferences in neighborhoods with respect to fado venues; to police the limits of genre; to stake claims to authenticity; and to argue for afective power. You know, fado amador is where only drunks go to sing. hat is not fado. All they do is scream! Or, Yes, I have sung professionally for many years, but at heart I am an amateur. I feel most at home when I am singing fado amador, unwinding with friends. Or, Fado amador has the most soul; the rest is just for tourists. Or, Fado amador is about the working class; fado began that way—in the brothels, in the taverns. he distinction has ramiications for the required licenses and the fees owners of venues pay to municipal entities and to the spa. Some commercial establishments host amateur fado “unoicially” to avoid having to pay the fees; when this is discovered, they might be closed down. As fado has gained increasing recognition internationally over the past decade, the venues themselves have become increasingly diverse and hybrid in the types of fado they claim to ofer, and the economics at work, particularly in relation to the compensation of fadistas in the socalled amateur venues, is increasingly diicult to parse. A venue might hire a few regulars but still encourage participation by amateurs. Or a restaurant might have a group of unpaid regulars who sing almost every night of the week, generally to tourist audiences, but charge food prices on par with professional venues. By hosting so-called “amateur” fado, these venues substantially lower their operating costs and also capitalize on tourists’ desire for authenticity (see also Klein and Alves 1994). Some professionals participate (without pay) in fado amador in their leisure Introduction • 19 time, yet many who identify as amador do not have access to the opportunities and social networks that would enable them to participate as professionals at the elite venues. Many stars of Lisbon’s amateur circuit are semiprofessionals who earn a portion of their income by singing fado for payment at parties, charity events, and neighborhood fundraising events and by selling their recordings, oten between sets of performance, at the unpaid amateur venues. hese recordings are oten produced at one of the few studios on Lisbon’s periphery that cater to fado’s semiprofessionals. Within communities of fadistas who identify as amateur, and among fadistas who primarily identify as professional, exist diverse social networks. Among elite professionals, I heard sharp evaluative distinctions voiced regarding diferent styles and venues for professional fado. In the early 2000s, I met amateurs who sang aristocratic fado who boasted hereditary descent from the old monarchy and were still lamenting the loss of the dictator Salazar. At the same time, I met amateurs who participated in completely separate social networks, many working class, those of the older generations claiming Communist Party alliances during the Estado Novo. I also attended single amateur venues that were regularly frequented by listeners and fadistas from strikingly diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Both amateur fado and professional fado (as venues; as practices; as categories for social and aesthetic evaluation; as social networks; and as relations to labor, consumption, and pleasure) carry with them tangled, and oten difering, sociopolitical histories (see chapter 2). Within the amateur communities in which I spent the most time in the early 2000s—whose participants were predominantly working class, older than it y, and strongly tied to Lisbon’s historic core neighborhoods—actors sometimes called forth aspects of these perceived political histories and distinctions of genre to mark their own relationships to the past, to ethics, to solidarity, and to the future. po liti cal histories, policies of culture (1926–1974) he Portuguese totalitarian regime, the Estado Novo (New State), began in 1926 and ended with a bloodless military coup on April 25, 1974 (25 de Abril). António de Oliveira Salazar was the dictator from 1932 to 1968; in 1968, Marcelo Caetano took his place. he coup was given impetus by desperately failing colonial wars in Africa, the 1968 protests in Paris, international pressure calling for Portuguese decolonization, and exten20 • Introduction sive mobilization within Portugal through clandestine communist networks with international ties, particularly to Portuguese in exile abroad. he revolution signiied the end—at least in practical terms—of the Portuguese empire and the beginning of a wave of immigration from the former colonies to Lisbon, signiicantly altering racial dynamics in the metropole.35 Portuguese totalitarianism, particularly in its irst few decades, shared many ideologies and practices with other, coterminous European forms of totalitarianism (e.g., with respect to the formation of youth movements, the “disciplining” of the mind and the body through organized expressive cultural practices, state censorship, state corporatism, and a powerful secret police force). While it is beyond the scope of this book to enumerate in detail the diferences and similarities of these regimes, I note some key facets that marked the Portuguese dictatorship: (1) the Catholic church played a fundamental role in its institutions of power and in shaping and disseminating ideologies of the regime to “the people”; (2) the Estado Novo was excessively focused on an idealized past, particularly in relation to the gloriication of the Portuguese Discoveries and with respect to sentiments of anti-industrialization (evident in a celebration of rurality, as contrasted with the “degeneracy” of the urban; see Castelo 1998; Holton 2005; Melo 2001); (3) Portugal remained neutral during the Second World War; and (4) Portuguese colonialism was essential to the maintenance of the regime. Many of my interlocutors were hesitant to call the Estado Novo “fascist.” Some referred to it as a “light” dictatorship (compared with those of Germany, Italy, and Spain) and lauded Salazar for keeping order and peace in the country. Yet many spoke to me about the inal decades of the Estado Novo as being marked by brutal censorship, panoptic police surveillance, increasing imprisonment of political activists, and the deployment of sophisticated techniques of torture by the state. Some of my interlocutors were imprisoned during that time, and many had family members or friends who were. Cultural policy with respect to expressive culture—and to fado in particular—underwent multiple shits during the course of the dictatorship.36 During the irst decades of the Estado Novo, the state played a key role in the professionalization, codiication, and censorship of fado through the creation of oicial professional venues, but the state did not explicitly appropriate fado in the ser vice of the nation during that time. Introduction • 21 In fact, in oicial discourses, fado was oten considered inappropriate as a national form because of its “illicit” origins, its dolorous tenor (it was not a “ighting” song; see Moita 1936), and its urban degeneracy (Melo 2001; see also chapter 2). At the same time, during the irst Portuguese Republic (1910–26)—the period that immediately predated the Estado Novo—anarchist and workers’ movements sang fado ( fado anarquista and fado operário) as a means of social protest. he formation of oicial fado venues, fado censorship, and professionalization thus worked as ways for the state to take some control of what was perceived to be a potentially disruptive expressive form (Nery 2004). he beginnings of the Estado Novo coincided with the era of sound reproduction and radio; fado circulated on the radio, on Portugal’s irst sound i lms, and on recordings.37 By the 1950s, the Estado Novo was increasingly marshaling what by then had become a highly sentimentalized practice of fado in the ser vice of a burgeoning international tourist industry in Lisbon (CôrteReal 2001; Nery 2004) and as an ideological force on state-controlled radio. Luxurious casas de fado became meeting places for senior state oicials, visiting foreign dignitaries, and members of the ruling elite. hrough the voice of Amália Rodrigues, the state channeled fado as an international export as the sound and soul of Portugal. At the same time, in many parts of Lisbon and in the towns across the Tagus river, people performed fado behind closed doors, singing lyrics that otherwise would have been censored. Fado Resounding attends to some of the stories, afects, and silences of the Estado Novo that accrue around fado as genre within a sociopolitical context marked by post-colonization, Portugal’s accession to the European Union (1986), and economic crisis. It argues neither for fado as a “national” or as a “revolutionary” genre; rather it foregrounds the ambiguity of these distinctions as practiced, as remembered, as sung, as felt. Fado Resounding: Method and Form I worked in the present, documenting acts, sounds, performances, social formations, and stories. Grounding myself primarily in Lisbon’s amateur fado scenes, I traced fado networks outward from the Tasca do Jaime, a small, primarily working-class bar that held amateur fado sessions during weekends, in the neighborhood of Graça, in which I lived in 2001–2003. I interviewed fadistas and instrumentalists, ranging from 22 • Introduction singers on the street and amateur musicians to world music divas and venerated professionals of the older generation. I spoke with fans, listeners, policymakers, club owners, and sound engineers. I attended and recorded a wide range of performances that took place in a rich variety of contexts and scenes, from hidden-away word-of-mouth-only amateur sessions to the most touristic fado and folklore restaurants and elite professional venues. I studied fado institutionalization and pedagogy by taking “lessons” at a museum and at a neighborhood association and by attending and documenting fado coaching sessions and rehearsals. I used my singing to elicit feedback about genre, style, and the parameters of the soulful sung. I came to “history” and memory initially through the traces let in bodies, in the sounds of voices, in the fragments of story told between sets of singing, in the expressions of feelings about the past, and in the cityscape of Lisbon itself. I mapped correspondences and discontinuities with traces in the archive, in work by Lisbon’s “organic intellectuals,” by Portuguese academics, in ilms, and in the popular press. he chapters of Fado Resounding ethnographically track the lourishing and genealogies of the soulful in interconnected fado worlds and forms. hey move from an amateur fado venue and institutionalized sites of learning in relation to poetics and pedagogies of soulfulness in sound of chapter 1 to fado’s “afects of history” with respect to histories of Portuguese nationalism, colonialism, and the Estado Novo (chapter 2); the interanimation of place, sound, and genre in Lisbon as “fado’s city” (chapter 3); the “style of the soulful” through a musical explication of fado’s sonic structure and vocal styling in performance (chapter 4); the “gender of genre” in relation to fado’s afective labors of the feminine (chapter 5); and, inally, the multiple forms of the soulful manifest in the early twenty-irst century aterlife of the voice of fado’s greatest diva, Amália Rodrigues, who admirers told me had a “throat of silver” (chapter 6). lisbon. i am in the vestiges of an empire long gone on the far fringe of western Europe, in the capital city of a country that hosted Europe’s longest dictatorship, a place where modernity and expansion have run amok and oten collide with the material and not-so-material stuf of history. It is 2001. European Union money has come and gone. A taxi driver tells me, “Portugal is in a sad state (é uma tristeza)! No, it is in a tragic state! Go home, girl. Go home. Portugal has no future.” Art deco Introduction • 23 buildings fall to ruins. Trees grow from rootops. Graiti referring to the 1974 revolution is still visible on walls, fading: “Liberdade! Viva o 25 de Abril!” he current rate of the euro lashes neon in the inancial district. Electric trolleys covered with Coca-Cola advertisements heave up steep inclines, getting stuck behind badly parked suvs. Beggars sit still, with withered faces, holding out hands. Tourists wander, carry ing the same guidebook in diferent languages. Look, there we can see old-timers playing cards! Old theaters are knocked down to build new shopping malls where people buy on credit. Another theater is restored to become the Hard Rock Café. One of Europe’s largest shopping malls, Colombo, stretches out on Lisbon’s periphery, with “streets” named for former colonies and with a chapel of Nossa Senhora das Descobertas (Our Lady of the Discoveries) in its basement, its glass windows facing a wall on which is painted a mural-size map of Africa. Displaced and hard-up eastern European immigrants with advanced degrees do manual labor, working to restore decaying city buildings. Black men from former African colonies and Islamic immigrants hang out smoking and talking in the square outside the former Church of the Holy Inquisition. Immigrants from former colonies sell their wares in a cement four-story mall structure built into the side of a sixteenth-century chapel, while drug dealers make fast transactions outside in the neighborhood of Mouraria, the neighborhood at the bottom of the hill beneath the castle to which the Moors were banished ater the Christian Reconquest, the neighborhood that, according to one legend, gave birth to the music of fado in the voice of the irst fadista/prostitute, Maria Severa, in the early 1800s. On the swank shopping street Rua Garrett, a woman stands begging, with a green towel wrapped around her shoulders, in place of a shawl, singing fado. She holds out her cup, singing to the accompaniment of a boom box. Just down the street, on Rua do Carmo, fado sounds pour out of speakers attached to a green cart that sells fado cds to tourists. Around the corner, tourists line up for a ride on Lisbon’s famous art deco elevator, the Elevador de Santa Justa; as one rides upward, the wailing of the beggar singing fado is overlaid by the voice of Amália Rodrigues, Portugal’s most celebrated fado diva, blaring from the fado cart. A sign on the outside of the cart reads, “Lisbon, the City of Fado.” As I approach the Moorish castle, O Castelo de São Jorge, on the hill above the neighborhood of Alfama, on a Sunday aternoon, one star 24 • Introduction fado voice bleeds into another, one historical moment into the next, as fado recordings sound from small souvenir shops with open doors, the sounds bouncing of high stone walls on narrow cobbled streets. On the castle’s grounds on a stone bench with a panoramic view of Lisbon sits a middle-age woman singing Amália’s fados of-key and out of meter, sometimes mixing one melody up with another. She takes song requests and collects coins from Japanese tourists. She tells me the story of her life, narrating it in a script that fado as genre has over and over again inscribed and inlected, in an endless dialogue between life stories of its protagonists and the mythological biography of a genre. A life of sufering. I sing with the voice that God gave me. Across the hill in the neighborhood of Bairro Alto, the waiters in fado’s prime tourist restaurant destination fold cloth napkins, set the tables, and ready the wines. “Why should I go pay money to hear fado to cry and be sad?” asks the woman in her mid-ities who sells me my groceries each day. A middle-class Portuguese man in his forties complains to me, “Fado, all of this saudade, I don’t like it.” A chilly Saturday aternoon in the winter of 2003, as dusk turns to dark. A small, densely packed Lisbon bar on the bustling main street of the neighborhood of Graça, standing-room only on the narrow sidewalk outside the front door. hose passing by might stop, crane their necks toward the darkened interior when they hear the sound of a strident female voice singing fado way in the back pouring through the open door, or when they hear the entire group inside burst forth singing a refrain, or when they hear the distinctive steel string twang of the guitarra. A car speeds down the street blasting hip-hop. An electric trolley clanks past. he singing stops. Someone turns on the lights inside. Men come outside, stand near the door, and smoke and talk. he lights dim. he men go back in, a hush falls, the fado starts up again. Inside, we close our eyes and we listen. Introduction • 25