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

Abstract

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 e sempre Lisboa. is always Lisbon. Fadistas (fado singers) sang out this impassioned refrain many times during the years that I lived in 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 central figure, Amalia Rodrigues. It is precisely the intangibility of this music that makes the refrain is always Lisbon work: its meaning cannot be taught, only understood. Fadistas often summarize 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 fieldwork from both long- and short-term periods of research (1999-2010) to interrogate 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 in sociological and anthropological studies of genre as lived experience and expressive cultural form. In this study, Gray focuses on vadio (amateur fado), an improvisatory practice of 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 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, vadio becomes the site of wide-ranging investigations into and meaning in 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 vadio serves to interrogate both the implicit and explicit practices of learning performance aesthetics. Contrasting the implicit learning achieved through rituals of listening and singing in amateur contexts with the explicit pedagogies of institutionalized instruction, the author illuminates what she calls a ubiquitous imaginary of the essentially unlearnable (p. 45). Chapter 2 links this imaginary to self-reflexive engagement with the past, which fadistas reimagine through the present. The past is inter - animated 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 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 performance. Concerned primarily with the performing voice, the author examines the influence of improvisation (and the memory of prior improvisations) in shaping musical signification. Together, these four chapters make an evincing argument for as genre in the ethnographic interrogation of the soulful-one of most exclusive claims to meaning-in terms of learning and pedagogy, conceptions of past/ present, locality and place, and stylized performance. …