Memories of Empire, Mythologies of the Soul: Fado Performance and the Shaping of Saudade

VOL. 51, NO. 1 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY WINTER 2007

© 2007 by the Society for Ethnomusicology

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Memories of Empire, Mythologies of the Soul: Fado Performance and the Shaping of Saudade

LILA ELLEN GRAY / Columbia University

One early July evening in Lisbon I walk down the Rua Garrett and hear some singing. I see a woman begging, standing on the side of the street

with a green towel wrapped around her shoulders singing fado. She holds out her cup, singing to the accompaniment of a boom box. Just down the street, on the Rua do Carmo, fado sounds pour out of speakers attached to a green cart that sells fado CDs to tourists. Tourists line up around the corner for a ride on Lisbon’s famous art deco elevator, the Elevador de Santa Justa; as one rides upwards, the wailing of the beggar singing fado overlays with the voice of Amália Rodrigues, Portugal’s most celebrated fado diva,1 blaring from the fado cart. A sign on the outside of the cart reads, “Lisbon, the city of fado.”

In the city of Lisbon there are stories built upon stories about what fado is, is not, was, should be.2 Urban legends, official and unofficial histories, ves-tiges of Estado Novo regime-making propaganda and academic discourse come together in the fado origin tales and variants I hear on the ground, a game of telephone gone mad.3 It came from the troubadours. No, it started in the 1800s influenced by European salon music. It comes from the Moors, it is Arab; the Moors were so far from their home and they felt saudade. That feeling, that feeling of longing, of saudade is where fado came from. Or, fado comes 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 comes from the sung voices of homesick sailors on boats during the Discoveries.4 (The Portuguese discovered the world you know). Those sailors made the sea salty with their tears. Or, fado comes from Africa, then

Gray: Fado and Saudade 107

from Brazil; some say it used to be a lascivious dance. But almost always, fado is from Lisbon, fado is sung with a Portuguese soul, 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.

Polemic surrounding origins has been central to published fado discourse since at least the early 1900s (Pimentel [1904] 1989; Carvalho [1903] 1982). While the two main strains of this polemic argue either for African influenced derivations, via the black slave trade and Lisbon’s positioning as port city vis-a-vis colonial contact and expansion, or Arab (due to the longstanding presence of the Moors in Portugal), or a combination of the two, some link fado to the music of the medieval troubadours, expressive traditions from rural Portugal, to the Celts, or to the gypsies. The theory of origins now granted the most academic credence places fado’s “birth” in the first half of the nineteenth century and locates its primary influences as Afro-Brazilian, influences that were heightened by the exodus of the Portuguese court to Brazil during the Napoleonic invasions and to its subsequent return to Lisbon (Nery 2004; Tinhorão 1994; see also Brito 1999; Carvalho 1994, 1999).

The discourse on fado’s “origins” from a range of sources (historical and contemporary) and from actors from varying subject positions is marked by its excess (in terms of sheer quantity and its often impassioned nature). This essay takes the highly charged nature of discourse on fado’s origins as one point of departure for theorizing relationships between musical experi-ence and the shaping of sentiments of belonging, feelings of place, and the ideas about history upon which belonging and “locality” are often predicated. Originary discourses are always linked to complex dynamics of social power. Roach reminds us that remembering necessitates forgetting, “the 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 as “circum-Atlantic”5 is a “monumental study in the pleasures and torments of incomplete forgetting” (1996:6–7). Why is it that musical performance and musical experience often elicit such impassioned and polemical claims to origin? From the vantage point of the hearer or performer, might musical expression accumulate history in ways different from other expressive aes-thetic forms? In other words, from a phenomenological perspective, one that places primacy on embodied, lived experience, what might music history mean?

This essay builds on recent ethnomusicological scholarship that eth-nographically foregrounds music’s potential for polyindexical meaning as crucial to understanding the multiple and complex ways in which music makes sense (Meintjes 2003; Samuels 2004). It puts these models in dialogue with phenomenological approaches to the study of place (Feld and Basso 1996) and voice (Fox 2004) and with scholarship in performance studies that

108 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2007

argues, particularly through the prism of ritual and aesthetic practice, for the body as a bearer of cultural memory (Connerton 1989; Roach 1996; Taylor 2003). Lastly, the arguments I make here are linked to a wider conversation in the social sciences and the humanities that has become more vigorous in recent years, one that seeks to foreground sound and hearing as critical to the understanding of social life (see Bendix 2000; Erlmann 2004; Feld and Brenneis 2004; Hirschkind 2006; Sterne 1997, 2003; Thompson 2002). I sug-gest that in fado practice and discourse, musical sound and style are linked to place through a poetics of soulfulness that shape the complex politics of place through feeling (sentimento). I theorize saudade as an “originary trope” for feeling which enables expression as fadista. Through reenacted rituals of singing and listening, place, history, and belonging converge in feeling that is made material and sensate in stylized sound. Here I explore instances of sung power and trace the moments and contexts of poesis through place and time.6 In so doing, I ask questions about the relationship of musical dis-course and practice to the reinscribing of souls in a modernizing, globalizing, postcolonial landscape.7

Portuguese anthropologist Joaquim Pais de Brito links the sound of the fado voice to a sense of the eternal: “The voice is in its transparency or huski-ness, limpidity or hoarseness a vital principle which negates by its absolute and impressive existence the ephemeral bodies which produce it. No fadista can ever be alone within his body, he is his voice . . . ” (Brito 1994:34). In popular discourse and practice, the fado voice often commodifies “soul” as icon of Portugal or of Lisbon. A Dutch newspaper article following the death of Amália Rodrigues claimed, “She thought the music came to her directly from God and that she was predestined to be ‘the collective Portuguese soul’” (Zoon 1999). Notes in the latest CD (Argentina Santos 2003) by an iconic fadista of the older generation, Argentina Santos, state, “Argentina Santos is the fado in its most pure and fascinating expression. Argentina Santos is the voice of fado and of Portugal.” A large banner stretched over a fence which blocks off a construction site in the neighborhood of Alfama (a historic neighbor-hood in the city center which is a common tourist destination associated with fado) as it undergoes an extensive project of urban restoration in the spring of 2003 reads, “Alfama is fado.” Liner notes for fado recordings that circulate via the world music industry often link the sound of fado to the timeless soul of Lisbon. For example, notes from the CD Tears of Lisbon state, “Although Lisbon may have changed over the years, the city’s soul and literature have remained the same. Both villancico and fado express the boundless melan-choly of a city that daydreams on the Atlantic coast, a position that makes it Europe’s first and last city” (Nevel 1996:9).

What are we to make of all of these souls, all of these strategic conjoin-ings of sound to soul, place to sound to soul? Certainly, these linkages all


rest on assumptions about music in relation to affect and mystery that have undergirded much Western philosophical writing on music since Plato. Nei-ther is this ethos surrounding sound a product only of the West. Turnbull’s description of the role of the molimo in his ethnography of the BaMbuti Pygmy society in the Congo serves as an eloquent case in point (Turnbull 1961; see also Taussig 1999:183). Musical experience is also deeply embodied. The history of Western art music attests to centuries of institutionalized strife based on this tension between music’s purported ability to elevate the “soul” and its “dangerous” ability to arouse the passions and to move the body. As Taussig asserts in his work on “the public labor of the negative,” “sound has a privileged function in stoking the dialectic of Being and Nothingness in the public secret” (1999:183).8 Certainly in the case of fado/soul rhetoric about Lisbon that is intended to travel outside of its local ritual context via the world music market, the discourses on soul in relation to fado (via saudade) serve to link constructions of an unchanging past to a bounded place precisely because music is often unproblematically conceived in relation to the soul, to emotion, to the body and thus to the natural.

Even within Portugal, for some listeners, the soul/fado connection often works to bind an idealized past to the space of nation (see Boyarin 1994); this rests in part on the long history of a dictatorship which censored fado, professionalized it to keep it under reign, and drawing on an aesthetic ethos of saudade, promoted lyrics which reinforced ideas of a return to an idyllic past. The national, historic, timeless soul which could be channeled via saudade through the fado voice, particularly the voice of Amália Rodrigues, helped to structure an imaginary of group belonging and national memory, as well as to shape an idea of Portugal which was static, where time stood still. It is precisely for this reason that some Portuguese complain that fado, because of the sentiment of saudade to which it is attached, reinforces feelings that help to keep a modernizing Portugal behind the rest of Europe. While the metaphor of the soul may link fado to a timeless essence, the climactic mo-ments of the performance of soul are anything but unchanging; rather the music and lyrics contain inventive improvisations and new compositional twists.9 Likewise, for those who listen to and perform fado, a soulful musical moment is not necessarily experienced as bound to the specificity of place or historical moment. These charged musical instances often have the capacity to simultaneously index multiple histories, senses of the past or place in the ways in which they are heard and felt.

Places of Fado

There are places in Lisbon which gather fado and fadistas,10 places where the talk of fans and singers, the photographs on the walls, and the songs and


the stories told through singing, merge, and spin off of one another teaching and reinscribing what fado is and its relation to History (both its own history as a genre and Portuguese colonial history writ large). These places teach one how to listen to fado, how to feel saudade, and teach one how to have a soul. If fado must be sung with the soul this soul is often marked as particularly Portuguese and relies on a cultural poetics of saudade for its expression.

Fado performance in Lisbon moves through interrelated sites and so-cial networks that mutually inform and influence one another. The density of tourist fado clubs in the “traditional,” “historic” Lisbon neighborhoods of Bairro Alto and Alfama delimit and mark spaces of the “real Portugal” for an international tourist market. Simultaneously, fado lovers and musicians continue to imagine and reproduce their everyday lived neighborhoods and social networks through engaging with fado, often within the context of fado amador (amateur fado).

The tasca, or small neighborhood bar is one type of venue where “ama-teur fado” performance in Lisbon has traditionally taken place. Distinctions between “amateur” and “professional” are marked and nuanced in multiple ways by many participants in the fado world.12 Yet these distinctions within the context of fado practice often blur. “Fado amador” is often used to dis-tinguish contexts in which the singers are not paid or regularly contracted. But it is common for professional fadistas, those under contract at officially designated fado venues (casas de fado), to sometimes participate in “amateur” sessions at “amateur” venues. Currently, in Lisbon and its suburban periphery, “amateur” fado sessions occur regularly in a handful of small bars, in some restaurants that are not classified as official casas de fado, and at neighborhood associations.13 In the first two types of venues, fado is normally designated for no more than a few times per week, and in neighborhood associations, usually less often, once a month or a few times per year.14

The tasca is often reified through ongoing and multiple discourses (urban legend, song lyrics, fado origin mythology, fado marketing) as the space of authentic social and musical/performance practice and contrasted to offi-cial casas de fado where professionals regularly perform under contract for a predominantly tourist audience.15 “I would never say this to a journalist,” says a famous guitarra (Portuguese guitar) player, who traveled the world with Amália Rodrigues, after I switch off my tape recorder, “but you know these little tascas where there is amateur fado, this is where there is the most fado.” A professional fadista who sings at the amateur venue O Jaime for fun before his nighttime gig tells me, “The Tasca do Jaime has a different kind of soul (alma); it is not like the professional places where the singer sells his voice.”16 Yet boundaries between sites of official fado and places which host so called “amateur” fado or fado vadio (literally “homeless” or “vagrant” fado) are in many facets porous and along with both international and local


recording and media industries, amateur and professional fado shape inter-dependent discourses and practices. I focus here on performance practice within “amateur” sites because venues like O Jaime offered me the greatest scope for bearing witness to failures, risks, and dreams in the midst of an intensely sociable audience whose very way of listening shapes aesthetic style and the learning of the soulful.

Learning Soul: Ritual as Practice for Learning Soulfulness in Sound

It is a Saturday afternoon in 2003 at the bar, or tasca, O Jaime, in the Lisbon neighborhood of Graça. The place is packed with amateur and professional fado singers waiting their turn to sing, and with their families and friends. It is cramped, windowless, smoke filled. Men line up along the bar drinking, women with girlfriends and husbands sit at tiny tables, people sitting on milk crates squeeze between chairs, an occasional tourist stands tentatively in the entrance. Photographs of fadistas, both living and dead, vie for space on the walls. The doors are open to the sounds of traffic—people talking on the street, the ringing and clanking of the electric trolley, the occasional boom bass of a passing car blasting hip hop. In the back of the room, under-neath a guitarra hanging on the wall and a framed, illuminated photograph of Amália Rodrigues sit two or three male instrumentalists (one usually playing the guitarra and another the acoustic guitar [viola])17 and in front of them stands the fadista. People sitting at the tables get up and take turns singing. While fado is in session, the lights are turned off, and the owner of the bar and listeners enforce strict silence, hissing, sssss, glaring, or shouting to de-mand silêncio from anyone who so much as tries to whisper. When a fadista starts singing, particularly if a song is a sad one, people listening sometimes close their eyes and silently move their lips in the shapes of the words. The fadista often sings the more melancholic songs with eyes closed, with her head thrown back, her hands at times interlocked in front of her and at others gesturing expressively, the torso in a stillness rapt with a focus that directs all attention to the sound and expression of her voice.18

I sit across the table from an amateur fadista named Olga, singing to her under my breath, trying out a fado I am learning for my upcoming audition at the fado museum. Interrupting my singing, she says, “I could hit you, I could kill you, but you will never have a Portuguese soul.” “But we have souls too,” I say. (Since when have the Portuguese had a monopoly on soulfulness?) I try it again and ham it up by singing extended voltinhas (vocal turns) along with a rubato on the phrase “cantando dou brado” (“by singing I am heard”) and she says, “Yes, now you are beginning to have some soul.” For many people in the fado subculture, the concept of learning has nothing to do with fado;


for many to admit to learning might be to reveal an essential lack, to não ser fadista (to not be fadista). Singing fado with feeling (sentimento) is com-monly understood as something that cannot be learned; rather a fadista is born with fado na alma (fado in the soul). Yet surely soulfulness is learned. For Olga, my voice and performance lacked soulful signifiers; the soul resides in musical and performative details of the voice.

The singing of fado at O Jaime, and amateur fado performance in general, is dependent on numerous codified ritual practices (see Cordeiro 1994); the exact details of rituals vary depending on the venue, but many aspects hold same. The ways in which I come to understand individual variation and development, the shaping of an aesthetic and ways of listening, feeling and expressing the soulful in sound, figure against a ground of ritual’s weekly repetitions.

Preparations

It is three in the afternoon on a Saturday in June 2002 and I walk up the series of steep cobblestone streets that connect my apartment building on the Rua de Bela Vista da Graça (Street with the Beautiful View of Grace) to the Tasca do Jaime on the Rua da Graça. When I arrive, a few men are standing outside the door smoking; we exchange kisses of greeting. Smells of frying fish and potatoes mingle with tobacco as I walk in and my eyes adjust to the darkness. A few men alone sit at tables finishing off their lunches with hard liquor. A man in his seventies wearing a suit jacket with a pin of a guitarra on his lapel sits drinking water, and hums to himself while looking at a folded list of all of the fados he sings and the keys in which he sings them, which he keeps in his breast pocket. A middle-aged couple sits in the back chatting with Jaime who eats before the fado starts at four. I say hello to everyone individually with a kiss on each cheek. “Ah, Elena, the Americana,” someone says. Laura, Jaime’s wife, chides me for coming so late but takes my lunch order anyway. The instrumentalists occasionally come early to eat a big meal before playing; sometimes they bring their wives who sit patiently through the entire afternoon. Gradually, more people come in, many claiming regular tables. After coming to O Jaime for many months, I have a sense of which people arrive when, I know who are singers and who come to listen, and those who come to do both. People banter with one another, ask about each other’s lives, children, illnesses. They start to build individual relationships with me; I learn about their families, their jobs, and of their relationships to fado, to other fadistas, and to other venues in which fado is performed.

The place begins to buzz with the activities of fado about to happen and sounds of fado conversation: “Did you know that that fado was first sung by Maria Teresa de Noronha? A grande senhora of fado she was.” Someone else


might say, “Well, her voice was too lyrical for me, but yes, a grande senhora she was.” “Yes, she had a clear voice [uma voz limpa].” “What key do you sing ‘Lagrima’ in?”19 “I sing it in G.” “I have always sung it in F. Are you coming tonight to the fado night at Boa Vista?” “No, we are going to Tasca do Careca.”20

“But they can bring the van by and pick you up later, they need fadistas.” An amateur poet might have sheets of paper with working versions of a fado and be trying to get some fadista to try it out for him. A fadista might begin the fado halfheartedly then stop because she doesn’t like the flow of the words. The guitarra player unpacks his instrument then takes out his unhas (fingernail extensions which give an added brilliance to the sound, sometimes made from pieces of plastic or old credit cards), carefully taping them onto his fingers, then begins to tune. The viola player comes in and greets everyone then opens his case.

It is 3:55 pm. Jaime switches off the television set, plugs in the light that illuminates Amália’s portrait and then connects the cord to light a diorama that hangs in the center of the back wall in a glass covered wooden box. (A group of cutout men in suits stand around a table in a miniature bar; Jaime long ago altered the diorama by adding a viola to the picture and by past-ing in a tiny photo, taken from a postcard, of Amália Rodrigues singing and glued it in the back and surrounded it by a cutout stage.) When he turns on a dim red light and switches off the main lighting, this is the signal that the session is about to begin.21 Jaime walks to the back of the bar where the instrumentalists are positioned and in a resonant bass voice gives a general welcome which might go something like this, “Welcome to my humble tasca, to yet another afternoon of fado, another afternoon of tradition. I am proud that so many good people and fadistas come here every week. I am sorry that the place is not more comfortable. We are all like family here (em família)so feel at home.” He introduces the instrumentalists with great flourish. The guitarra and viola play a guitarrada.22 Jaime then often sings the first three fados of the afternoon before introducing the first fadista.23

Performing I

“She has only just begun singing fado and she is a little shy but we all agree that this senhora really carries fado in her voice. I would like to present Olga de Sousa!” There is the squeak of chair legs against the tile floor, the shuffling of feet and the movement of bodies as Olga, a woman in her late forties, dressed in black, makes her way to the instrumentalists. They ask her what she will sing first and if she knows the key. She doesn’t know the key but tells them the name of the fado; they have her hum the beginning and the guitarra player decides on a key for her. As she is about to start, there is still whispering in the house and some outright talking near the door. Laura,


who is busy trying to serve a group of four a platter of shrimp, shouts loudly, “Silêncio por favor! Silêncio!” A woman sitting at the table closest to the mu-sicians whispers a piercing psssssss, with a well aimed glare to the talkers; at the last minute, another woman at the same table pulls out a black lace shawl from her bag and stands up and puts it around Olga’s shoulders and adjusts it, saying, “now you will be more fadista.” The instrumentalists begin to play, the guitarra elaborating the harmony of the melody and the viola marking the bass line. Olga nervously fingers the edges of her shawl, closes her eyes, tilts her head back, takes a breath and begins to sing in a low, husky voice the first lines to the fado “Que Deus Me Perdoe” (May God Forgive Me [for loving the fado]),24 “If my closed soul could speak, it would tell how I suffer in silence . . .” Her body sways slightly from side to side, her fingers twist the edges of her shawl and her voice gains momentum as she moves further into the song. She begins to fall slightly out of sync with the viola player, to lose the beat (compasso); I hear the instrumentalists mark the rhythm more strongly and she gets back on track. The entire house bursts forth singing the refrain, in tune, out of tune, some in time, some lagging behind but all with tremendous energy. After the refrain, her voice picks up the next verse with extra vigor and as she moves into the finale, there are shouts of lindo!(beautiful), bem! (well done), from the audience as they break into applause. Almost immediately the house fills with waves of talk. The instrumentalists have a few words with her and give her some tips for the next time. An older woman who is a friend of Olga’s whispers to me, “Her family wouldn’t let her be a fadista, but it has always been her dream, she has the voice, today is only her second time singing in public.” Olga has a tremor in her voice. She sometimes sings off pitch, she can’t get the rhythm; but her eyes are luminous and her body alive with this new excitement of singing in public.

Performing II

In a photo portrait shop up the street, a framed photograph of Fatima Fernandes (a female fadista who is given great prestige at O Jaime) sits in the window; this photo also hangs prominently on the wall of O Jaime. During an interval during this Saturday afternoon fado session, Jaime’s wife Laura leans towards me and says, “Have you heard the voice of Fatima Fernandes? For me, she is the very best that there is. Fatima, she is special, she really knows the fado.” Fatima makes rare appearances at O Jaime, although she is a regular at Friday night fado sessions a few miles up the road at the Jardim do Poço do Bispo and appears often as a hired fadista at special fado gala nights throughout the city.

This Saturday, Fatima arrives late during a set in between songs to whis-pered fanfare as people move out of the way to let her by. She walks heavily,


holding a cane, leaning on Laura’s arm. From head to toe she is dressed in black; her eyes sparkle as she greets friends and settles down in the back corner at a table near the instrumentalists. When it is Fatima’s turn to sing, she doesn’t walk to the instrumentalists, but rather she stands near her chair propping herself up with her cane, her eyes closed, her head tilted back and sings three melancholy fados. Just before she approaches the finale of the third fado, there is a hush and her voice drops to a pianissimo as she draws out a phrase with a long rubato. One can hear a quivering in her voice as she elaborates with semitones and with some pitches that slide almost into microtones. In the midst of absolute silence in the room, in this moment of tremulous rubato, voices of listeners gasp, lindo (beautiful), boca linda!(beautiful mouth), fadista! (you are a true fadista).

Performing Soulfulness: Silences

É fadista quem canta como quem sabe ouvir em silêncio. (A fadista is one who sings like one who knows how to listen in silence.)

—Fado epithet scribbled on a piece of torn paper tablecloth and passed to me by a listener at O Jaime.

Silence like sound can be affectively charged, bearing multiple nuances of attention and feeling. My eyes are closed and I am listening; the person next to me whispers to her friend across the table, “Look how she is feelingthe fado.” A four-year old boy sits with his mother for an entire afternoon session, when he starts to talk she gently places a finger to his lips, teaching him silence. Silence in the performance space of fado can be filled with the raptness of a listening that is feeling, can direct all attention to the voice and expressive movements of the fadista, sounds of the instruments, the mean-ings of sung words.

Silence can evaluatively mark the quality of a venue; singers and fans might speak of a venue in terms of the quality of its silence, where an audi-ence who knows how to be silent is one that knows how to listen with the same intensity as which with the fadista is singing, thus entering into the fado and thus into feeling. Silences may be enforced with a hiss, a glare, a shout for silence, or before a set or when things get really out of hand, a short speech from the presenter to the house about how fado tem um outro sabor com silêncio (fado has a different taste/flavor/quality with silence), or with the exclamation Silêncio! Que se vai cantar o fado! (Silence! Fado is going to be sung!). There are decorous silences, bored but respectful silences, or si-lences of laughter held in just about to break when people tell jokes written on napkin scraps or catch someone’s glance across the room. It is often the singers who are recognized as most powerful (as house “stars”) who during


their “off stage” listening are given more leeway in causing disruption. Distrac-tion during a less than optimal performance may give way to whispers and nudges. Then there are the feeling-filled silences which fall upon a room as a deep hush, a collective transfixion commanded by the sheer affective force of a singer’s voice; one way in which a masterful performance is acknowledged is by the quality of silence it elicits, and another by the way in which this silence is broken.

Breaking Silence

In the space of silence, a listener might perform her soulfulness or inte-riority by the way she closes her eyes and utters the words to the fado being sung in soundless incantation. The silent intonation of lyrics is common practice amongst many listeners in amateur venues frequented by aficionados and blurs the line between the fadista’s performance of interiority and the listener’s interiorized hearing. An entire audience may collectively burst into song during a refrain; some fados have refrains and even in the traditional fados which do not,25 the instrumentalists often play a strophe or part of a strophe alone; in amateur fado, both of these present opportunities for the audience to sing. The way in which an audience sings the refrain or strophe often depends on which fadista is singing; if it is a beginner or someone whom they feel needs help, the audience may sing the refrain with added vigor and volume.26

There are moments in fado when the instruments might pause and the voice might hover on the break of a cry, might become almost impossibly soft (or for a man, impossibly high), the voice might tremble and turn upon itself in ornamentation. Many singers identified this stylistic moment (the voice singing alone during a critical moment in the fado at a lowered volume or with higher pitch) with the term “pianinho.” These are moments when listeners sometimes cry out in exclamations: bem! boca linda! ah fadista!In amateur fado, listeners often voice exclamations of approval at moments of heightened emotion particularly immediately before the finale or during the finale on the final repetition of a key poetic utterance. These moments are often stylistically signaled by any of the following: shifts in vocal regis-ter, dynamic, heightened improvisation, use of rubato, melisma, vocal turns (voltinhas). In amateur fado the unspoken rules for understanding how and when to exclaim vary depending on venue. In some cases, even in places where exclaiming is common practice, absolute silence may be the highest accolade or the most “appropriate” response.

Singers have different words they use to name the moment of heightened feeling in a fado. One older professional male singer called it “fado,” using the generic term qualitatively, implying that within one fado song, certain parts


could have “more fado” than others. The same singer also used the phrase dar sentimento (to give feeling). It is also precisely this moment in which a singer is most likely to employ melismatic microtonal vocal ornamentations. That the practice of using extended voltinhas, or vocal ornaments, in fado was popularized by Amália Rodrigues in the1950s and 1960s27 is generally not known in amateur fado venues. Rather, this musical moment is sometimes marked as having an Arab sound and is pointed to as proof of fado’s Moorish origins and its birth in the neighborhood of Mouraria. “Mouraria” originally referred to the Moorish quarter of a Portuguese city. In fado lore, Mouraria figures prominently as one of the “origin” neighborhoods for fado and in songs is often a site of nostalgia. In contemporary Lisbon, Mouraria is one of the city’s most ethnically diverse neighborhoods, home to Asian, African, northern African and white Portuguese populations.

Performing Tears

“Fado,” a fadista once told me in one of Lisbon’s biggest tourist clubs, “is music of the soul. When I sing I make people from all around the world cry.”

—Professional fadista at Café Luso in Lisbon

Soulful exclamation can take the form of tears silently passed. A listener wipes the tears from the corners of her eyes and expresses that she has been moved, but also that she knows how to listen with feeling.28 The singer might brush the tears from her eyes after she has finished the finale, expressing that she has sung authentically, with feeling, with soul. These tears index both a private emotional/aesthetic experience and a moment of shared sociality (see Feld 1982; Urban 1991); they point to the power of musical experience to be simultaneously felt as both intensely subjective and social. Aesthetic appreciation merges with heightened feeling in a moment of sound and the soulfulness of the aural is made visibly public, thus social in the form of the tear. In this context the tear can thus be read as a socially salient indexical icon of soul.29 Talk of tearfulness (for example, “your singing made me cry,” “I had tears in my eyes when you sang,” or “whenever he sings I always cry”) is almost always heard as praise.

While singing may elicit tears, while many lyrics reference tears, crying, sobbing, and affects of melancholy, containing reflexive discourse which links both fado and fado sound to crying, and while singers and instrumentalists often stylistically employ codified “icons of crying” (Urban 1991:156),30 actual crying by the singer would threaten rupture of form, making it impossible to continue to sing. I witnessed one episode at O Jaime where a woman was singing a sad fado when suddenly her voice broke, faltered, stopped. She walked away mid-song in tears later explaining that the song reminded


her of her father who had recently died. Singers do speak of the catharsis they achieve by singing fado, but this is a highly stylized catharsis sustained within the strict confines of form; the voice might tremble upon a cry but must not break sobbing.

Performing Soulfulness: Vasco da Gama in the Throat of a Fadista

No cristal de uma garganta vive a alma de um pais. (In the crystal of a throat lives the soul of a country.)

—Phrase popularly glossed to take on different meanings in multiple fado lyrics.31

Jaime dims the lights as we settle in to listen again after a long interval. The guitarra and viola start playing, a little tentatively, sounding slightly off key, looking almost bored, trying out the fado song, “Julia Florista,” for a fadista, a solid looking woman in her early fifties with short dark hair and sharp brown eyes whom I have not seen before. Maria José Melo stands, feet grounded on the floor, hands clasped in front of her chest then closes her eyes. The instrumentalists finish the introduction, the viola rhythmically marking the bass line as the guitarra strums the first statement of the melody of the re-frain. As Maria José begins to sing with a low grainy voice, her hands follow the gestures of her voice and breath, furling, unfurling, rising, falling, coming again to rest in a position almost of prayer; her eyes open, close, open again; standing in front of the instrumentalists, she shifts her weight sometimes taking a step forward, sometimes back. Her face twists, screws up in inten-sity conveying theatrically stylized smiles, grimaces, passion. She sings to the melody of “Julia Florista,”32 a well-known fado canção (fado song). Maria José sings new lyrics, written by the popular poet Manuel Calado Tomé, whose lament critiques current changes to the landscape of Lisbon, “Lisboa, Não Mudes Assim” (“Lisbon Don’t Change Like This”).33

“Lisboa, Não Mudes Assim”by Manuel Calado Tomé (1998)

Mudar sim LisboaMas mudar à toaNão é bem pensadoNo crescer e progressoÉ um mau processoEsquecer o passadoDo povo donzelaTão linda tão belaEscuta o meu recado

Change, Lisbon changeBut to change haphazardlyIs not a good ideaIn growth and progressIt is a bad processTo forget the pastLisbon, maiden of the peopleSo beautiful, so goodListen carefully to my reprimand


Não percas a raçaVais ficar sem graçaSe não tens cuidado

O MonumentalCentro de culturaSeguro sinalDeste mal sem curaAli no SaldanhaPartido esventradoFoi capa de manhaE logo apanhaUm supermercado

E fora de portasOnde eram as hortasHá cimento armadoSe não os detêmDe certo que vêmNada é poupadoSe for nossa forçaSalvamos da forcaO Parque MayerSerão preservadosCostumes sagradosSe o povo quiser

E já o comboioVai à outra bandaFicam cacilheirosSós na corda bamba

Tens a Vasco da GamaO Parque das NaçõesDe tudo se esquecemQue desaparecemBrados e pregões

Don’t lose the raceOr you will be without graceIf you do not take care

O Monumental34

Center of cultureA sure signOf this evil without cureHere in Saldanha35

Broken and ripped apartIt was the cloak of cunningAnd later caughtA supermarket

And outdoorsWhere there were the hortas36

There are cement buildingsIf you do not stopIt is certainNothing will be savedIf but by our forceWe are able to save from the gallowsThe Parque Mayer37

Sacred customs will be preservedIf that is what the people wish

And already the trainGoes to the other side [of the river Tagus]And the ferries between Lisbon and

Cacilhas38

Remain alone in the chaos

Refrain:You have Vasco da GamaThe Parque das Nações39

And in the midst of it allEveryone forgets that brados and pregõeshave disappeared.40

Maria José repeats the last verse twice; between these repetitions there is a refrain where she hums, gesturing with her hands, encouraging people to sing along. The first time, she renders the last verse straight; the second time, she begins a long rubato on the name “Vasco da Gama” and she orna-ments the “a” in “Vasco” with vocal turns, drops her dynamic slightly then slides luxuriously downwards into the next syllable. She prolongs the word “Gama” emphasizing it by swaying her shoulders from side to side. She con-tinues the rubato into “Parque das Nações,” gathers breath, throws her head


back, closes her eyes and forcefully sings the last line. A regular at O Jaime, Iracema Oliveira, shouts, “Bem!” and the house erupts in applause.

The commuter bridge and the shopping mall, “Vasco da Gama,” were built in 1998 in conjunction with the World’s Fair in Lisbon that commemorated the five hundred year anniversary of the discovery of the sea route to India. Abandoned factories and warehouses along the city’s eastern waterfront were demolished to make way for hyper-futuristic, glass and steel gleaming structures, a commercial/governmental/recreational space named Parque das Nações, which was to help revitalize the new Lisbon. Maria José, in her per-formance, prolongs, ornaments and foregrounds the climactic phrase “Vasco da Gama” with hand, facial and vocal gestures. While the literal reference of “Vasco da Gama” in this context is to the commuter bridge over the river Tagus, it is also evocative of the adjacent shopping mall and the Portuguese navigator-hero.

“Lisboa, Não Mudes Assim” figures against a ground of at least three traditional subcategories of fado lyrics in terms of content. This fado is one of many whose lyrics celebrate places in the city of Lisbon—fados which exist symbiotically with particular Lisbon places. By recalling Vasco da Gama (the person), the song references a type of fado that glorifies Lisbon as the seat of colonial prowess. Lastly, “Lisboa, Não Mudes Assim” participates in a long tradition of fados whose lyrics are grounded in an aesthetic ethos of saudade.

Saudade as Originary Trope for Feeling

Maria José Melo tells me, “Fado was born from the spirit of ventura (fate, destiny, risk) of the Portuguese people who through the Discoveries gave new worlds to the world. Or fado was born from the saudade of those who remained for those who left or from the saudade of those who left for those whom they left behind. And perhaps from there, fado was born as a song of tears (choro), a song of saudade, a song of distance. Perhaps the people who sang felt closer to those who were far away.”41 A respected professional male fadista in his fifties comments to me, “You are studying the fado? I hope you have a long time; you could study the fado forever and never come to the end of it. Are you studying its origins? No? Well that is good because no one has been able to figure out where it came from, and it is better that way. Fado is a mystery.”

All great genres of music create a mythology. As part of a process to legitimate the fado, it was necessary to create a myth of historically remote origins . . . An Arab origin is out of the question, just as is a medieval origin relating to the troubadours. These are fantasies. The Portuguese navigators playing the guitarra


on the high sea, these are completely invented, romantic, ideas. And this [on which the refutations above are based] is objective, historical data. But I am for the freedom of religion; if people want to believe that Don Afonso Henriques42

sang fado, that is material of faith. (Tavares and Nery 2002, my translation)

While some origin narratives may be the “material of faith,” as musicolo-gist Rui Vieira Nery suggests in the above interview excerpt that appeared in the Lisbon daily paper, O Diário de Notícias, on the third anniversary of the death of Amália Rodrigues, they are central for many participants in the fado subculture as originary tropes for feeling which enable expression as fadista. In these stories of origin, feeling is emplaced, feeling which positions the singer/instrumentalist/listener in relation to wider histories and to ideas of belonging, feeling which links imaginaries of past to the shaping of present and future. Fadista Olga de Sousa tells me, “We are born into the fado. Fado is a state of the soul [um estado de alma] fados are dramas of which almost all are sad, fado has to be sung with the heart, you need to feel nostalgia. Fado is sad because fado was born almost for certain in Mouraria. Where is Mouraria? That was the place of the Moors and they had saudade for their terra [land, place, birthplace].”

While I only heard this particular version of origin narrative from Olga, one in which fado’s “essential” sadness is linked to the saudade of the displace-ment of the Moors (she is not clear whether she refers to the five hundred year Moorish “occupation” or to the banishing of the Moors to Mouraria after the Christian reconquest), this story works as a way for Olga to situate herself and her individual expression as fadista within a long term history where “history” does not just signify officially remembered sequences of events with respect to nationalist projects but where the primary symbolic value of “history” lies in its emotional valence vis-a-vis saudade. Saudade in this instance references both spatial and temporal distance.

João Leal, in his work on “the making of saudade” in relation to national identity and “ethnic psychology” in Portugal traces a literary genealogy of the term to the fifteenth century (2000:3–11). He details the ways in which sau-dade was increasingly shaped as a nationalist ideology in the early twentieth century, particularly in relation to the artistic/literary movement saudosismoin the period from 1912–1926. As a backlash against cosmopolitanism, saudo-sismo promoted a “a cult of ‘Portuguese things’ reflecting the true ‘Portuguese soul’” and ideologically bolstered the nationalist agenda of the First Repub-lic. He argues that it was also during the early 1900s that saudade became attached to fado. Later, during Salazar’s New State (1926–1974), saudade ideologically came to broadly signify the sense of feeling, history, uniqueness, and time of the Portuguese “people” and “nation,” and the “essence” of the “Portuguese soul.” Leal argues that in post-regime Portugal, saudade (like fado)


became “politically incorrect” for those in power but that currently, saudade is symbolically appropriated to take on different valences by different social groups:

From this point of view, saudade should be regarded as an example of a more widespread tendency present in other processes of construction and circula-tion of national symbols and stereotypes: although directed towards the whole national population, they are in fact selectively appropriated by specific cultural and social groups who reproduce them as particular symbols of their own sense of a more general feeling: that of “being national.” (Leal 2000:14)

Saudade, as poetic and historical topos, thus links to a particular kind of “Portuguese” soulfulness and gestures toward pivotal events in the definition of an official Portuguese historical narrative. At the same time it allows for the individual expression of seemingly infinite desires, memories, and senses of loss and absence. Fado as genre often serves as catalyst for retellings of “history” writ large via the soulful conduit of saudade where “history” both stands in for feeling and gives rise to its expression. If saudade lent spirit and soul to the “body” of the Portuguese nation, a soul which contained salient aspects of the past and “history” while gesturing to the eternal (see Leal 2000 citing Handler 1988), the expressive practice of fado articulated this link between “body” and “soul” in sound.

“Before being thought, saudade was sung; it is prisoner of the lyricism which first gave it voice” ( Lorenço 2001:92).43 Portuguese philosopher and essayist Eduardo Lorenço distinguishes the power of song, the poesis of the lyric as set apart, almost granting to them a primal magic that he denies to thought (and as such posits yet another version of sound and music as natural, as timeless). Trapped within the confines of aesthetic form and the modula-tions of the sonorous voice, Lorenço’s saudade cannot escape the signification of feeling. I suggest that the power of fado as genre to function as symbol, or as a node which unleashes by association individually inflected variants of “history,” is symbiotically linked to the lyric—to the affective, sonic, sensual and storied aspects of the genre as musical/poetic form and practice—but that lyricism always implies agency and possibilities for improvisation and change. The power of the lyric as aesthetic form lies in the ways in which form is at once socially and individually inflected via style. Different styles in this sense often index “competing values and ideas” (Meintjes 2003:10; see also Bauman and Briggs 1990, 1992; Feld 1994; Hebdige 1979; Urban 1991).

Remembering Vasco da Gama

The nostalgia and the kind of remembering invoked by “Lisboa, Não Mudes Assim” are different from what I heard in many fados from 2001 to 2003. In 2003, twenty-nine years after the end of the dictatorship in Portugal, lyrics


whose saudade cries out in lament at modernity and whose utopic spaces are places idyllic and unchanging, continued to be sung and written (these type of lyrics were common during the dictatorship). Tomé’s lyrics reference the destruction and transformation of specific cultural sites and anxiously lament a loss of cultural history wrought by modernization and change too quickly seized. The poet’s nostalgia for the past is not nostalgia for the regime. Indeed, Tomé noted that lyrics like these would have probably been censored during the regime for leveling a critique which could be read as directed towards city policy.44 Rather, Tomé uses the trope of nostalgia to get listeners to think about the haphazardness of current modernization, the transformation of a cityscape and the consequent shaping of the historical imaginary. In other words, what does it mean that Vasco da Gama’s lieux de memoire (Nora 1989)45 are a commuter bridge and a shopping mall? The moment of height-ened feeling on the performed utterance “Vasco da Gama” simultaneously calls forth multiple historical imaginaries and ideas about history. As a vestige of Estado Novo regime-making, a popular recounting of Portuguese historical narrative almost always starts with the colonial discoveries; thus “Vasco da Gama” is a call to origin of empire in which lies the power of nation.

Yet this stylistic moment for some, where vocal turns function as an icon of the Arab, calls on a different history, that of the five hundred year presence of the Moors in Portugal. In warning of the havoc rampant build-ing and destruction are wrecking on a sense of Lisbon’s past, this call also directs attention to the material shaping of Lisbon’s present sense of history. These calls are made sensate, thus soulful via the strategic placement of the phrase within the structure of the song that calls Maria José to foreground the phrase through the way in which she styles it.

Styling Soulfulness

A common epithet runs “ser fadista não se aprende, nasce logo quando nasce uma pessoa” (one does not learn to be a fadista, one is born fadista). To style well (estilar), or to improvise artfully, is considered one of the most important features of good singing. As one of the most primary signs of authenticity or soulfulness (along with vocal timbre), it is one of fado’s most naturalized characteristics. With improvisation (as with timbre), you either have it or you don’t.

Some acknowledge the places where fado is sung as places where sing-ers learn from one another and through the act of singing for others. Singer and fado researcher José Manuel Osório calls fado houses “the only schools fado has” (p.c., 7 December 2002). Certainly within the subculture of fans and singers who participate in the amateur scene in Lisbon, places like O Jaime, places of dense sociality centered around music making and listening,


function as schools for the performance of soulful singing and hearing. One learns the visual icons of soulful singing (the head is thrown back, the throat strained, the eyes closed, the body still and it is dark) and the embodied aural icons (the raspy vocal timbre of a fado voice “which has suffered,” or a voice whose timbre breaks up during a climax as if on the verge of tears, or the sound of a long held rubato coupled with vocal turns sung during the last verse). People learn to perform their souls in the way in which they listen, in silence, attentively, eyes closed, words uttered inaudibly like an incantation and maybe with tears. In amateur practice, the singing of refrains, the silent incantation of lyrics and the voicing of exclamations, the evaluative silence of listening, and tearfulness or talk of crying shape and frame an aesthetic of soulful listening and singing. Exclamations, and sometimes tears, provide markers (in addition to the performative, musical, and stylistic shifts employed by the singer which are enabled by the musical/poetic structure of numerous fados) that set moments of heightened feeling and virtuosity apart. In other words, they help shape structures of listening.

Appadurai (1996) suggests that performance might play a critical role in articulating the “structures of feeling” (Williams 1977) upon which the production of locality depends. With “structures of listening” I play with com-mon tropes of hearing and of listening, where they are linked to interiority, to feeling, to subjectivity, while foregrounding the sociability of listening, the sociality of hearing and their emergent qualities (see also Bendix 2000; Cumming 2000; Feld 1994). The structuring of feelings, the experiencing of place and the imagining of history converge in an instance of styled soulful-ness, a moment of music, and in this converging, ideas of place in relation to narratives of history become unmoored.

Lisbon. I am in the decaying vestiges of a colonial empire long gone on the far fringe of western Europe, in a capital city of a country which hosted Europe’s longest dictatorship, a place where modernity and expansion have run amuck and often collide with the material and not so material stuff of history. European Union money has come and gone.46 I am told, “Go home, go home; Portugal has no future.” Art deco buildings fall to ruins. Trees grow out of rooftops. There are abandoned palaces. Graffiti of the 1974 revolution is still visible on walls, fading. The current rate of the euro flashes neon in the financial district. Electric cars covered with coca cola advertisements heave up steep inclines getting stuck behind badly parked SUVs. Beggars sit still, with withered faces, holding out hands. 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. Tourists wander carrying the same guidebook in different languages. Displaced and hard up Eastern European immigrants with advanced degrees do manual labor working to restore decaying city buildings. Black men, some retornados from former colonies, and Islamic immigrants hang out smoking and talking in the square


outside of the former church of the Holy Inquisition. On the street of Saudade outside of the ruins of a Roman amphitheater, a black man is pinned to a car by four white men who accuse him of trying to steal the purse of a Spanish tourist.47 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 where the Moors were banished after the Christian reconquest; the neighborhood that according to one legend, gave birth to the music of fado in the voice of the first fadista/prostitute, Maria Severa in the early 1800s. “Listen,” someone whispers to me during a moment of sung beauty at a session of O Jaime as if revealing a great secret, “listen to those voltinhas. Fado is Arab you know and comes from Mouraria.”

Taylor differentiates between the “archive,” objects upon which memory is inscribed or “permanently stored” and the “repertoire” as that which “enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing” or “ephemeral” knowledge (2003:20). Drawing on Foucault’s genealogical approach to history, Roach (1996) develops the concept of “genealogies of performance” to point to how memories and histories are transmitted through the body and inflected in performance.

Histories and memories proffer themselves forth unraveling in the density of a musical moment. If each moment of performance contains the embodied traces of history, a study of these soulful moments, precisely because they mark the convergence of heightened creativity and feeling, might help us to understand the shaping of the contemporary historical imaginary as regis-tered in relation to a sense of place in which place is continuously imagined, transformed and produced. Yet, I was often cautioned by fans and singers to respect the mystery of fado and fado’s origins. How can we best pry apart what Taussig (1999) has called the “secret of sound” while keeping a sense of its mystery? From an idea of mystery comes a wellspring of invention and storied histories which are re-spun and imagined when the fadista sings or the listener listens com alma (with soul). For the subculture of Portuguese fado singers and fans, a poetics of saudade, musical and lyric traditions, and reenacted rituals of singing and listening enable improvisation and creativity while structuring the feelings which engender particularly situated expres-sions of soulfulness. These condensed musical moments unleash multiple and diverse historiographies, stories of origin and fantasies of past and future, all of which shape the landscape of feeling in Lisbon’s present.

AcknowledgmentsField research in Lisbon between 2001 and 2003 was generously supported by the Social Sci-ence Research Council IDRF program with funds from the Andrew G. Mellon Foundation, by


the Luso-American Foundation, the Duke University Center for European Studies FLAS program, the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, and the Duke University Center for International Studies. Portions of this paper were read at the Society for Ethnomusicology, 48th Annual Conference Miami, Florida, October 2003; the conference “Creating Identity and Empire in the Atlantic World, 1492–1888,” at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, September 2004; and at the American Portuguese Studies Association, Fourth International Conference, College Park, Maryland, October 2004. I am grateful to Louise Meintjes and Charles Piot for their comments and suggestions on this manuscript. Additionally I am grateful for the assistance of Ana Maria Fachadas Gonçalves with the Portuguese orthography and also to the editors and to the anonymous reviewers of Ethnomusicology for their comments. Special thanks go to Jaime and Laura Nunes, Maria José Melo, Manuel Calado Tomé, Fernanda Proença, Olga Rosa de Sousa, José Manuel Osório and to all of the people who taught me how to listen to the fado at O Jaime. I welcome correspondence regarding this article and can be reached at [email protected].

Notes1.Amália Rodrigues died in 1999.2.The university city of Coimbra has its own unique fado tradition. Yet the musical, per-

formative, thematic and socio-cultural features of Coimbra fado are so different as to constitute a separate genre. Coimbra fado falls beyond the scope of this essay.

3.The dictatorial regime in Portugal spanned the years 1926 to 1974 and ended with a bloodless coup on April 25, 1974. This regime is commonly referred to as the Estado Novo(New State).

4. In “Discoveries” I retain the capitalization that is commonly used in Portugal when refer-ring to the Descobrimentos (the Portuguese colonial discoveries).

5.“The concept of a circum-Atlantic world (as opposed to a transatlantic one) insists on the centrality of the diasporic and genocidal histories of Africa and the Americas, North and South, in the creation of the culture of modernity” (Roach 1996:4).

6. I use “poesis” in this context in the sense of “cultural poesis” to refer to “an aesthetic act that animates and literally makes sense of cultural forms and forces at the point of their affective, material, or imaginary emergence” (Stewart and Liftig 2002:349–350).

7.This essay is part of a larger ethnographic project (Gray 2005). This research, conducted between 2001 and 2003, dialogues between multiple Lisbon sites: tourist and professional venues, museums and archives, the recording and world music industries, but it is primarily grounded in amateur fado performance practice in Lisbon clubs.

8. Referring to Berndt’s (1962) work on Papua New Guinea, Taussig states, “Again and again it seems like we are being told to listen but not look, that it is at the point where the world is presenced through unsighted sound that the labor of the negative exerts its extremity, as with the ‘voice,’ which emblematizes Donald Tuzin’s [1997] study of what he calls the ‘secret men’s cult’ in the East Sepik region of Papua New Guinea” (Taussig 1999:200–201). After a discussion of Berndt, Tuzin, and Turnbull, Taussig goes on to comment, “how strange, given its importance to these sacred secrets that so little attention has been paid to sound and music by ethnologists!” (ibid.:206).

9. See Castelo-Branco (1994) for an analysis of the complex dialogue between voices and instruments in fado performance.

10.The term “fadista” is generally used to refer to one who sings fado. Within the context of amateur fado, some informants also used “fadista” to refer to one who knows how to listen to fado. “Fadista” is also sometimes employed as a qualitative evaluative term (fans might consider one singer “more fadista” than another).

11. See Stewart 1996 on the cultural poetics of place as storied.12. It is also possible to understand the professional/amateur distinction within fado as

referring to distinct sets of social/performative practices linked to particular types of places


where fado is performed (see Gray 2005 for further elaboration). See Costa and Guerreiro (1984) for a sociological account of amateur fado in the neighborhood of Alfama.

13. Casas de fado usually refer to fado restaurants that feature “typical” (típico) Portuguese cuisine and professional fado. Tourist oriented venues, particularly in the Lisbon neighborhood of Bairro Alto, sometimes also feature performances of Portuguese “folkloric” dance. The official casa de fado, along with the professionalization of fado, was instituted during the regime. An officially designated casa de fado has a contracted group of regular paid singers (elenco) and instrumentalists.

14. In recent years, hybrid types of fado venues have been appearing (i.e., they may have a few hired regulars, but still encourage amateur participation; or, a restaurant may have a group of unpaid regulars which sing almost every night of the week, generally to tourist audiences). By hosting amateur fado, these venues substantially lower their operating costs, the cost to the consumer, and also capitalize on tourist desire for authenticity (Klein and Alves 1994).

15. See Klein and Alves (1994) for a discussion of the history of professionalization in rela-tion to fado houses and the regime of the Estado Novo and also for a discussion of the develop-ment of the phenomenon of fado vadio. See Cordeiro in the same volume for an ethnographic account of social practice in the amateur fado venue Guitarra da Bica in the 1990s, which has since closed.

16. I conducted field research in Lisbon almost exclusively in Portuguese. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Reported speech of informants that appears in quotation marks without a footnote citation to a taped interview has been taken from my field notes.

17.The instruments that accompany the fado currently almost always include a guitarra (the Portuguese guitar) and a viola (the “Spanish” guitar, i.e. six string acoustic guitar). At O Jaime additional instrumentalists sometimes participated in the session (for example, a second guitarra player, an electric bass guitar player). In fado practice, instrumentalists are almost always male. See Castelo-Branco (2001) for a description of standard instrumentation in fado.

18. Here I describe common poses and gestures for female fadistas particularly while singing melancholy or melodramatic fados. Men of course sing fado too, although they participate in a different iconicity of gesture. Female voices in fado often carry a more excessive, melodramatic charge and symbolically, they carry more of the genre’s weight of lament. Likewise, it is the more sexualized (or explicitly gendered) voices of women that the fado star system privileges both locally and internationally. While tragic or sad fado is sometimes privileged as being “more fado” (i.e., more authentic), there are lively and humorous fados. These often are accompanied by different types of bodily movement and gestures. The closing of the eyes and the tilting back of the head are commonly employed by both male and female singers, particularly while expressing powerful emotion.

19.“Lagrima” (“Tear”) is the name of a popular fado song (fado canção) that was part of the repertoire of Amália Rodrigues (lyrics by Amália Rodrigues, music by Carlos Gonçalves).

20.A restaurant, outside of the old city center (since destroyed and relocated) which was renowned for its Saturday night fado sessions.

21. It is customary for fado to be performed at night and in semidarkness (often just with candlelight or with the electric lights dimmed). O Jaime is one of just a few places in Lisbon that I attended which held fado during the afternoon. By holding sessions during weekend afternoons, they were able to hire the instrumentalists for a lower price and also to ensure the greatest attendance of fadistas.

22.A guitarrada is an instrumental piece usually virtuosic in nature and sometimes com-posed of a medley of music from various fados.

23.The order in which people sing follows strict guidelines. The general rule in the amateur venues I observed is that the presenter of the fado session (in this case Jaime) writes down the names of singers in order of arrival and that fadistas are called to sing in this order.

24. Lyrics by Silva Tavares and music by Frederico Valério.25. Popular classifications within the genre of fado break types of fado broadly into two

categories (although these categories are debated): (1) fado tradicional (traditional fado);


traditional fados, strophic in form, of which there are over four hundred (Osório 2005), follow a set harmonic and poetic structure and can be set to multiple texts; (2) fado canção (fado song) which has its origin in the theatrical reviews (revistas) of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century and often have a refrain (see also Castelo-Branco 1994, 2001).

26.Audience participation in terms of singing refrains and the voicing of exclamations is often discouraged or considered in bad taste in elite professional venues.

27. I acknowledge musicologist Rui Vieira Nery for being the first to call my attention to Amália Rodrigues’ role in popularizing melismatic vocal ornamentation in fado performance (p.c. November 2001). Nery discusses the influence of a tradition of melismatic improvisation characteristic of the Beira Baixa region of Portugal on her vocal style (p.c. 10 November 2006); while Amália Rodrigues was born in Lisbon, her parents were originally from the Beira Baixa.

28. See Shannon 2003 for a discussion of emotionality and sociality in relation to the concept of tarab in contemporary Arab classical music in Syria as it simultaneously relates to practices of listening, performing, and the shaping of aesthetic judgment.

29.Tear as icon is manifested in different form on guitarras from the city of Coimbra. Co-imbra guitarras, have a carving of a tear at the top of the neck of the instrument, have a larger resonating chamber than Lisbon guitarras and are tuned one half step lower. Coimbra guitarras are sometimes used by Lisbon guitarristas for the accompaniment of Lisbon fado.

30. Urban (1991) details commonly understood characteristics of what he terms “icons of crying” (i.e., cry break, voiced inhalation, creaky voice and falsetto vowel).

31. Personal communication, José Manuel Osório, 15 August 2005. The authorship of this phrase can most likely be attributed to Avelino de Sousa (1880–1946) (p.c. Osório, 9 June 2006).

32. Lyrics by L.Vilar and music by J. Pimentel.33. Lyrics by Manuel Calado Tomé, translation mine, written permission granted by the

author for reproduction in print. While it is standard in traditional fado for the same fados (in terms of basic melodic/harmonic patterns) to be set to an infinite number of poems, it is less common in fado canção. The above however is an example of a well known “fado song” set to new lyrics.

34. Monumental was an old Lisbon theater destroyed to build a shopping mall with the same name.

35. Saldanha is the name of a shopping mall that is close to a monument of the Duke of Saldanha (a 19th century Portuguese military man and statesman) in Lisbon’s Praça Duque de Saldanha. The shopping mall Saldanha is adjacent to Monumental (mentioned above).

36.“Hortas” in the context of these lyrics refer to outdoor gardens where fado was often performed. This is no longer common practice.

37.The Parque Mayer is a celebrated early 20th century center for vaudeville theater in Lisbon; in 2003 it was in the process of being restored with a casino added. As of 2006, this restoration is far from complete.

38. Cacilhas is a town across the river from Lisbon.39. O Parque das Nações (The Park of Nations) is the name of the 1998 Lisbon world

exposition site.40. Brados and pregões are traditional street cries (between speech and song) that in

the past were used by street vendors in Lisbon. They are often referenced as an expression of nostalgia in fados; some fados contain examples of old street cries.

41. Maria José Melo. Recorded interview. Lisbon, Portugal, 17 January 2003.42. Don Afonso Henriques was the first king of Portugal.43.“Antes de ser pensada, a saudade foi cantada e é filha e prisioneira do lirismo que

primeiro lhe deu voz.”44. Manuel Calado Tomé and Edite B. de Medeiros Tomé. Recorded interview. Povoa, Portugal,

30 May 2003.45. Nora differentiates between lieux de memoire (sites of memorialization) and mileux

de memoire (or bodily environments of memory). Yet Nora’s classifications regulate mileux


or environments of memory to a nostalgic pre-modern thus re-inscribing an idea of body (and orality) as primitive; that is not my intention here.

46. Portugal joined the European Union in 1986.47. I use “black” and “white” in this narrative not to reify racial categories but rather to call

attention to the ways in which these categories were commonly deployed by multiple actors within the context of my field research (see Gray 2005).

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Memories of Empire, Mythologies of the Soul: Fado Performance and the Shaping of Saudade

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