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Fado, often described as 'urban folk music', emerged from the streets of Lisbon in the mid-nineteenth century and went on to become Portugal's 'national' music during the twentieth. It is known for its strong emphasis on loss, memory and nostalgia within its song texts, which often refer to absent people and places. One of the main lyrical themes of fado is the city itself. Fado music has played a significant role in the interlacing of mythology, history, memory and regionalism in Portugal in the second half of the twentieth century. Richard Elliott considers the ways in which fado songs bear witness to the city of Lisbon, in relation to the construction and maintenance of the local. Elliott explores the ways in which fado acts as a cultural product reaffirming local identity via recourse to social memory and an imagined community, while also providing a distinctive cultural export for the dissemination of a 'remembered Portugal' on the global stage.
Fado, Portugal's most celebrated genre of popular music, can be heard in Lisbon clubs, concert halls, tourist sites, and neighborhood bars. Fado sounds traverse the globe, on internationally marketed recordings, as the "soul" of Lisbon. A fadista might sing until her throat hurts, the voice hovering on the break of a sob; in moments of sung beauty listeners sometimes cry. Providing an ethnographic account of Lisbon's fado scene, Lila Ellen Gray draws on research conducted with amateur fado musicians, fadistas, communities of listeners, poets, fans, and cultural brokers during the first decade of the twenty-first century. She demonstrates the power of music to transform history and place into feeling in a rapidly modernizing nation on Europe's periphery, a country no longer a dictatorship or an imperial power. Gray emphasizes the power of the genre to absorb sounds, memories, histories, and styles and transform them into new narratives of meaning and "soul."
A compelling account of the role of Fado and the fadista in Portuguese film and the wider culture.
Based upon a decade of research in four countries, and including unpublished data, this book traces the history and explains the meanings of this enigmatic and often misunderstood music.
This text exposes how Fado lyricists have appropriated popular novelist and playwright Julio Dantas' forging of Mouraria fadista/prostitute Maria Severa as a national heroine, and the Fado as Portugal's national song to manifest a sub-rosa criticism of the Estado Novo's demolition of the Mouraria between the 1930s and 1970s.
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A young singer, Luisa, arrives home to her apartment in Surrey, BC, to find her mother, Rosida, collapsed on the floor, weeping, because the greatest fado singer of all time, Amalia Rodrigues, has died. Luisa realizes she doesn't know how to sing a single Portuguese song, because she and her mother moved outside the community after the death of Luisa's dad. Luisa embarks on a multicultural journey back to Lisbon to reclaim her heritage by learning how to sing fado and retrieve her own true song.