Review

Reviewed Work(s): Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life by Lila Ellen
Gray
Review by: Loren Chuse
Source: Ethnomusicology , Vol. 61, No. 2 (Summer 2017), pp. 333-336
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.61.2.0333

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Vol. 61, No. 2 Ethnomusicology Summer 2017

Book Reviews

Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life. Lila Ellen Gray. 2013.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 328 pp., photographs, figures, musical
transcriptions, references. Cloth, $89.95; paper, $24.95.
Lila Ellen Gray’s engaging and vivid study of fado performance fills a void
in the scholarly work on Portuguese fado. Few English-language ethnographic
studies of fado have been done, so her recent work stands out as an especially
valuable and important contribution to the literature. It is further distinguished
by the depth of its analysis of the historical and social contexts of fado perfor-
mance. Based on her 2005 doctoral dissertation at Duke University, Gray’s work
is an anthropologically based study of the social life of the sung poetic genre of
fado. Gray’s ideas are presented in an immediate style that is rich in personal
vignettes and ethnographic data. Her work foregrounds knowledge embedded
and transmitted in the performing body and in musical sound, knowledge that
engages habits of memory along with improvisation. Fado Resounding will be
of interest to scholars across disciplines and musical genres, as it relates sound,
listening, and vocality to social life; aesthetic forms and genre to affect; music
to language; and performance to politics, memory, history, and a sense of place.
Gray did her field research among fado singers, instrumentalists, and cul-
tural brokers in the city of Lisbon from 2001 to 2003, spanning diverse and
overlapping sites and social worlds from professional fado performance venues
to small amateur bars, recording studios, museums, and archives. The author
portrays senses of place and history through investigating the affective labors
of musical forms and the intertwining of musical genre and emotion, keeping
in view Portugal’s position on Europe’s farthest southwestern border.
The author’s work is premised on a dynamic mode of genre and offers
social analysis through the prism of musical genre. Citing the work of Mikhail
Bakhtin (1986), Gray argues for genre as sociohistorically contingent and against
a notion of genre as formally fixed. She further asserts the power of genre in
rendering communicative and affective the implicit narratives that shape an

© 2017 by the Society for Ethnomusicology

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334 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2017

individual’s sense of self and place in the world. Fado style and talk engage with
a re-presentation of genre that is hybrid, gendered, and raced.
Gray takes the charged polemic about fado’s origins as one point of departure
for theorizing relationships between musical ideas and the shaping of ideas about
history, belonging, and locality. She posits an “anthropology of the senses” and
asks how musical experience might accumulate history in ways different from
other expressive forms, and she examines the relationship between sound, listen-
ing, and vocality to social life and a sense of belonging and place (4–6). Query-
ing how we make emotional sense of sound, the author presents a framework
of fado sound as shaped both socially and physiologically in her discussion of
musical significations that are at once as sensuous and embodied as they are felt
and heard. She draws on approaches to musical signification in sociolinguistic
anthropology that argue for music and language as coconstitutive domains of
meaning (Feld and Fox 1994).
Fado developed in Lisbon in the early 1880s as a sung poetic gesture voiced
from the city’s socioeconomic margins with original narratives linked to prostitu-
tion, criminality, and colonial expansion. Later embraced by the upper classes,
fado rose to the status of national symbol and played a role during the Estado
Novo, the Salazar dictatorship in power from 1924 to 1976, in sanitized versions
developed through censorship and professionalization. Themes that emerge
in Gray’s examination of this trajectory have parallels in a number of popular
contemporary genres.
Saudade, the evoking of memory and history, is one of fado’s most pervasive
tropes. Gray analyzes how saudade is achieved through vocal and instrumental
stylings, as well as through choice of lyrics, which are of primary importance in
fado. Gray chose to focus on performance practice in amateur venues, which
offered abundant opportunity to observe performers and audiences whose ways
of listening shape the learning of style and meaning. One neighborhood venue,
O Jaime, provides a place of dense sociality centered on music making and listen-
ing, a place that functions implicitly as a “school for performance,” according to
Gray (30). She describes in detail the performances, the singers, the audience’s
reactions and participation, and the physical and emotional space of the Sat-
urday afternoon fado sessions. Vocal qualities associated with shifts in register,
dynamics heightened by use of rubato, and extended melismatic ornamentation
all signal moments of heightened emotion, as does the affectively charged use
of silence. Fadistas (fado singers) also express emotion with downward glis-
sandi and with lyrics that speak of tears. These tears index, according to Gray,
both a private emotional and an aesthetic experience and a moment of shared
sociability.
How fado is learned and the discourse that surrounds learning, what Gray
calls “the pedagogies of the soulful in sound,” are central to her arguments about

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 Book Reviews 335

saudade and about the social construction of genre. She describes in detail her
own experience of singing lessons, a process that involved learning lyrics, styl-
ings, and arrangements from recordings. She also notes the intergenerational
participation, the encouragement of children to imitate the affect, and the pos-
tures and vocal stylings of adults. One of the primary tropes she encountered
in her research was a nostalgia for the past, the idea especially among older
singers that older fado was more “soulful.” The majority of fadistas she encoun-
tered expressed antagonism toward the recently created institutions focused on
teaching and learning fado. One frequent trope is that one does not learn to be
a fadista; rather, one is born a fadista, it is in the blood. Yet in contrast to this
prevailing trope, Gray stresses the extent to which emerging fadistas, herself
included, are encouraged to learn from recordings. The discourse on ways of
learning and responses to the institutionalism of learning echoes a number of
genres, such as flamenco and rebetiko, in which highly charged discourses sur-
rounding issues of authenticity and “purity” are frequent.
Turning to gender politics associated with this genre, Gray notes how men
and women move differently through fado worlds. These routes tend to dictate
the boundaries of possibility in terms of how one performs and is received. She
situates her analysis within constructs of deeply gendered forms of knowledge
and ideologies of gendered affect that characterize fado. In contrast to male
musicians who frame fado as the instrumentalists, theorists, and poets of the
genre, female fadistas are rendered symbolically as suffering, tearful, and sacri-
ficial while conversely as overly sexualized in tropes of the femme fatale. Gray’s
insights, drawing on Lauren Berlant’s (2008) examination of sentimentality asso-
ciated with the female, will be of broad interest to scholars on music and gender.
Gray’s chapter on the life and work of a famous fado diva, the late Amalia
Rodrigues, emphasizes the extraordinary power of the voice of a celebrity for
shaping not only the genre but also public feeling. Gray analyzes the poet-
ics of public biography and fan discourse in her discussion of the enormous
importance of Amalia to the shaping of fado as genre. She examines the dia-
lectics between the genre of celebrity and fado as genre and goes on to theorize
more generally about audiences and the commercial mediation of genre and
of singing musical superstars. Gray outlines Rodrigues’s role in standardizing
the commercial forms of fado and becoming the “voice of the national patri-
mony” (183). Rodrigues, who is described as having a “throat of silver,” became
a larger-than-life iconic representation of fado and of Portugal both nationally
and internationally.
Overall, Fado Resounding provides an evocative and detailed ethnographic
portrait of a contemporary musical genre as it exists within its socially and his-
torically constructed context. It is a fascinating study, well grounded in gender
and performance theory, that makes a valuable contribution to the field.

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336 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2017

References
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1986. “The Problem of Speech Genres.” In Speech, Genre and Other Late Essays,
edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 60–102. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Berlant, Lauren. 2008. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American
Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Feld, Steven, and Aaron A. Fox. 1994. “Music and Language.” Annual Review of Anthropology
23:25–53.

Loren Chuse Independent Scholar

Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration. Adriana N. Helbig.
2014. Ethnomusicology Multimedia Series. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press. xix, 233 pp., photographs, notes, bibliography, index, guide
to online media examples. Cloth, $70.00; paper, $28.00; e-book, $21.99.
In Hip Hop Ukraine, Adriana Helbig argues that local uses of hip hop enable
changing perceptions of the continuous migration of students from the Afri-
can continent. While she focuses on Ukraine and, by extension, postsocialist
Eastern Europe, Helbig offers a conceptualization of practitioners’ emotional,
philosophical, and musical connections to US hip hop useful to scholars wher-
ever sweeping economic change is lived through race and racialization. Over
the book’s final three chapters, in particular, she shows that both African and
non-African Ukrainian practitioners make analogies between various kinds of
difference, using the indelible linking of hip hop with otherness as a framework
for their own negotiations of racial, ethnic, linguistic, and economic conflict.
For those who recognize their own homes in US hip hop videos’ tropes of
inner-city poverty, neglect, and decay, racialized images and the sounds that
accompany them become a way to simultaneously draw attention to rising eco-
nomic inequality and to assert one’s cultural capital, regardless of income (123).
In order to do the latter, Ukrainian hip hop artists and listeners encode their
interpretations of African American hip hop onto African bodies: “At hip hop
dance parties . . . , a person of African heritage—almost always male—is typi-
cally invited to dance on stage. . . . His dancing validates the skills of the DJ but
concurrently places the black body on display” (134). Helbig’s (2005) dissertation,
on a leading Roma rights NGO in Ukraine and the pervasive depiction of Roma
as naturally talented musicians, positions her well to discuss self-essentializing
strategies deployed by marginalized individuals and groups. In the book’s most
nuanced and compelling analyses, African musicians use the racializations within
which they are inscribed to argue for their own acceptance as “new Ukrainians,”
even as their very ability to integrate is widely questioned (155).

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