Fado Resounding

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."

"Fado Resounding is an impressive and engaging book, one that will expand understanding of fado beyond Portugal. Lila Ellen Gray takes up a wide range of topics, discussing fado in relation to emotion, historical mythologies, gender, and the idea of 'soulfulness,' as well as Lisbon, national identity, and world music. This is a stimulating contribution to the anthropology of expressive cultural forms."—João Leal, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, "Lila Ellen Gray positions Lisbon's amateur fado scene in terms of all the contestation about what fado is and where the action is taking place. This positioning is a unique and valuable contribution to music ethnography, and Gray does major and convincing intellectual work arguing for 'amateur' scenes as paths into the deepest musical and ethnographic understandings of genre, style, performance, poesis, and the ways that sociality is lived and experienced through sound."—Steven Feld, author of Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana, "Lila Ellen Gray’s Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life has the feel of a magnum opus. Ambitious in its breadth, it is clear from the get-go that this study is no small undertaking. Indeed, this is the first full-length ethnography of Portuguese fado published in English.... Lila Ellen Gray’s many years of good, old-fashioned fieldwork... has produced a highly nuanced, original contribution to knowledge around Portugal’s legendary 'national song.'", "Fado Resounding is a powerful ethnographic account in which Lila Ellen Gray argues compellingly that the musical genre of fado performs invaluable labors in locating, synthesizing and activating modes of experience, expression and interaction....[The book] weaves together incredibly vivid ethnographic accounts with incisive analyses that will be of great use to scholars working on vocality and gender, as well as constructions and articulations of locality, history and genre.", “In Fado Resounding, Gray makes a compelling response. Her study of fado stands out in making the intangible tangible, finding resonance across time and place, and locating fado’s meaning as genre, as soul, as Lisbon.”

Lila Ellen Gray is Associate Professor of Music at Columbia University.