Fado

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=15881&date=2017-02-05&pageid=1

Exploring the Fado

“These are the ideas of pseudo-intellectuals. Don’t believe them! They are plain wrong. Fado is Portuguese. Fado was born in Portugal. Fado did not come from Brazil. If it ended up in Brazil, it is because we brought it there. Fado is ours.”  An impassioned response from a workshop tracing the cultural genesis of fado has much to tell us.

The origins of Fado, widely perceived as Portugal’s ‘national song’, have been the subject of over a century of scholarly speculation and surmise. It was not until the late 1980s that scholars turned their attention to fado in a concerted fashion, attempting to dispel the poetic myths which had dominated the discourse in the past.

World Music Festivals are dismantling many myths, along with showcasing music from different parts of the world. Unearthing and presenting the common threads which tie varied musical genres together, these festivals are heavily rooted in research. The studies in Iberian music, the Flamenco, with its roots in rural Arabic, Sephardic and Spanish music has now widened to the Kalbeliya dance of the Manganiyar caste in Rajasthan.

 ‘Sacrality of Fado’ at the Ketevan World Sacred Music Festival (10^th- 19^thFeb, 2017) combines ensemble of Portuguese , North African, Sephardic, Iberian, Indian (Sonia Shirsat) and Arabic musicians . Together they will explore the origins of fado and this broken love story between God and Portugal. “It will explore the roots of fado music, its sorrows, its desire and a certain kind of exile of the idyllic times, lands and spiritual protection that has been broken somehow, sometime. All this emotion, sounds and timbres flood fado music and music of the Iberian peninsula. Fado is the fatigue of the strong soul, his contempt of God in whom he believed and who forsook him,” says Santiago Lusardi Girelli, maestro and artistic director of the festival. “The concert was conceived very much in keeping with the new wave of fado scholarship, paying particular attention to the origins and the way in which older notions have been revised according to Portuguese post-colonial theories of the ‘Brown Atlantic’ and its characteristic triangulation between Portugal, Brazil and Africa,” he adds.

The earliest poetic myth about fado states that it originated in the 1820s in Portugal. The first fado vocalists would have been sailors, the working class heroes who were driven by musical expression to ‘saudade’ – a perpetual longing, a feeling of loss and nostalgia. Sonia Shirsat’s campaign ‘Fado in the City’ last year charted  a panoramic sweep of fado’s evolution on Portuguese soil from its  early nineteenth century dissemination in Lisbon’s poor riverside neighborhoods within circles of sailors, prostitutes, criminals and drifters  to its subsequent adoption (and adaptation) by the middle and upper classes.

Over the years, fado has brought to the limelight a considerable number of poets both erudite and popular and classical and contemporary. The great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessao (1888-1935) wrote, “Fado sings saudades… Fado sung to guitar has the sound of desire...There is a song of the people. We sing fado gravely in an undefined interval. Fado, however, is neither joyous nor sad. It is an episodic interval. It shaped the Portuguese soul when it didn’t exist and it desired everything without having the power to desire it.”

Santiago states that other scholarly forays into the topic have charted a variety of musicological courses for early fado expression. Some scholars made a case for fado’s link to Arabic music. Others link fado to the rural traditions of Portugal. Still others argue that fado evolved from medieval troubadour songs that found their way from Provence to Portugal. In contrast, the most recent wave of publications which deal with fado’s early incarnation agrees on the Afro-Brazilian foundation of fado’s dance form.

 “The two-way cultural traffic, characteristic of the ‘Black Atlantic’, details the evolution of fado, first as dance form in Brazil and later as a sung form in Lisbon. In its earliest appearances in Brazil at the end of the eighteenth century, fado emerged as a fusion of older dances such as the African -derived fofa and lundu and the Iberian fandango,” states a scholarly study from Rutgers University.

The study further explains,”The lundu, a dance so similar that it was perceived by foreign travelers to be interchangeable with the fado, often featured a pair of dancers who approached one another seductively, sometimes pressing abdomens together, in what was called an ‘umbigada’,  before backing away. The alteration between approach and retreat was performed to the sounds of vocal and instrumental music structured into choruses and refrains. Fado distinguished  itself from the lundu by combining the ‘castanholado’ of the fandango with the ‘umbigadas’ of the lundu . . . amplifying the role of the song, substituting the refrains marked by clapping for the sung intermezzo . . . accompanied by the guitar. This vocal ‘intermezzo’ accompanied by guitar constituted the seeds of what would evolve into the sung fado we know today.”

The latest Brazilian music genre, ’Bossa nova’ developed and was popularized in the 1950s and 1960s, is today one of the best-known music genres abroad. The lyrical themes found in Bossa nova include women, love, longing, homesickness and nature. “When fado meets Bossa nova, it blends the romantic lyricism of Portuguese fado with the rich harmonies and rhythms of Brazilian Bossa nova,” says Santiago. The Sacrality of Fado will explore these connections and many more at the Ketevan festival.

Considering the following of fado in Goa, the concert should have much in store for the fadistas  here!