Author: Raul Azevedo Ramos

1st Program – Fragments of a musical inquiry in Vila Verde de Ficalho (Lower Alentejo – 9th of August 1971

This is the first complete episode I see of any made by Giacometti. Before, I only watched fragments available on Youtube of displaced episodes. Giacometti is seen before the interviewee, asking questions in an inquest format (name, age, homeland, etc.). You can see the whole team of RTP around the place: people from the city, dressed in the latest fashion, while António da Assunção Lopes, the subject under review, and another compadre hanging there, dressed in old, dark and antiquated clothes. We are in Via Verde de Ficalho, land of the Baixo Alentejo (Serpa, Beja).

Still, about the production, we observe situations of social consciousness that, although almost insignificant and insignificant, are, in the eyes of an academic and enthusiast of others that such as the case of Stephen Feld, of great importance. They constitute a symbolic immensity for the whole of production and the entire political-social context of the early 70s. It symbolises the participation of the people in the practical realisation of the freedom of speech (perhaps) so necessary at that time. Antonio’s companion is one of the actors who allows the recording of the subject’s voice. Along with the members of RTP, he will enable the extension of the cable of Nagra IV-s (analogue tape label).

At the same time, I wonder about the editorial intentions of the image and sound assembler: there were some “silences”, the recordings were kept complete, listening to the old-fashioned metal machinery rubbing the earth and itself, frogs, steps… It’s not just the voice. It’s all that sounds. That is, it legitimises the natural environment of that record.

"Moda da Lavoura" (Farming Moda, moda is a way of singing) of Vila Verde de Ficalho, performed by António da Assunção Lopes


Nestes campos solitários
Onde a desgraça me tem,
Brado, ninguém me responde,
Olho, não vejo ninguém.

A vida do almocreve
É uma vida arriscada,
Ao descer uma ladeira,
Ao cerrar uma carrada!

Translation:

In these lonely fields
Where misfortune has me,
I shout, no one answers me,
I look, I see no one.

The life of the almocreve*
It’s a risky life,
Going down a hill,
Close up a bunch!

*almocreve: "Cargo-carrying individual (whether or not on periodic journeys)."(Dicionário, 2022).

2nd Program – Santa Cruz celebration in Aldeia da Venda: Upper Alentejo – August 23, 1971.

“In this atmosphere, as if emerging outside the present time, an orchestra from the neighbourhood attacks, without transition, a pop song: the youth prepares for a country dance, which will last the night away.” (Giacometti, 1971).

This is the same celebration nowadays. Still resisting.

3rd Program – Fragments of an inquiry in Salir: Algarve, 6th of September 1971

Beautiful program! Nothing is more beautiful than seeing the people in improvisation, failure and repetition. It is the genuineness of culture free from folklorisation. In this episode recorded in Salir, a man whose function already refers to hidden times immerses the people in hallucinations told of things never lived and misrepresented experiences. But the freedom of expression is reflected in him. RTP gave him this opportunity, and Giacometti heard it. On the other hand, José de Sousa, who had travelled through the ethnomusicologist lands, failed to play the mischievous travessa flute and lamented its insufficient and worn technique.

However, the relevance centres on recording the tale, which Alfredo, who was in front of Salir’s people sitting on the stairs, understood to roll the tape and record as much as he could. Today, decisions like this are seen as easy. In the 1970s, there was a budget for everything, and indeed, film tape had its limits. Alfredo Tropa, then the visual director of Giacometti’s ethnographic decisions, decided to take this experience to the air and make it tangible for all Portuguese people.

4th Program – A Oração das Almas em São Bento do Ameixial (Translation: The Souls Prayer in São Bento do Ameixial): Upper Alentejo – 20th of November 1972

The ephemerality of traditions. The inability to continue. In the end, Giacometti comments, “It is necessary and urgent that the systematic collection of our regional music is processed between us and by all available means. By losing the physiognomic traits of our musical tradition, we will have consciously obliterated and forever, living portions of a reality that our people express with strength and truth. If this is the case, it is clear that any future analysis of this same reality must necessarily lead to serious shortcomings to the detriment of this truth.” (Giacometti, 1972).

References:

In: Priberam Dicionário. 2022. Almocreve. [online] Priberam. Available at: <https://dicionario.priberam.org/almocreve> [Accessed 12 May 2022].

Giacometti, M., 1971. A Festa da Santa Cruz na Aldeia da Venda. Povo Que Canta. RTP.

Giacometti, M., 1972. A Oração das Almas em São Bento do Ameixial. Povo que Canta. RTP.

Music and Conflict is a book edited by ethnomusicologists John Morgan O’Connell and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo Branco, which describes and analyses many situations where the production and propagation of music were used under conflicting scenarios through various essays written by several scholars.

O’Connell highlights primarily the importance of defining what Conflict is, given that it might have several forms and it can be either positive or negative outcomes. Hence, Conflict can be “viewed negatively, as the logical outcome of economic inequality and social disparity leading inevitably to violent rupture where the status of a dominant elite is called into question (Morgan O’Connell & El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, 2010). It is also evaluated as a nonrational behaviour, following the minimal group theory developed by Henry Tajfel; still, it is also seen as a “rational reaction to power where the state provides a locus for simulating models of group interaction”. 

Conflict can be understood through music when its musical treats are evaluated and put under the perspective of those who create it. For instance, these can be noticed in the music’s structure, systems, materials, practice, contexts, and values. These factors are symbolic, and they are also an analogy. 

Additionally, Music and Conflict questions the work of an ethnomusicologist when it is set to register any situation that portrays the influence of music in Conflict and vice-versa. “As Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco argues in the epilogue, although ethnomusicologists may operate as mediators in conflictual situations, they may also have to become politically engaged if conflict resolution is to be effective.”(Morgan O’Connell & El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, 2010).

Concerning my topic, this book appeared to have discussions capable of bearing fruit on questions related to the methodologies of an ethnomusicologist. How should one position himself in a conflicting situation? What are the limits and complications an ethnomusicologist faces? How could this be useful for analysing Michel Giacometti’s work? How do the case studies reflected in this book relate to the Portuguese Conflict? There is indeed an immediate connection between the popular music that appeared before and after the Carnation Revolution, resembling the names of Zeca Afonso, José Mario Branco, Adriano Correia de Oliveira, among others, who sang and produced protest songs either to overthrow the dictatorship and later to be a cornerstone to socialist political ideologies. However, what about traditional music? Where does it belong? What is the status of these forms of music? These are questions that this book struggle to answer.

Morgan O’Connell, J. and El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, S., 2010. Music and Conflict. 1st ed. University of Illinois Press, pp.1-12.

For More Than One Voice is a book written by Adriana Cavarero, an Italian philosopher with many writings on voice and feminism. Although her speech nature is politically and philosophically focused on the feminist voice, she has also discussed general ideas on the politics of voice, which are essential to the means of my essay.

In this book, Adriana Cavarero discusses the definition of voice and its position on contemporary philosophy, deconstructing ontological schools of thought that have deteriorated its core meaning so far. She begins by quoting the Italian writer Italo Calvino: “A voice means this: there is a living person, throat, chest, feelings, who send into the air this voice, different from all other voices”, and by this, she reflects on the uniqueness that voice has apart from speech. Speech relates to linguistics, the science that studies the human language. However, Cavarero agrees with Paul Zumthor that the prior is far more connected to orality than vocality, “the whole of the activities and values that belong to the voice as such, independently of language”.

With this book, I pretend to evaluate a Giacometti quote.

We shouldn’t criticise the way these people sing because this is the best way they know how to express themselves. I’m also interested in understanding whether such an evaluation would apply to the case study I am working on. My central inquiry is: Does the subject’s voice have a deeper meaning in Giacometti’s recordings? What perspectives can be introduced to help understand the tapes?

In fact, Giacometti’s subjects are not expressing tormenting experiences during the ongoing dictatorship. Instead, they are singing and telling stories at work and recreationally through distinct forms of Portuguese traditional music and customs. Empirically, the people who sing are indeed singing. However, ontologically, and according to Adriana Cavarero, voice “is not at all a thinking that expresses itself out loud, nor is it merely vocalised thought, nor is it an acoustic substitute for think.”(Cavarero, 2005). Additionally, Cavarero also differentiates the act of communicating and speaking, whereas the voice uniqueness is noticed before the intention of transmitting information to another. In this way, Giacometti’s intentions, apart from recording different forms of folk music and locating them in a context of oppression, can be analysed under this new philosophy of voice ontology. 

References:

Cavarero, A., 2005. For More than One Voice. 1st ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp.173-182.

Acosutemology is a term coined in 1980 by Steven Feld, an American anthropologist born in 1949 that aims to understand how the production and listening of som (including music) can be an instrument for knowledge, with relations between humans and non-humans, and those to the environment. The term is a word composed of acoustic and epistemology. It tries to understand the space of sound interaction between animals and humans, which doesn’t limit itself to its physical condition but extends to non-material worlds. It doesn’t restrict itself to understanding the world passively but with the help of those who listen and reproduce sound, exchange experiences, and reflect on their practices and sound perceptions.

Acoustemology is, thus, a tool for comprehending how different beings that cohabit in the same social or geographic space and build their relations, having sound as a form o connection. 

It was with the Kaluli, who belong to the Bosavi people tribe in Papua New Guinea, where Feld entered anthropology with his musical knowledge in 1976, and the result came out in 1982 in the form of a book called Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (1982). By that time, he considered himself an ethnomusicologist. Still, he later realised the term wasn’t adequate to refer to all societies’ sound and music productions because the ethnic creates a space between western people and the non-western. Feld argues that the study of the sound output should embrace musical manifestations and other expressions in a soundscape. So, acoustemology also attenuates the tensions between anthropology and musicology: the first centred on humans, and the second, on the European concept of music. 

Feld projects acoustemology as a mode of understanding sound as part of a process way broader than the relation between beings capable of producing knowledge regarding interactions and trades. Sound comprehension involves material and physical experience because the sound would be any vibration in the air captured by the cells of our ears and transformed into electric impulses sent to the brain. Apart from that, it carries a social dimension, since what we hear and how we do it brings traces of our experiences and society.