Fado Performance And The Shape Of Saudad Analysis

How does this music make you feel? What do you think of the music being played? What is your mind telling you? What is your heart telling you? These questions are some of the most frequently asked questions in not only the music world, but also in the world itself. Such questions categorize your emotions, identity, and aesthetics into two categories: how you mentally and emotionally interact towards one thing or the other. Such inquiries demonstrate the separate complexities of the mind and the heart, but very rarely put the two together. However, in Lila Ellen Gray’s article Memories of Empire, Mythologies of the Soul: Fado Performance and the Shaping of Saudade, she challenges this idea as she describes both the mind and the soul of the Portuguese people becoming collective unit within their music. By describing the history of fado and the development …show more content…
Through their participation in the performance of fado, they build a social relationship and sense of being through their music. Gray further gives evidence to the Portuguese soul by quoting Fadista Olga de Sousa who stated, “We are born into the fado. Fado is the state of the soul...fado has to be sung with the heart” (Gray 121). As a collective body, the Portuguese find their identities together in their music as they not only profess their own passion for fado, but also as they help others experience the soul of fado as well. By defining the difference between fado amador (amateur fado) and professional fado, giving encouragement and advice to performers, supporting struggling fadistas by joining in on the chorus, and by allowing new forms of imagery and style within fado, they enable others to enter into the true soul of Portugal; the soul of fado (110). Therefore, the Portuguese identity has dual significance in both its intellectual and soulful