Events
GIEEMP Seminar | Songbooks in Goa: Cultural representations from colonial to digital
PERMANENT SEMINAR OF THE RESEARCH GROUP ON ETHNOMUSICOLOGY AND STUDIES IN POPULAR MUSIC
2023-11-08 | 2.30 p.m. | NOVA FCSH, Colégio Almada Negreiros, Campolide (Lisboa) | Room 208 - Floor 2
Free entrance, both online and in presence.
Zoom Room
Meeting ID: 999 0083 0323
Pass code: 482082
Songbooks in Goa: Cultural representations from colonial to digital
Eduardo Falcão | INET-md
In this seminar, I will present my Ph.D. thesis, which had as its starting point the manuscripts on musical practices compiled by the Goan Agapito de Miranda (1911-1995). How can we use these manuscripts as a historical source for ethnomusicology? This work aims to provide elements for a historical contextualization of this songbook. With the aim of “returning to the ethnomusicological past” (Bohlman, 2008) the investigation was developed in a dialogue between an analysis of the manuscripts and intermittent fieldwork carried out over 2 years in Goa. In a multilingual and multicultural context, I used the concept of concurrences (Gunlog Für, 2017) as a methodological tool attentive to the various layers of meaning, the concomitant perspectives and the constant recreation of borders that characterize the narratives of musical practices in Goa.
Born in 1911 in the then-Portuguese State of India, Agapito de Miranda compiled approximately 1400 songs in more than 5000 folios associated mainly with the Mando and Dulpod performative genres. His life path was divided in 1961 with the military annexation of Goa by the newly independent Indian Union. This historical process transformed Goa's political identity from the capital of the Portuguese empire in Asia to an Indian Union Territory and, then in 1987, to India’s smallest state. The ongoing work carried out by Agapito, written in Portuguese, began before 1961 but remained unpublished. With the end of the Portuguese empire, state archives were lost, deliberately destroyed or remained inaccessible; and power relations, as well as the positions that the different groups occupied there, changed abruptly.
It is in this context of separation from Portugal, integration into India and the search forautonomy in Goa that Agapito de Miranda's work fits. In the period following 1961, concurrent imaginaries about musical practices, due to the multidirectional nature of memory (Rothberg, 2013), were negotiated through the construction of canons and the writing of historical narratives. Having said that, this work reflects on the histories of representations of musical practices and on the way in which we can summon and understand the multiple identities that shape the plural reality of Goa.
Eduardo Falcão | Has a master in History and Heritage at Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto (FLUP) and a degree in History from Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) in São Paulo, Brazil. He has an associate degree in classical guitar at Escola de Música do Estado de São Paulo (EMESP). His research interests include musical practices and postcolonialism; the invention and representation of tradition. He is particularly interested in exploring the interstices between music, history and the colonial difference. He has worked in UNESCO General History of Africa (Portuguese edition) published in 2010.
