News
Note of grief | Arnaldo Trindade (1934-2024)
It is with great grief that the Institute of Ethnomusicology – Center for Studies in Music and Dance (INET-md), and specially the team of Orfeu (1956-1983) project, receives the news of the death of record producer, businessman and poet Arnaldo Trindade (21/09/1934-08/01/2024).
A central figure in the history of popular music in Portugal in the 20th century, Arnaldo Trindade was the founder of the Orfeu record label in Porto, through which he recorded and distributed a significant part of the popular music produced in Portugal in the 20th century.
The activity of recording and publishing records, which began in the late 1950s, played a central role in transforming the way the country listened to music during the complex historical, political and social changes that characterized that century in Portugal.
Widely familiar with the international capitalist production system, out of tune with Portugal's economic and industrial development during the dictatorship, Arnaldo Trindade combined forms of production from the international record industry with avant-garde artistic projects. The poetry albums he called "Antologia da Poesia Portuguesa" challenged the canonical forms of this literary genre, shaping new modes of sensitivity mediated by the voice of poets.
In the same way, the closeness to the avant-garde theater of the city of Porto through the affinities with António Pedro and the artists - actors, poets and visual artists - who gravitated around the Teatro Experimental do Porto, were fundamental vehicles for sound proposals that called for new cultural categories at a time when popular culture in the country was inscribed in crystallized categories and largely staged by an imposing cultural policy. An example of this is the recording by Conjunto António Mafra, which, from the late 1950s onwards, proposed links between popular culture in the media and the universe of traditional expression, with an impact both in Portugal and in the diasporic communities.
However, it was the reception that musicians from Coimbra's academic tradition found at Orfeu, such as (among others) Adriano Correia de Oliveira, Rui Pato, António Portugal and, above all, José Afonso, which shaped the label's historical recognition. This moment of aesthetic and ideological change in Coimbra's music in the 1960s, which turned it into a ground for political and social protest, ensured that the memory of the Orfeu label and Arnaldo Trindade's fundamental role in the sounds that accompanied the democratization of the country, before and after 25 April 1974, survived.
The Orfeu Project, in collaboration and intimacy with Arnaldo Trindade who generously committed himself to its realization, tried to inaugurate ways of reflecting on the articulation between popular culture, the development of consumer society and the transformation of political sensibility in the country between the 50s and 80s of the 20th century. It is therefore with a deep recognition of his role in this transformation, but also a great sense of grief at the loss of a friend, that the Institute of Ethnomusicology pays its heartfelt tribute to Arnaldo Trindade. All forms of reflection on the importance of Orfeu and the uniqueness of its editor will continue, perpetuating the "Orfeu spirit", as he aspired to do.
Leonor Losa,
on behalf of the Orfeu Project
In the photograph on the left, we see Arnaldo Trindade with his friend and music producer for the Orfeu label, Jozé Niza (b. 1938- m. 2011). And in the photograph on the right, we see Arnaldo Trindade with José Afonso at Convenção do Disco, Ofir, 1969. Photos available on the Orfeu Project page, here and here.
For more information on the Orfeu Project, kindly acess its webpage here.
