Biography
Born in 1989, in Trento, Italy, Andrea Musio took his degrees in oboe, at Conservatory of Trento, in Philosophy at Universitá degli Studi di Torino and is master in Ethnomusicology at Universidade Nova of Lisbon with a dissertation focused on cultural production and the moral staging among the broadcasting system of the two last decades of «Estado Novo» and the italian «light song» produced at the beginning by the Festival of Sanremo. He is a PhD student in Ethnomusicology in the Department of Musical Sciences of the FCSH/NOVA with a research proposal dedicated to the study of Pimba music and its relationship with emigrants communities, the popular parties and the music system in Portugal and Europe. His fields of interest are also cultural and performance studies, popular music and nationalism, mobility and migration, among others. He is also a musician and a poli-instrumentalist, who plays in different bands and projects in Portugal and Italy, and is an active songwriter.
Doctoral Project
Title
An Arraial without Pimba is like a Bifana without Mustard: Expressive Representation, Intimacy and Parody in Pimba Music in Portugal in the 21st Century.
Advisor
Abstract
I propose an ethnomusicological interpretation of Portuguese pimba music in its relationship with the music industry and the population, in relation to forms of entertainment for popular classes, focusing on the dynamics of leisure and parody in contexts of urban and rural parties and in commercial media. Analyze challenges in the connections between cosmopolitan contemporary musical innovations and trends and domestic and “traditional” forms of spaces of sociability and particular cultural identity. The social relevance of pimba depends on its economic and media importance, inserting itself into the Portuguese national story as a form of multiple – and multiform – expressions of the music market through the cultural element. In my research, in addition to investigating clear structural and compositional elements, I confront the pimba style with its centrifugal forces, that is, as a musical expression inserted in the dimension of the popular performative event, revealing interpretative instances related to cultural intimacy, everyday narratives affective, digitalization and industrial promotion logics. Jane Sugarman (2007) and others, analyzed cases of popular music where democracy and the free market challenged the role of elites as judges of culture, something that also stands out in pimba through dualisms that it proposes, consciously or not, such as popular / elite, urban/rural, gender issues, national/cosmopolitanism, memory/nostalgia, irony/parody, among others. The contributions of Popular Music Studies theoretically fertilize the terrain of pimba music in areas of massive distribution to a heterogeneous public, absence of written compositional structures, movement of music as a product of consumption and convenience. The eminently popular components of pimba - the parties, the dance, the lyrics of the songs, the places and contexts of performance, the promotion of artists, etc. - are interpreted within the framework of the music industry and the technical society in which they operate, not just within the “borders” of popular festivals. Urban and rural party spaces are considered in this study as manifestations of power where the public is the protagonist, and their participation is interconnected with programmed schemes of negotiation and staging of intimidation in ephemeral expressive forms of citizenship. The artist pimba, through the intertextual potential of irony and parody, personifies emotions and vehicular memories incorporated into popular everyday life. Entertainment and popular leisure therefore become vehicles for concrete identity experiences in local spaces as well as in urban and international contexts, highlighting the importance of an academic analysis of their functions.
Keywords: pimba music, cultural intimacy, music industry, expressive culture, parody, Popular Music Studies.
Funding: Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, refs. PD/BD/135574/2018 & COVID/BD/152054/2021.
