The global series Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture from Oxford University Press illuminates various national music domains through socio-cultural descriptions, listening examples and eyewitness accounts of musicians as they craft melody, harmony and rhythm across time and space. Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco and Susana Moreno Fernández's depth of experience and personal connections to Portuguese and Spanish traditions electrify the series with granularity and verve.
The book presents musical expressions of the Iberian peninsula comprehensively, not only through prose that highlights cross-cultural understandings, but also via vignettes of brilliant fieldwork and rich explorations of sound. Music in Portugal and Spain augments the series by providing readers with five capacious chapters on the history, geopolitics, form and performance of Iberian music, with spotlights on fado and flamenco. For instance, Castelo-Branco paints a critical visual and aural picture of fado, explaining how it shape-shifts in Lisbon, becoming alternately the place's soul and the embodiment of nostalgia and religiosity. When the chapter pivots to fado's historical development across the 19th and 20th centuries, readers already have a nuanced grasp of the sounds and politics at stake.
In the Activity sections, Castelo-Branco and Moreno Fernández pair contextual descriptions with aural explanations and exercises. For example, in observations about the rondalla, the instrumental and vocal ensemble that accompanies the jota, a Spanish music and dance genre, Moreno Fernández explains how the instruments and chords, musical phrases and scales situate the jota musically and contextually. Relatedly, when presenting the fado song ‘Gaivota’, Castelo-Branco balances lessons about music vocabulary with cultural history. As readers learn about ‘Gaivota’, they can apply their burgeoning knowledge of rubato, appoggiaturas, mordents, vibrato, portamento and melismas to various structures, contexts and histories of fado castiço (‘traditional fado’) and fado-canção (‘song-fado’). Helpfully, the authors provide didactic close-ups of the music without presupposing the readers know the bread-and-butter basics of music theory. Just as Castelo-Branco tacks between the micro and the macro in ethnographic vignettes, histories and analyses about fado, Moreno Fernández employs a similar approach vis-à-vis flamenco. Through her lively description of a peña – a flamenco club frequented by guitarists (tocaores), hand-clappers (palmeros), singers (cantaores), and aficionados who participate in singing (cante), dancing (baile) and instrumental performance (toque) – readers grasp how the environment fosters creativity, inscribes local identity and embodies long-lasting emotions. A detailed discussion of key flamenco musicians (20th and 21st centuries) offers a trail of playlists for budding enthusiasts. Elsewhere, Castelo-Branco and Moreno Fernández explore how marches performed by amateur wind bands during Holy Week – a multi-day event commemorating the passion, death and resurrection of Christ – engage thematically with socialisation, Catholic religiosity and politics in Portugal and Spain.
In addition to taking a wide angle and a long view of the unique music genres in Spain and Portugal, the authors embrace a comparative approach by exploring peninsula-spanning music. For example, Castelo-Branco and Moreno Fernández examine the romance (ballad), a poetic narrative genre cultivated in Spain during the Middle Ages before being disseminated to Portugal and beyond, and its fellowship with broader socio-cultural mechanisms. Readers trace the symmetries of poetic structure, form, melody, rhythm and historical development in the romance across temporal and geographic expanses by learning about specific pieces, such as ‘Gerineldo: el paje y la infantina’ (Spanish)/‘Gerinaldo’ (Portuguese). Additionally, the authors investigate the Arab world's influences on Iberian traditions, prompting readers to appreciate music as a locus where cross-cultural influences fuse.
Engagingly, the authors outline how the Iberian peninsula has experienced similar intersections of political instability, economic turmoil and governmental cultural policy throughout the 20th century. Moreno Fernández shows, for example, how the Franco regime in Spain propagated a nationalist ideology through staged performances of rural song and dance by folkloric groups (grupos folclóricos). Specifically, the authoritarian regime designated urban popular culture, such as the zarzuela, flamenco and copla andaluza, as conduits for ideological and social scripts. Similarly, Castelo-Branco illustrates how folklore groups, or ranchos/grupos folclóricos, during Salazar's nationalist regime in Portugal performed rural dance genres meant to symbolise a parish, a municipality or a region. In one case study, Castelo-Branco highlights the regime's mission to harness cante, a choral movement that emerged in the 1930s, to trumpet a patriotism suffused with Catholicism, rurality and collective memory. While genres such as folklorised versions of rural music and urban expressions (flamenco and fado) flourished under its yoke, the regime approached jazz and rock tepidly, fearing that they espoused anti-nationalist values. Unsurprisingly, from 1950 onward, waves of resistance and protest confronted the regime's machinations. Broadly speaking, from regional oppositional movements such as the Catalan New Song (Nova Cançó) in Spain and Coimbra's song (canção de Coimbra) in Portugal to the revivalist groups of traditional music that coalesced during democratic activism in the 1970s, the authors reveal the unstinting actions of musicians to imbue music with freedom of speech and equality. Interestingly, cante experienced a metamorphosis once democracy was established in 1974 and joined UNESCO's Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2014. In cante's revival, practitioners champion themselves as stewards of a collective craft electrified by artistry, camaraderie, pride and regional identity.
Particularly illustrative is the authors’ thoughtful approach to showcasing a shared Iberian connectedness among citizens, while also limning the ways in which people have embraced regional and national identities. For instance, Portuguese citizens typically conceive ‘the nation’ as a homogeneous, unified collective of people. This perspective has been largely uncontested except for periodic attempts since the last quarter of the 19th century at pluralising the Portuguese identity. At that point, sundry decision-makers underscored regional differences in lifestyle, taste and socio-economic realities to steer perspectives of Portugal toward plurality. More markedly, while Spain experienced nationalist movements, starting in the late 19th century, regionalist movements, or ‘peripheral nationalisms,’ exerted an outsize influence in citizens’ lives. Three noteworthy regions – Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia – launched movements of regional differentiation, framing certain socio-linguistic and musico-political factors as fillips for intraregional belonging. These sentiments resonated in music, leading to one-to-one linkages between particular musico-kinetic genres and specific geographic regions. For example, the sardana, a rural circle dance, has symbolised the spirit of Catalonia since the 19th century. Interestingly, as regional music coalesced, Spain and Portugal witnessed concurrent movements to forge ‘national music’ in art music and musical theatre that incorporated vernacular music and popular song styles. Civic wind bands, choral societies and chamber music groups popularised regional and national genres alike. This book establishes a compelling precedent for analysing the crisscrossing lines of homogeneity and heterogeneity that musicians create throughout the Iberian peninsula.
While the book provides a refreshing overview of music animating the Iberian peninsula, its concise narrative, probably owing to the publisher's word count limit, leaves readers wishing for more detail. Specifically, the text could have benefited from an integrative concluding chapter, but its merits outweigh reservations. This book warrants sincere praise because it comparatively explores how Portuguese and Spanish musical assemblages – from wind bands (bandas de música/bandas filarmónicas) and bagpipes (gaitas/gaitas-de-fole) to revival movements and protest songs – articulate with national and regional identities, ritualised events and globalisation to transform the course of human events. The Iberian peninsula is awash in sonic brilliance and Music in Portugal and Spain propels readers to marvel at and share knowledge about the people who participate in making this music meaningful.
