The sensitive atlantic: music, creativity and sustainability connecting lusophone communities

Abstract

From a political and historical point of view, the cultural relations between interconnected Lusophone communities is a fruitful question for ethnomusicology and for the understanding of contemporary musical practices in different contexts such as Portugal, and the Atlantic archipelagos, or Brazil. That is why the circulation of musical instruments and practices within these communities has been a very rich field for understanding cultural processes that took place in the past and are still significant from the point of view of cultural contacts and social memory. In these Lusophone contexts, the phenomena of creation, enjoyment and work related to music are marked by the sharing of widespread repertoires and musical instruments and provided the construction of what can be called “sensitive, singular and autonomous universes”, which define different ways of “seeing the world”. The sustainability of these universes is fed by processes of reactivation of memory through dialogue and musical creativity involving the instruments and their movements. The chordophones are a very important issue in this perspective, partly because of their easy mobility, but also by the implications of their “social life” (Bates 2012). The four works proposed in this panel are the result of a multidisciplinary research project with an ethnomusicological framework. It intends to understand, in different cases, the role of instruments, luthiers and musical practices in the construction of symbolic and sensitive relationships, between communities in Portugal, Brazil and the archipelagos of Madeira, Azores and Cape Verde.