For the 1st edition of the Évora Contemporary Music Festival, I was comissioned by Projecto DME and Câmara Municipal de Évora to create a fixed media piece that would somewhat touch upon traditional music practices from my home region, Alentejo. I sought to analyse and reflect upon my relationship towards these traditional music practices. Despite having been born in a region with a rich and internationally recognized singing and playing tradition - particularly Cante Alentejano -, it's difficult not to feel detached from it due to the lack of its presence in my musical (and cultural) education. I haven't interacted with these traditions in a meaningful manner, thus making me feel like they are akin to a cloud of mist: constantly surrounding me but impossible to touch.

To kickstart the project, I had a conversation with musician Tó Zé Bexiga, who plays the traditional instrument Viola Campaniça. We spoke about our relationship to traditional music, what it meant to transpose traditional practices into contemporary music-making, and, most importantly perhaps, how traditional music is preserved in the Portuguese context - done especially through the Federação do Folclore Português. While these entities aim to preserve traditional practices, they also obligate traditions to crystallize in time by labelling a certain traditional practice as "right", "wrong" or "accurate" - the people, to whom these practices should belong, loose authority over them. It stagnates.

The core material for this piece are recordings of my grandmother Mariana singing traditional songs. She remembers singing these while working on the wheat fields or farmland. She started working when she was around 8. The percussion instruments seen in this piece are played in traditional music. I made the effort to borrow them from cultural institutions based in Évora which focus their work on the local community and incentivise traditional music practices. They were Do Imaginário and Associação Pé de Xumbo. The bell is not used in traditional music but it's a “hard to miss” sound while driving through my region as cows and sheep have one hanging around their necks. The tablecloths and curtains hanging during the performance were sown by hand by my grandmothers Mariana and Catarina. It was usual for new mothers to start sewing these when their child was born. They were then gifted to them when they got married and moved to a new house with their partner.

Read here a review by Ismael G. Cabral (in Spanish).

This piece was premiered at the Évora Contemporary Music Festival 2021 at Universidade de Música de Évora, Évora. Photo by Mike The Axe.