By Isabel de Lucena , Andrew Cronshaw. Portugal is best known as the home of fado, the passionate and elegant music of Lisbon and Coimbra. Portugal is best known as the home of fado , the passionate and elegant music of Lisbon and Coimbra. However, in its regions, a rich variety of traditional styles and instruments are still to be encountered, at family or civic celebrations or in concert performance. As the country moves away from that turning point, alongside the development of Portuguese variants of global pop, rock, rap, electronic dance music and jazz, there has been a recent upsurge in the popularity of Lisbon fado.
Isabel de Lucena and Andrew Cronshaw share out the custard tartlets between themselvesβ¦. Neither the bagpipes found there gaita-de-foles nor the older of the traditional unaccompanied singers are enslaved by the mathematical equal-temperament scale of equal semitones which, largely because of the needs of Western classical harmony, has come to dominate the musics of the world. Such dances are typically played by a gaita accompanied by a bombo bass drum and caixa snare drum , or alternatively by a solo musician tamborileiro playing a three-hole whistle flauta pastoril with one hand and a small snare drum tamboril with the other.
Portuguese tradition is rich with songs for all aspects of day-to-day, festive and ritual life, and some draw on the oral ballad repertoire that was once widespread across Europe with stories dating back to the Middle Ages. Iberia has its own specific group of ballads, the Romanceiro , which were sung in the royal courts from the fifteenth until the seventeenth century, but continued in use in the fields and villages long after that, and in some cases up to the present day.
A great many songs reflect the cycles of nature β lullabies, and tilling, sowing and harvesting songs. Until the s they remained very much within living tradition, but while some survive, sadly, many now exist only in recordings or in the repertoire of revival and progressive folk bands which, however excellent, inevitably present the songs in a different context.
In the south, particularly Alentejo , there is a tradition of acapella polyphonic vocal groups, a vibrant Mediterranean sound comparable to that of the vocal ensembles of Corsica and Sardinia. As the song moda proceeds, the powerful group vocal alternates with expressive solo verses from the alto and sometimes the ponto. Essentially, this is spontaneous rather than chorally directed music-making, but there exist named performing ensembles, and it is these that are featured on most of the available recordings.
