MUSIC, MOBILITY & CITIZENSHIP: NAVIGATION TIPS
MUSIC, MOBILITY & CITIZENSHIP: NAVIGATION TIPS

Summary/Abstract: Questioning mobility of people and music is coming to the forefront of Ethnomusicology, namely from the sphere of music and migration studies. Political implications in approaches to nationalism and related critical assessments (Smith 1986, 1991, 1998, 2002 and Guibernau 2004) are touched in some studies that relate this field of inquiry with those of music and power, political propaganda, identity and protest (Baily & Collyer 2006, Côrte-Real 2010, Scheding & Levi 2010, Toynbee & Dueck 2011). Theoretical discussions move this field of social responsibility. Valuing subject-centred perceptions of moving citizens, music producers, mediators, researchers and listeners, this paper focuses on moving processes to highlight complex dynamic structures involved in them. To do so it uses elementary knowledge from Navigation Sciences. The idea is to metaphorically point at relative relations specific to mobility, underestimated in Social Sciences. Challenging established sets of categories from classifications of music genres, nationalist perceptions and historical constructs it equates close and distant forces needed to locate positions in the process from previously determined ones. Information for this study was collected in field and archival work done in the Music Departments and the Centre for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University in New York and the Institute of Ethnomusicology at the New University of Lisbon, the Sailing School of the Naval Association of Lisbon and the BMW Sailing Academy of Terra Incógnita, also in Lisbon. Public state owned and private documentation sets were useful as were the moments among fado and other Lusophone songs’ practitioners, from 1988 to 2016.

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