We just completed a new edition of Popular Musical Instruments Portuguese, Ernesto Veiga de Oliveira, a joint project of the Music Department of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the National Museum of Ethnology, introducing substantial changes concerning the previous editions.
This publication is of a dual meaning. The first is, of course, which comes from the replacement of a work in book editions of the Music Department that, after almost 40 years since its first edition, continues today to be one of the most important sources of popular culture organology and Portuguese.
To prove it is the demand that this work has always met with respect to either of its first edition, 1964, both the second since 1982, as well as interest in its reissue constantly expressed by the researchers and the general public. And because they have always been held that the book Popular Musical Instruments of the Azores, published in 1986, would be a complement to this first work dedicated to the mainland, we decided now to put together in one book, the author of two studies on Portuguese folk instruments.
Moreover, the new edition of this book is supplemented, in addition, a fact not least, the gift to National Museum of Ethnology's collection of musical instruments popular Portuguese owned, so far, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, which will provide permanent public access a collection of great interest and one in Portugal. This is a set of specimens collected by Ernesto Veiga de Oliveira at the request of the Foundation, along with work in this field investigator conducted in the early sixties, and which would result in the publication of the first edition of this book.
The years of research that led to the formation of the collection of folk musical instruments - and the book that made itself known - are extremely significant for understanding the history of anthropology in Portugal and the National Museum of Ethnology. The team was formed around this and that, ever since 1947, touring the country and proceeded to be systematic withdrawals under the scientific coordination of Jorge Dias, set goals in which the collection and study of musical instruments came to be inserted so singular.
The primary objectives were for this group of anthropologists, the survey and systematic study of technologies, techniques and tools from a rural society in transformation and with them to account for the diversity of the country and its history. This was the ultimate reference of all research conducted over decades in the projects of the Center for the Study of Ethnology to the extensive work that brought together a cohesive team, Jorge Dias, Margot Dias, Ernesto Veiga de Oliveira, Fernando Galhano and Benjamin Pereira, referring to the main researchers who, until today, conducted research focusing primarily on Portugal.
So it was forming a vast corpus of information. The publication of most of the original assembled volume occurs between 1954 and 1960. It is then that starts the collection and study of musical instruments, by suggestion and proposal from the Music Department of the Calouste Gulbenkian, in the same years in which it anticipates, and prepares the creation of the Museum of Ethnology.
In the extensive work of researchers of the Centre, the musical instruments can therefore be read as the eruption of forms that are not confined to mere materiality of the objects, but allow more dimensions to reveal complex, unstable and humane practices of a traditional society that was sought seize and return to a more extended, and where the individual's role could be highlighted more general phenomena and larger categories that help to interpret it.
When the book is published (1964), its importance is immediately highlighted by the narrower field of experts who simultaneously followed the first collection and dissemination of research work of Michel Giacometti and Fernando Lopes Graça Both will then be the Revolution of April 25, 1974, object and instrument of work and intense emotional projection on the part of groups which then are collected, revealing the voices and the singing of a country in rediscovery.
So it was with the Cultural Action Group (1974), Almanac, Brigada Victor Jara (both 1975), or Earth to Earth (1977), among the first that appeared. This is the context that helps explain how this book became the reference work for all those who made and make the route of approach to musical forms and performative qualities in which they produce and are fruídas.
It is also what makes a warm personal relations are established between the author, Ernesto Veiga de Oliveira, and musicians, collectors and art teachers who come to give their input to the second edition of instruments or rely on your support CD's, as happened with the first disc of Julio Pereira, Cavaquinho (1981). This is how the social space that this work has come to demarcate an area frequented by ethnologists, ethnomusicologists and by those who, somehow, while musicians, promoters or simple amateurs to pore over the instruments and traditional musical forms.
One fact of great importance accompanies this reissue of the popular Portuguese musical instruments, beyond those arising from technical and editorial translated into the inclusion of the book Popular Musical Instruments of the Azores, in the story of Benjamin Payne, or reproduction of color images of the instruments . With it the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation has invited bids to the National Museum of Ethnology of all the instruments that were collected and, to date, his property on deposit at the Museum.
So is thickest senses a course in the history of that institution's own collection and ethnologists associated with it, enabling the convergence at the Museum who helped create and that gathered around the same project, all documentation that resulted from those years research and all activity which has now been developed around this collection. She has been the subject of numerous exhibitions since the first in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 1962 and 1964, all those that follow the second edition of the book between 1983 and 1986, the National Museum of Ethnology and various institutions and local country, or later in other exhibitions in Portugal and abroad, where some of the instruments were present.
With this new situation were created conditions for the establishment of an inventory program that accompanied the change in status brought the donation, and has already allowed its computerization, made by the young anthropologist, Paul Maximin, who now occupied the study of instruments while that participated in the collection of information that helps film documenting new situations in which these instruments are still players at a time of expansion and upgrading of reserve areas and services of the Museum.
Miguel Sobral Cid
http://www.musica.gulbenkian.pt/cgi-bin/wnp_db_dynamic_record.pl?dn=db_musica_estudos_musicologicos_en&sn=estudos_musicologicos&orn=203
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