Music from Borda dÁgua in the texts and images of Alves Redol

Abstract

António Alves Redol, Portuguese writer from the town of Vila Franca de Xira, was born on 29th December 1911 and died on 29th November 1969. A central figure in the Portuguese Neorealist movement (Neorealism) he was the author of a vast fictional body of work which includes theatre and short stories. On the evening of 25th October 1940, at the headquarters of the Sport Lisboa e Vila Franca football club, he delivered a lecture on "Borda d'Água Música" of which there is no known record. We have tried to reconstruct this lecture or at least its speech guidelines resorting to Redol's texts, some unpublished, from 1938 and 1939, which we were able to see and scan in his son's collection, António Mota Redol, in October 2012. In Redol's work, the references to music and dance are structural to the situations he describes. Without going into technical details, something which he might have been ignorant of, what he conveys reveals how the Neorealist movement, that has a lonely mentor in Fernando Lopes-Graça, did not neglect the repertoires and popular cancioneiros (songbooks), setting them against the practices and musical taste of the dominant classes.