Lila Ellen Gray
Dickinson College, Music, Faculty Member
- Ethnomusicology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Affect (Cultural Theory), Music, Aesthetics, Urban Anthropology, and 30 moreFado, Lisbon (Portugal), Gender, Post-Colonialism, Sound studies, Materiality (Anthropology), Mediterranean Studies, The Lusophone World, Intangible Cultural Heritage (Culture), Precarity, transition to democracy in southern Europe, Memory Studies, Protest, Popular Culture, Spanish Indignados (Occupy), Portugal, Genre Theory, Performance Studies, Visual Anthropology, Feminist Theory, Portuguese Colonialism and Decolonizaton, Iberian Studies, Voice (Music), History of the Senses, Anthropology of the Senses, Music and Politics, Anthropology of Music and Sound, Creative Cities, Ethnography of salt, and Anthropology of Tourismedit
- Lila Ellen Gray is a cultural anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, and interdisciplinary music scholar. She holds a PhD... moreLila Ellen Gray is a cultural anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, and interdisciplinary music scholar. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology and an MA in music from Duke University. Her research and teaching interests include: the anthropology of music, sound, and the senses; affect; media and public culture; ethnographic poetics; celebrity; transnational heritage politics; peripheral early musics; urban ethnography; gender; post-colonialism; the Lusophone world; Europe; and Portugal. Her book Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life (Duke University Press, 2013) is the recipient of the 2014 Woody Guthrie Award for Outstanding Book on Popular Music (IASPM-US). This book is based on ethnographic research conducted during the first decade of the 2000s with amateur fado musicians, listeners, poets, fans, and cultural brokers in Lisbon. Fado Resounding argues ethnographically for the efficacies of a popular music genre, sound, and aesthetics for shaping affective publics. Her 2011 article “Fado’s City,” published in Anthropology and Humanism, was awarded the Jaap Kunst Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2012. From 2014-2016, she was the co-convener of the Music and Sound Special Interest Group of the American Anthropological Association. Organizations that have supported her work include: the Social Science Research Council; The Council for European Studies; The Luso-American Foundation for Development; the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis; and the Bogliasco Foundation. She has previously taught on the ethnomusicology faculty at Columbia University (2005-2014) and at the Institute of Musicology at the University of Amsterdam (2015-16). She is completing a book on the Portuguese fado diva Amália Rodrigues (Bloomsbury Academic). She is currently an Associate Professor of Music at Dickinson College.edit
The voice of Amália Rodrigues (1920-1999), the “Queen of Fado” and Portugal's most celebrated diva, was extraordinary for its interpretive power, soul wrenching timbre, and international reach. Amalia à l'Olympia (1957) is an album made... more
The voice of Amália Rodrigues (1920-1999), the “Queen of Fado” and Portugal's most celebrated diva, was extraordinary for its interpretive power, soul wrenching timbre, and international reach. Amalia à l'Olympia (1957) is an album made from recordings of her first performances at the fabled Olympia Music Hall in Paris in 1956. This album, which was issued for multiple national markets (including: France; USA; Japan; Britain; the Netherlands) catapulted Amália Rodrigues into the international limelight. During its time, this album held the potential for international listeners, outside of Portugal, to represent Portugal, while also standing in for cosmopolitanism, the glamorous city of Paris, and to present a sonorous voyage in sound.
This book introduces readers to the voice of Amália Rodrigues and to the genre of the Portuguese fado, offering a primer in how to listen to both. It unpacks this iconic album and the voice, sound, style, and celebrity of Amália Rodrigues. It situates this album within a historical context marked by cold war Atlanticist diplomacy, Portugal's dictatorial regime, and the emergence of new forms of media, travel, and tourism.In so doing, it examines processes that shaped the internationalization of peripheral popular musics and the making of female vocal stardom in the mid-20th century.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/am%C3%A1lia-rodriguess-am%C3%A1lia-at-the-olympia-9781501346194/
This book introduces readers to the voice of Amália Rodrigues and to the genre of the Portuguese fado, offering a primer in how to listen to both. It unpacks this iconic album and the voice, sound, style, and celebrity of Amália Rodrigues. It situates this album within a historical context marked by cold war Atlanticist diplomacy, Portugal's dictatorial regime, and the emergence of new forms of media, travel, and tourism.In so doing, it examines processes that shaped the internationalization of peripheral popular musics and the making of female vocal stardom in the mid-20th century.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/am%C3%A1lia-rodriguess-am%C3%A1lia-at-the-olympia-9781501346194/
Research Interests:
Fado, Portugal's most celebrated genre of popular music, can be heard in Lisbon clubs, concert halls, tourist sites, and neighborhood bars. Fado sounds traverse the globe, on internationally marketed recordings, as the "soul" of Lisbon. A... more
Fado, Portugal's most celebrated genre of popular music, can be heard in Lisbon clubs, concert halls, tourist sites, and neighborhood bars. Fado sounds traverse the globe, on internationally marketed recordings, as the "soul" of Lisbon. A fadista might sing until her throat hurts, the voice hovering on the break of a sob; in moments of sung beauty listeners sometimes cry. Providing an ethnographic account of Lisbon's fado scene, Lila Ellen Gray draws on research conducted with amateur fado musicians, fadistas, communities of listeners, poets, fans, and cultural brokers during the first decade of the 2000s. She demonstrates the power of music to transform history and place into feeling in a rapidly modernizing nation on Europe's periphery, a country no longer a dictatorship or an imperial power. Gray emphasizes the power of the genre to absorb sounds, memories, histories, and styles and transform them into new narratives of meaning and "soul." (Winner of the 2014 Woodie Guthrie Prize from the International Association for Popular Music, IASPM, US)
Introduction and front matter available as PDF download below and also on scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/166025392/Fado-Resounding-by-Lila-Gray
Introduction and front matter available as PDF download below and also on scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/166025392/Fado-Resounding-by-Lila-Gray
Research Interests:
Listening to music might make one tremble, cry or get up and dance in response. Musical feelings might spread from listener to listener in a hard to pin down but nevertheless palpable ‘emotional contagion’. While theorising emotion,... more
Listening to music might make one tremble, cry or get up and
dance in response. Musical feelings might spread from listener to
listener in a hard to pin down but nevertheless palpable
‘emotional contagion’. While theorising emotion, feeling or
sentiment in relation to the social life of music and sound is not
new, for the most part, scholars in music and sound studies have
been relative late comers to the contemporary conversation on
affect theory. In this essay, I place two academic turns in
productive alignment, an ‘affective turn’ and a turn in
ethnomusicology, the anthropology of music and sound and the
interdisciplinary field of critical sound studies to the study of
listening and aurality. What might methodological approaches
gleaned from the anthropology of music and sound lend to
theorizations of method for the anthropology of emotion and
affect? In what ways is affect rendered audible as an object of
analysis in the process of doing ethnography? Focusing on
analyses of select audio-visual field recordings, I ask, how can we
listen for affect? And what theoretical and methodological
considerations might emerge when we do?
dance in response. Musical feelings might spread from listener to
listener in a hard to pin down but nevertheless palpable
‘emotional contagion’. While theorising emotion, feeling or
sentiment in relation to the social life of music and sound is not
new, for the most part, scholars in music and sound studies have
been relative late comers to the contemporary conversation on
affect theory. In this essay, I place two academic turns in
productive alignment, an ‘affective turn’ and a turn in
ethnomusicology, the anthropology of music and sound and the
interdisciplinary field of critical sound studies to the study of
listening and aurality. What might methodological approaches
gleaned from the anthropology of music and sound lend to
theorizations of method for the anthropology of emotion and
affect? In what ways is affect rendered audible as an object of
analysis in the process of doing ethnography? Focusing on
analyses of select audio-visual field recordings, I ask, how can we
listen for affect? And what theoretical and methodological
considerations might emerge when we do?
Research Interests:
Gray, Lila Ellen. 2018. “Listening Low-Cost: Ethnography, the City, and the Tourist Ear.” In The Routledge Companion to the Study of Local Musicking. Edited by Suzel Reily and Katherine Brucher. New York: Routledge.
Research Interests:
This article examines the circulation and reception of a song that catalyzed a youth movement and widespread protest in 2011 Portugal, in a moment marked by economic precarity throughout Europe’s South. It investigates the efficacy of... more
This article examines the circulation and reception of a song that catalyzed a youth movement and widespread protest in 2011 Portugal, in a moment marked by economic precarity throughout Europe’s South. It investigates the efficacy of this song for simultaneously catalyzing protest, shifting a register of political engagement, and for affecting narratives of return, to an earlier (1974) moment of public sphere assertion. In so doing, it introduces “register,” as a theoretical frame through which to understand the alignment of socio-political and affective dimensions of voice and the permeability of genres. Building on long-term ethnographic investments in Portugal and on close analyses of audiovisual media, this article argues for the importance of attending to micro-shifts in aesthetic form, engagement, and response, to understanding macro-shifts in public and political feeling.
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ZsvbazNbBypf3EqR7yaz/full
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ZsvbazNbBypf3EqR7yaz/full
Research Interests:
“Fado’s City” examines the poetics and affective place-making politics surrounding practices of performance and reception of the musical and poetic genre of fado in Lisbon, Portugal. Drawing on literature in the anthropology of the... more
“Fado’s City” examines the poetics and affective place-making politics surrounding practices of performance and reception of the musical and poetic genre of fado in Lisbon, Portugal. Drawing on literature in the anthropology of the senses, affect theory, interdisciplinary work on genre, and scholarship in the anthropology of sound and aesthetics, this article argues for the labor of musical genre in organizing, recontextualizing,
and mobilizing place-based affects and modes of sociality. [Poetics, Affect, Music, Portugal, Europe] (Winner of Jaap Kunst Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2012, Co-Winner of the Richard Waterman Junior Scholar Prize in Popular Music, from the Society for Ethnomusicology, popular music section, 2012)
and mobilizing place-based affects and modes of sociality. [Poetics, Affect, Music, Portugal, Europe] (Winner of Jaap Kunst Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2012, Co-Winner of the Richard Waterman Junior Scholar Prize in Popular Music, from the Society for Ethnomusicology, popular music section, 2012)
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2013. Gray, Lila Ellen. Review of Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters edited by Bob W. White (Indiana University Press 2012). American Ethnologist 40 (2): 410-411.
Research Interests:
2007. Gray, Lila Ellen. Review of Performing Folklore: Ranchos Folclóricos from Lisbon to Newark by Kimberly Da Costa Holton (Indiana University Press 2005). ellipsis: The Journal of the American Portuguese Studies Association 5:... more
2007. Gray, Lila Ellen. Review of Performing Folklore: Ranchos Folclóricos from Lisbon to Newark by Kimberly Da Costa Holton (Indiana University Press 2005). ellipsis: The Journal of the American Portuguese Studies Association 5: 168-171.
Research Interests:
2004 Gray, L. Ellen. “Recent Recording Releases: A Review Essay.” World of Music 46 (3): 186-189.