Institutionalizing and materializing music through sound sources: the case of Bruce Bastin’s fado collection in Portugal

On the 27th of November 2011, in Bali, Indonesia, UNESCO approved the inscription of the Portuguese musical genre, fado on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Fundamental to the submission of fado to the UNESCO's committee - which was ratified by the Lisbon Municipality on the 12th of May 2004 - was a particular collection of 78 rpm discs, recorded during the first half of the 20th century that included recordings which were virtually forgotten for almost 50 years. This collection was “discovered” outside Portugal in 1993, by a Portuguese collector, and from the moment it was recognized as “Portuguese patrimony” by the official entities, it underwent a very interesting process of transformation according to the ways in which it was regarded by different agents and addressed by distinct discourses. Within this process of transformation – which can be seen as a conceptual metamorphosis -, are the voices and speeches of politicians, music collectors, scholars, journalists and fado singers (fadistas). This paper intends to analyze the historical process through which the collection of commercial recordings was “repatriated” and institutionalized in Portugal. For this purpose I will address the following question: what kind of transformation can occur to a set of discs when it becomes an archive for the collective memory of a community?