Music and the Making of Portugal and Spain: Nationalism and Identity Politics in the Iberian Peninsula

CEIS20 integrated researcher Leonor Losa (Group 4 – Artistic Currents and Intellectual Movements) contributed to this book with a chapter entitled “The Invisible Voices of the Early Recording Market in Portugal”, in which she reflects on the emergence of a recording market at the beginning of the 20th century, focusing in particular on the role played by shopkeepers in the urban centres of Lisbon and Porto. Based on a historical analysis anchored in an in-depth study of sources, this text shows how the outline of this market were the result of a dialectic between the development of corporate capitalism in the Western context, the agency of shopkeepers, the social and economic conditions of the country, and the transformations in how people listed to technologically mediated sound.

Looking at the ways in which sound recording and reproduction technologies have found their local roots, the author shows how the spread of modern ways of listening to music describes different patterns depending on social and geographical realities, often being alternative forms of modernity.

The book launch took place on 29 November and featured by Kimberly DaCosta Holton and Michael Christoforidis. The event was hosted by the University of Illinois Press as a Zoom webinar, which can be accessed via this link.