Talk with João Polido
Portuguese composer João Polido works at the crossroads between cultural memory, tradition, sound technology, and the socio-political history of music. “Spectral Lore of Tradition”, the title of this talk, emerges from his observation that, as oral memory fades from contemporary life (paradoxically aided by recorded media), traditional music and folklore become suspended in a kind of temporal loop. Shaped by structures of power in Portugal’s history - particularly during the military dictatorship and its aftermath - these forms reveal complex dynamics of aural remembrance, abstraction, and reference. Framing remembering and forgetting as intertwined acts, Polido explores spectral processes in audio as both remediation and a strategy in the face of the failure of recognition. As Nagel and Wood write in “Anachronic Renaissance”: “There was no ‘original’, in other words, until someone tried but failed to replicate it. The original was the creature of the replica.”
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