Music and Songs Back

Music and Songs

The melodies that could be heard and shared in the cars as the team brought the participants home were the foundation of the musical atmospheres we developed in the labs and performances. The music accompanying almost every session balanced between more Western pop, urban and classical music and created atmospheres of rest, reflection and dance. There were Pakistani songs and a lot of Nepalese and Indian music with snippets of Bollywood, bringing together a large informal collection of possibilities that were brought to the shows. The musicians began to recompose, arrange and rehearse. In the first year, the songs were also in the hands of some participants: Bipasha, a Bangladeshi woman who sang a pop song from her country from the window of a house in São Teotónio; and Manpreet, another man with a traditional Indian musical education who sang accompanied by the sitar of our band. There was a piece that the whole cast sang, which we performed in a lively and joyful way, and, at one point, some Indian people came up to us and explained that it was a funeral song. The choirs were more present in the second year under the direction of voice artist Margarida Mestre. The musical laboratory environments led to songs from the Indian classical tradition, Asian pop music and a whole sound field that gave the performance a strong oriental flavour in the first year with music composed by the artist André Duarte. In the second year, there was free jazz with songs by the band Chão Maior. The musicians and participants studied and learned the writing and recovery of songs from multiple countries in Asia. Thanks to this exchange, we created two strong musical performances. Here, you can listen to some of the songs from the first performance.

Photography by: João Mariano - 1000 Olhos