Event overview
Sofia Vieira Lopes, PhD candidate at INET-md, presents her doctoral project “Playback”: The RTP Song Contest and the music production and mediation in Portugal (1964-2018).
The Eurovision Song Contest is held by European Broadcast Union since 1956. Portuguese television network (RTP) has organized the RTP Song Contest and has participated at the Eurovision since 1964. Portugal won the Eurovision for the first time ever fifty-three years later, in 2017. Last year, Portugal hosted the Eurovision Contest for the first time, and this year, many Eurovision fans believe that Portugal will win it again.
The Eurovision Song Contest and the Portuguese RTP Song Contest has been a stage for identity struggles and negotiations since the 1950s. Both contests witnessed crucial moments of European and Portuguese histories and different strategies for identity construction. Both contests are capable of displaying and challenging social and political postulates. So, music, lyrics, expressive behaviour, and the discourses around it have the capacity to mediate identity narratives, creating a multi-dimensional phenomenon worth examining.
In this session, Sofia analyses how the Portuguese public television network (RTP) has been dealing with their role of performing Portuguese identity narratives at the European level. She begins by presenting an historical account comparing strategies and results over 50 years and then she focuses her analysis on the first Portuguese Eurovision victory (2017), the Eurovision Song Contest in Lisbon (2018) and this year Portuguese entry at Eurovision. She examines how Portuguese television reshaped identity discourses to brand a new image of the country and how they manage its role as public service television at international level.
Sofia Vieira Lopes is a Ph.D. Candidate at Ethnomusicology Institute (INET-md) of FCSH-NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal, with an Ethnomusicology project funded by FCT and entitled “Playback”: The RTP Song Contest and the music production and mediation in Portugal (1964-2018). She holds a BA and Master’s Degrees in Ethnomusicology from FCSH/NOVA finished with a dissertation about music, television and protest song during the Dictatorship.
She was a researcher at INET-md in the project "The recording industry in 20th century Portugal" (2008 – 2010). She has presented her research work in several conferences in UK, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, France, Italy, and Portugal. She published six papers about her PhD research and has several papers in press. She also made fieldwork on Portuguese Wind Bands (2009 and 2011) and published a Portuguese-English book (2013): New Inhabitants – Euterpe Musical Society. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Dossier – the Observatory of the Protest Song.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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25 Mar 2019 | 1:00pm - 2:00pm |
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