09/16/2026
By Monica Melo
The Saab Center for Portuguese Studies, in partnership with the Department of World Languages and Cultures, announces a concert lecture, "Atlantic Crossings: Music, Mobility and Cultural Exchange in the Luso-Afro-Brazilian World."
This concert lecture explores the Atlantic as a historically layered and dynamic space of musical transformation, where people, ideas, repertoires and belief systems circulated between Portugal, Africa and Brazil across several centuries. The public will learn how people, ships, religious practices and artistic traditions moved across the Atlantic over several centuries, generating new musical forms at the intersections of migration, empire, slavery, missionization, cosmopolitanism and cultural resilience.
The presentation examines the transformation of Bantu ritual practices (calundu) into the Brazilian lundum, later landum in Cabo Verde, and ultimately the Afro-Brazilian lundu-canção — a genre that entered Lisbon’s opera houses and profoundly shaped the early development of Portuguese urban popular song and the roots of Fado.
The presentation also addresses diachronic contrasts, such as the long-term preservation of early sacred musical models in Madeira (Funchal Cathedral) and the Azores (Angra do Heroísmo Cathedral and Ponta Delgada main church), which coexisted with increasingly hybridized repertoires on the Portuguese mainland. Equally significant is the unexpected cosmopolitanism of Azorean composer Francisco de Lacerda, who intertwined insular folk idioms with the European modernism he absorbed during his Parisian years.
- Date: Sept. 25, 2026
- Time: 7:30 p.m.
- Location: Fisher Hall, Moloney Performing Arts Center
This event is free and open to the public. Parking is available in the Wilder Lot.