Music, Memory, and the Archive:
a practice-based investigation of Portugal’s democratic transition

This research project investigates how music improvisation, grounded in historical archival materials, can support communities in revisiting and engaging with contested memories of recent Portuguese history—particularly in relation to the 1974 democratic revolution. Marking the 50th anniversary of the Revolution, the study explores collective memory formation through a practice-based approach involving live musical performance. This performance component serves as a site of negotiation among musicians with diverse experiences and understandings of democracy, integrating archival content and audience reception into an interactive, reflective process.

​

The project generates new knowledge by examining how embodied, artistic practices can act as catalysts for public dialogue around complex historical narratives. It meets the Frascati criteria by addressing a novel research question through a creative and interdisciplinary methodology, combining music, history, and memory studies. The research embraces uncertainty in the improvisatory and dialogic nature of performance and adopts a systematic approach to data collection and analysis. Its findings are transferable to broader inquiries into collective memory and democratic engagement through the arts, and will contribute to academic discourse via conference presentations, journal articles, book chapters, and a monograph on music and collective memory.​

 

The project seeks to explore the unique intersection of music, historical archives, and memory, emphasising how the creative process itself can serve as a legitimate and valuable method for investigating contested histories and democratic legacies. To address this overarching question, several sub-questions guide the research process, each focusing on a different aspect of the interplay between music, memory, and history. One key aspect in the project is to understand the relationship between archival materials and artistic expression:​

​

1. What kinds of historical and emotional narratives emerge when archival materials are used as prompts for musical improvisation? ‘Music, Memory, and the Archive’ will examine how musicians interpret and respond to historical documents and recordings. I am interested in seeking to uncover how these materials shape the music and the emotions conveyed through performance. Another important angle of the study revolves around the negotiation of personal and political perspectives through collaborative music-making:

 

2. How do performers negotiate their personal and political perspectives through collective improvisation?

The project will explore the dynamics within the performance group, considering how musicians with differing views and experiences of democracy engage in dialogue through the improvisational process, shaping the performance itself.

 

The role of the audience in co-constructing meaning also plays a critical part in this research:

3. In what ways does the live performance function as a space for community reflection on democracy and historical memory?

The project will seek to understand how audience members interpret and interact with the performance, providing insight into how collective memory is activated and negotiated in real-time.

 

‘Music, Memory, and the Archive’ investigates how the artistic process generates knowledge and contributes to broader academic discourse. The question

4. How does the artistic process itself generate knowledge that contributes to academic discourse on collective memory and democratic processes?

explores how performance can be used not merely as an artistic outcome but importantly as an epistemological tool—an active mode of knowledge production within academic contexts.

 

Finally, ‘Music, Memory, and the Archive’ considers the broader methodological implications of using artistic practice as a research method:

5. What are the implications of using artistic practice as a method in the study of political memory?

‘Music, Memory, and the Archive’ will reflect on how performance as a research method can expand our understanding of political memory and historical narratives, contributing to new theoretical frameworks within the fields of memory studies, political history, and musicology.

 

Methodology

 

‘Music, Memory, and the Archive’ adopts a practice-based and qualitative approach, combining artistic practice (music improvisation) with archival research and ethnographic methods to explore how collective memory—particularly around the 1974 Portuguese democratic revolution—is shaped, negotiated, and expressed.

 

This project positions performance not as an outcome, but as a central research method—one that generates knowledge through embodied, collaborative, and temporal engagement with history. Improvisation, in this context, is used not only as a musical technique but as a methodological tool for investigating how collective memory is formed, challenged, and reshaped. This practice-based approach considers the artistic process as a site of inquiry, where meaning is co-produced through interaction between performers, historical materials, and audiences. The performance operates as both a research instrument and research finding, embodying critical questions about memory, democracy, and identity. The improvisatory method allows for an open-ended and responsive research process, where the negotiation of meaning is continuously unfolding—mirroring the nature of contested historical memory itself.