I would say that everything inspires people, from failed marriages to the horse that fell into a ravine (this is based on true facts, I guarantee), with other people being the greatest inspiration.
I’m going to go back a little further, to the 1930s, when an English musicologist spent two and a half years in Portugal, delving into the music made by the people and even taking the time to create theories about the evolution and origin of some musical expressions, from the north to the south of the country, and even on islands.
Rodney Gallop, in a masterful way, and with some humor, described how the people’s music has no limits. I can’t imagine how in the early 1930s people shared music with each other, other than what was played live, in concerts or spontaneously, or what was played on the radio, still in its early days.
The first regular radio broadcasts in Portugal date back to 1925, but it was only in August 1935 that Emissora Nacional – today Antena 1 – acquired a more formal character.
But let’s return to Rodney Gallop. The musicologist describes, in his book Songs of the Portuguese People (1937) which a group of women would sing “on the beautiful bridge of Mirandela”, in Trás-os-Montes.
“I stopped. A hundred women, or more, perhaps, were washing their clothes in the clear waters of the Tua. Now, I thought, I will surely hear the real truth.” leitmotif from Trás-os-Montes. Because only one woman sang, and her singing was… the fado of Mouraria!!!…”
The ellipsis and repeated exclamation points are the author’s and reveal the emotion with which he noted that Mouraria’s fado was popular in a region remote from Lisbon, which at the time had unthinkable access. Gallop’s astonishment, he says later, is due to the fact that he only encountered fado in Lisbon and Coimbra, in cafes or among “stevedores and denim workers”.
Gallop further argues that “it is certainly difficult to say to what extent regional and urban songs influenced each other, but there is no doubt that such an exchange existed, exists, and offers a particularly valuable example” of his “theory on the origin and development of popular music”.
The musicologist’s theory is vast and deserves to be revisited, but I particularly like the part where he explains that “the connection between music and dance is today as characteristic of Portuguese popular song as it was during the reign of D. Dinis”, in the 14th century, “and proves that, despite all foreign influences, all evolutions, the foundations on which Portuguese popular song is based are purely autochthonous”.
With all this, I feel that Bach, Lopes Graça and Gallop could perfectly be talking about what inspired them, what they ended up inspiring and about what they found throughout a life of incessant search for creativity, their own and that of others, with more or less austerity (Bach was extremely religious), some political content and, above all, a desire to look at others. It almost seems like the beginning of a joke: Bach Lopes Graça and Gallop enter a bar…