Apresentação - Uma segunda vida para as cidades musicais. Um caleidoscópio de significados e abordagens no século XXI

Abstract

The hustle and bustle of everyday life makes sounds overlooked. They make us like music, but we can hardly identify one as a favorite. As Carlos Ruiz Zafón wrote about books, we can see that in each song there is a song within the song itself. In his work ‘A Sombra do Vento’ [The Shadow of The Wind] (2021), Zafón reflected on the amount of ordinary things that get lost or are forgotten, hence he imagined the creation of a special library to keep the forgotten books of the city, but captive in the soul of those who read them. The same analogy can be made for this Dossier, about the second life of musical cities, in the sense that we see the city in the role of this special library, which keeps the songs that have touched the souls of others. Music and sound are ubiquitous. Whether it is in the performance of a street artist, at a concert, on the rails of a train, in the industrial machines that create symphonies of urban development, in the chords of the slow footsteps on the pavements, in the parting words of another day and the waking of a dawn (Guerra, 2020a; 2020b). All this is life. A second life that is neither seen nor recognised. In fact, Paulo Cunha e Silva already said that the future is now (Silva, 2018). It is thus determining to think about the ways in which music marks the urban in the short, medium and long term. In fact, it is enough to have as an example of this statement the fact that only in 2015 the city of Liverpool was recognized as a ‘City of Music’ by UNESCO, much due to its connection with The Beatles (Aughton, 1993). Or we can also refer to cities like New Orleans in the United States or Rio de Janeiro in Brazil as examples of contemporary music cities, because each one of them is associated with a musical style, an artist, a concert or even experiential experiences that are created around that idea.