Bruno Bettencourt, of the Associação Sons do Terreiro, argues that the candidacy of the knowledge and practices associated with playing the Viola da Terra for Portugal’s National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage is about far more than preserving an instrument. At stake, he says, is the safeguarding of a living world of musicians, builders, memories and traditions—and what he calls “the soundtrack of the life of every Azorean.”
An instrument can be placed inside a museum and preserved for centuries. Its wood can be protected from humidity, its strings replaced, its ornamentation catalogued and its history carefully written on a plaque. But music cannot be preserved in quite the same way. It must pass from hand to hand, from ear to ear, from one generation into another. For Bruno Bettencourt, of the Associação Sons do Terreiro, this distinction lies at the heart of the candidacy recently submitted for the knowledge and practices associated with playing the Viola da Terra to be included in Portugal’s National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage. “What matters above all,” he says, “is to understand the Viola, and the world surrounding it, as a whole.” Because what is being safeguarded is not simply an object. It is what he calls its “soul.”
That soul has different physical voices across the archipelago. Bettencourt points to two principal forms of the Azorean Viola: the 12-string instrument, historically common throughout the islands, although no current players or instruments are known on Corvo, and the 15-string Viola, a more recent form dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and predominant on Terceira, with examples also found on Graciosa and São Jorge. The 12-string Viola belongs to the wider Portuguese family of wire-strung violas and is often immediately recognizable by the two hearts decorating its sound opening. The origins of the 15-string form remain debated, although Bettencourt notes a theory linking it to instrumental influences associated with the Castilian presence in the Azores, particularly on Terceira. Yet cataloguing shapes, strings and origins only takes us so far. “The Viola is much more than glued wood, ornamented and fitted with metal strings,” he insists.
The candidacy therefore concentrates upon “knowledge and practices of playing”—the human inheritance surrounding the instrument. Over the past three years, the inventory project identified more than 350 players, with Bettencourt clarifying that they were found across eight islands. Behind that number are individual biographies: ways of tuning and playing, repertoires learned from relatives and neighbors, techniques transmitted without written scores, gatherings where the instrument accompanied singing, and the intimate relationship between player and Viola. “It is intangible heritage we are talking about,” Bettencourt says. “It is the soundtrack of the life of every Azorean that is at stake.” The instrument has accompanied everything from solitary moments to elaborate religious and secular celebrations. It could summon festivity, but it could also console during darker hours.
Its survival has depended significantly upon places where tradition remains something practiced rather than merely remembered. Folklore groups have been among the Viola’s principal nurseries and, in Bettencourt’s words, its sustaining habitat. Informal “Viola Schools” established in parishes and community organizations throughout the islands have helped create new generations of players, while the Regional Conservatories of Angra do Heroísmo and Ponta Delgada offer basic-level study of the instrument. These structures help explain why Bettencourt believes the Viola’s immediate future is reasonably secure. Preservation, however, cannot mean immobilization.
Indeed, one of the most striking developments of recent decades has been the Viola’s movement beyond the traditional settings with which it is most readily associated. It increasingly appears in solo performance and alongside musicians working in very different genres; original compositions are multiplying, as are recordings in which the instrument assumes a central role. Bettencourt recalls that the Viola has appeared outside strictly traditional music since at least the 1980s, including in rock. For purists, such encounters may occasionally provoke raised eyebrows. For Bettencourt, they demonstrate precisely the opposite of cultural loss. Techniques may change, compositions may be new and accompanying instruments unexpected, but “the soul, the essence of the Viola, the symbiosis between player and instrument will always be there.”
Education may now determine how far that continuity can extend. The Azorean Government has announced its intention to establish a regional Viola da Terra curriculum for secondary-level artistic education. The idea has a longer history: in 2016, the Regional Legislative Assembly recommended steps toward recognition and implementation of secondary-level teaching, and the 2023 regional plan for the valorization of the Viola da Terra again included education among its recommendations. At present, Bettencourt notes, formal study extends only through the basic level, up to the fifth grade. A secondary curriculum would allow students choosing the Viola to continue for another three years on terms comparable to students studying other instruments. That would value not only the instrument but also the young musician holding it, although Bettencourt acknowledges that questions concerning future professional opportunities remain to be considered.
His most compelling argument, however, may be that heritage should be understood in the future tense. Recognition cannot become an elegant certificate attached to something society has already decided belongs to the past. The real challenge is to strengthen the Viola wherever it already lives while making it desirable to those who have not yet discovered it—especially children and young people. A tradition survives not because one generation reveres it, but because the next generation finds a reason to make it its own.
And perhaps this is why the Viola da Terra remains such a powerful symbol of the Azorean experience. Its wood comes from the tangible world, its metal strings can be counted, and its ornamentation can be photographed. But none of those things explains what happens when someone takes it into their hands and begins to play.
That belongs to another realm: memory becoming sound, inheritance becoming creation, an island recognizing itself in vibration.
The Viola da Terra may have twelve strings or fifteen. But what Bruno Bettencourt asks us to hear is everything around them.
Based on an interview in Diário Insular-José Lourenço-director.