f30 Action Galicia
It’s a European hotbed region for traditional music. Andrew Cronshaw goes in search of wailing gaitas, skittering pandeiretas and more.
raditional music in Galicia is known as música popular, and it’s currently indeed experienc- ing a remarkable surge in popu- larity. WOMEX’s return to Santi- ago de Compostela seems a good cue for a look at what’s happening there.
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A memorable moment for those Wom- exicans who witnessed it during the 2014 Santiago edition was when young members of Cantigas E Agarimos, a folklore perfor- mance group formed way back in 1921, came out of a bar, at Kazum’s Sebastian Merrick’s instigation. They’d been having one of their regular gatherings, and sang and danced to their skittering pandeiretas on the street outside a showcase venue as delegates were coming out. Local music, meet world music.
The pandeireta – tambourine, played in a skilful, distinctive and visually attractive, downright cool way far from the British pri- mary school music trolley – is iconic in today’s Galician music. A pandeireta jingle was the symbol on Mercedes Peón’s 2000 debut solo CD Isué, and she – and also the pandeiretera group Leilía – were prime fig- ures in a turning point in the Galician music revival, which has moved from the era of gaitas (Galician bagpipes) and connection with the pan-Celtic music scene to today’s strong role for voices, particularly women’s, and percussion. Indeed the songs have largely been passed down via women, and
Davide Salvado
the pandeireta has largely been a women’s instrument. That’s all spreading now, though, to men.
I spent some time in Santiago earlier
this year, speaking with some of the leading figures in today’s Galician roots music scene. In what follows they talk about how they see the state of play.
Ana Rodríguez of Leilía, who formed in 1989 and released their eponymous first album in 1994, gives some background.
“Galician music was known for its gaiteiros. In the 1970s and ’80s there was a renaissance of groups, but the folk bands were very much characterised as comprising men, and also it was a music that looked abroad, to Ireland, Scotland, and Brittany; using Galician instruments but with inspira- tion from outside.”
“Young as we of Leilía were – around seventeen years old – we had a very clear objective. We wanted to do the music of the women of the aldeas, the small villages. The girls in the past, to connect with the boys, would have a fiesta in their own village. Not official fiestas, just an entertainment for themselves. To attract men from other vil- lages they had to sing and dance well.”
“There was a lot of emigration from Galicia. And those who emigrated were mainly men. So there were many women left behind. And the tradition passed from woman to woman. One of the most com- mon presents from grandmothers to grand- daughters was a pandeireta.”
“In Spain, when the Franco era began in 1939 after the Civil War, all the gather- ings, of singing and so on, were prohibited. So through the 1940s and 1950s, it wasn’t possible to gather to play or anything. These forms of entertainment, the idiom of the people, were cut off. Consequently there was a very strong cultural rupture. During the 1940s and 1950s children didn’t hear their parents sing, nor even knew that they used to sing and play.”
“Then in the 1990s there began to rise a movement, of which Leilía were part; these people who didn’t know that their parents had sung and played, their children discovered this from their grandparents, and told their parents, ‘Hey, my grandpar- ents played, danced, and sang.’”
Senén Bernárdez, producer of the excel-
lent and very popular Galician traditional music and custom programme Alalá on TV Galicia, says, “There was a big recession in musical traditions during Francismo.” (Fran-
co died, still Caudillo, in 1975.) “The gaiteiro passed from being the king of the fiesta, the most handsome, the most important person, to being excoriated, marginalised. Then from the ’80s people began to work on reversing that, researching and collecting – people such as Pablo Carpintero, Quique Peón and others. People now in their 60s didn’t learn the music as children, directly from their parents; they’ve learnt from those people such as the Peóns and Pablo. We call them ‘the lost generation’.”
When I first went to Galicia in the 1960s I did hear gaiteiros and players of pandeire- ta and side and bass drum, and exuberant group singing, during the Fiestas del Monte in A Guarda at the extreme south-west tip of Galicia. Alan Lomax’s Galician recordings were made in 1952, LPs of state-approved folklore ensembles such as Cantigas E Agari- mos, Coral De Ruada and Cantigas Da Terra were released during the 1950s and Roberto Leydi’s field recordings in the late 1960s; the music didn’t entirely die, but it wasn’t part of unofficial social gatherings, and so was- n’t being passed on as before.
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mmediately after Franco’s death there arose a new form of folk band, largely playing, on a wider range of instruments, the gaita repertoire learned partly from surviving musi- cians and partly from the published collec- tions of researchers. The most famous and influential of these revival-pioneering bands was Milladoiro, who are still per- forming and recording.
Milladoiro made connections with Irish music, particularly the Chieftains and, as Ana Rodríguez said, most of the Galician revival folk bands of the next couple of decades and more looked for inspiration and connections to musicians and bands in the other parts of Europe considered Celtic. During the 1990s individual young gaita stars rose to prominence, particularly Carlos Núñez and later Xosé Manuel Budiño – and later women gaita stars Susana Seivane and Cristina Pato began to figure in the largely male instrumental world. Some of the bands, such as Na Lúa, Luar Na Lubre, Fía Na Roca, Chouteira and Berrogüetto, featured a woman singer, either as band member or guest, and many of these, such as Uxía, Ugia Pedreira, Rosa Cedrón and Guadi Galego, are now well know for their solo careers and collaborations.
Wikipedia describes the warm-voiced Uxía as “the grande dame of Galician music”. Over the years I’ve run into her in
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