31 f
Leilía
various parts of the world; while I was in Santiago in May we met up in O Dezaseis, a restaurant that fulfils owner Suso Cobas’s plan for an agreeable encountering place for gastronomy and cultural communica- tion. She made the first of many albums in 1986, and was a member of Na Lúa, one of the first bands to ignore political bound- aries and embrace the kinship between Galician and northern Portuguese musics.
“I have the idea of an imaginary Gali- cia, a place that isn’t physical but emotional, for which you don’t need a passport, where anyone who loves the culture of Galicia can enter. It’s not a matter of blood. It’s a place where people travel, and the music travels with you. And it’s a constant evolution, experimentation. I’m always searching for a path, always connected to the root. And the connection with Lusophony, and Africa; we haven’t interacted enough. We were in Mozambique this week, rehearsing with the group Timbila – the name is a type of big marimba. It’s a very interesting project.”
“I don’t want to stay the same. I look for a way of reinventing.” Indeed so; she collaborates in Cape Verde and elsewhere, sings with Malvela, the traditional women’s group of her village, of which her mother is also a member, and her most recent albums have been settings of works by Galician poets, working with singer-guitarist Narf. “Galician poets seem to have a lot of con- nection with the music. For example Rosalia de Castro would start a poem with a tradi- tional copla. And classical composers of the beginning of the 20th Century were often inspired by traditional music.”
She’s the artistic director of the interna- tional Lusophone festival Cantos Na Maré, which is in January each year.
“I
t’s a different concept from a normal festival. There’s a band of musicians who accompany all the artists from Galicia and all the other Luso-
phone territories, adapting to the style of each one. We have several days before the festival to rehearse, and we work, eat and party together.”
Uxía’s very fond of the alalá, the slow, free-rhythm genre of Galician traditional music, named after its characteristic ‘ay-la- la’ vocables. “In Portugal there’s fado, in Argentina the tango, why not in Galicia the alalá as a genuine form of our own? It’s very profound, like the flamenco cante jondo.”
Singing at the launch concert of Mer-
cedes Peón’s debut album Isué was a group of elder women pandeireteras, a clear sym- bol of Mercedes’s championing of the cul- ture of village women. She agrees that today is a marvellous moment in Galician music, adding, “But it’s complicated. In Gali- cia the orally transmitted music and collec- tive creation, it’s the women who do it. 90 percent. But the pandeireteras, the women singers of the oral tradition, of collective creation, that’s disappearing, because these ladies are very old and are dying. What they transmit is now passed on via classes, and is therefore directed, channelled. And it’s in an androcentric system.”
In many Galician towns there are local associations that promote folklore and teach music and dance. A more centralised workshop, devoted to the research, making and playing of traditional instruments was set up in the 1980s at the Universidade Pop- ular de Vigo by gaita and zanfona (hurdy- gurdy) maker Antón Corral; it lasted until
2000, and musicians including Carlos Núñez and Anxo Pintos (zanfona-ist/multi-instru- mentalist with just about everybody on the scene and member of Berrogüetto, Matto Congrio, SonDeSeu) passed through it.
“The ‘90s were an important time for folk, roots music. There were charismatic musicians, but no school except the one in Vigo,” say Mauro Sanín and Chito Pinheiro. So in 2000 they founded a Central Folque in the town of Lalín, the current main centre for learning and researching traditional music. It moved to Santiago in 2007/8, and its activities have widened including collab- oration in a degree course at Santiago Uni- versity, research among the Galician diaspo- ra in central and south America, work with children and in deprived urban areas, pro- duction of shows, and the publishing of books and CDs, not just on traditional music but the wider Galician musical culture.
They organise an annual international hurdy-gurdy gathering. There had been blind hurdy-gurdy players, but the last had died by the mid-20th Century. Now it has returned to a role in Galician traditional music. “The hurdy-gurdy is a very symbolic instrument for us, for there were no people still living who played it.”
The pandeireta has recently become the instrument of choice not just of women but of male singers too. A newly prominent one is singer, pandeiretero and dancer Davide Salvado, whose visual image is very cool and pop-like, but whose heart and music are deep in tradition and who’s often to be found pitching in with the music, and dancing to it, as a member of A Banda Das Crechas at Santiago’s very active traditional music hub, the bar Casa Das Crechas near the cathedral.
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