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spanish traditonal and folk music |
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Spanish Traditional and Folk music For many centuries, the common image that the most of Europe and North America had about the traditional music of Spain was unified under the concept of Flamenco. Flamenco consists of the Spanish guitar, clapping hands, tapping shoes, castanets, and frenzied dancing. However, Flamenco is the music of just the southern Spanish region named Andalucia (Andalusia), although somehow it became the single representative of the tradition of the whole country (Overview of Music). Many people believed that music in the other regions of Spain is not so different from the Andalusian flamenco. The fact of the matter is that the traditional music from Castilla (Castile, the central region of the peninsula), Catalonia, Aragon and the Basque Country (neighboring regions with France) do keep many more similarities with the music from Portugal, Southern France or Italy than with Flamenco (Conci). The reason that that Flamenco became so well known throughout Spain was probably because of its exotic personality, which is strikingly different from the popular music from Western Europe and most of Spain (Overview of Music). This type of music was brought into Spain by nomad gypsies from India that traveled west from there throughout Europe three or four centuries ago, finally settling in Andalusia. ... For centuries travelers visited the southern corner of Europe where they found the legacy of the Arab architecture together with the life style and traditions of the Andalusians which quite well reflected in the personality of flamenco dancing and singing, and so started the myth of the "passionate Spain" (Traditional Music). That myth lasted until it was well exploited during general Francos dictatorship (1939-1975), starting the Spanish tourist business boom of the sixties with the slogan: "Spain is different". And what could give us a look more different to the rest of the Europeans than this hot-blooded Flamenco music and dancing not to mention the bloody bullfighting tradition. It is the richness, passion and sophistication of flamenco music and dancing which makes it appealing not just to the eyes of the foreign visitors, but also developed fans in many other parts of Spain, where the nomad Andalusian gypsies brought it with them. Outside Andalusia, flamenco could never replace the local traditions of the other Spanish regions, but could possibly make them look duller (Conci). ... Over there, their ancient bagpipes have lasted as the most representative instrument of their popular music. ... The general Spanish name for these pipes is gaita, although that name also designates other woodwinds without bag (with and without reeds) played in several other Spanish regions. ... Over there however, the bass drone hangs from the front of the bag in a similar fashion to the bagpipes from the south of France or the Italian zampogna (Traditional Music). The kind of dances traditionally performed with the Galician or Asturian gaita jigs could be quite comparable to the circular dances of French Brittany, having practically no similarity at all with flamenco (Overview of Music). ... Not to mention certain Galician historians that a couple of centuries ago started to dig out in their history until the days of the arrival of Celtic tribes in the Spanish peninsula. ... This feeling is also reinforced by the peculiar ancient Basque language, one of the oldest in Europe together with Finnish and Hungarian (Traditional Music). In certain cases, these feelings of differential cultural identity have motivated certain people (like some Galician folk musicians) to approach other distant cultural movements related by their historic links along the north Atlantic seas, like the Celtic music cultural movement developed since the seventies. The approach of traditional and folk musicians from Galicia, Asturias and Cantabria towards their counterparts from Scotland, Ireland and Brittany has progressed continuously since then (Pio). All of the above tries to summarize some of the trends in the Spanish traditional and folk music. I would say that since the folk music movements started in Galicia in the 70s and 80s, trying to renovate their traditional sounds chasing an approach to the "Celtic music" movement, the momentum of this has been successfully increasing since then, imitated also in Asturias and Cantabria (Overview of Music). The folk musicians of the other regions of Spain did not follow this movement. ... Instead, they just kept working on their music tradition as is (a cultural mix), trying to take the best possible advantage from the renewed interest of the folk music audience after the boom of the Galician and Asturian Celtic folks (Pio). |
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Title: spanish traditonal and folk music
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