Tag Archives: Traditional music of Spain

Vigüela at the Jeonju International Sori Festival, South Korea

The pandemic didn’t allow us to travel to Jeonju, but anyway, Vigüela will have the joy of participating in the Gala of the Jeonju International Sori Festival.

I was there the last year with Janusz Prusinowski Kompania and Manu Sabate and it was an amazing experience.

In this occasion we will count on Toni Quintana, from Jennyrecords, who has been Vigüela’s sound engineer for the last albums, and Jaime Massieu, in charge of the video, with whom we have also collaborated before.

This video below is just a little advance to greet our future public from Jeonju, recorded and subtitled by me (Araceli Tzigane):

The subtle eroticism of traditional Central Iberian music in this son, by Vigüela

Wage claims, feminism and sublimated eroticism in the Central Iberian musical tradition

Translating lyrics from the traditional village music is a challenge. Nevertheless I think it is worth the effort when it is to share lyrics like these. In the video below you have the piece with the subtitles. And the truth is that the message is quite clear and, at the same time, it is said very elegantly.

In the center of Spain there is a music style that is even more unknown than jota, rarely performed nowadays, because few people know the languaje: it is the son.

About jota, we have something ready with the basics, specifically for non Spanish people, here. Like the jota, son is improvised combining melodies from a body of guiding melodies from the people, that are in the personal baggage of the singer. The singer redress the melody in real time. The same happens with the lyrics. The shape of the son allows the group to sing together, as it includes repetitions, so anybody can join to sing in that part.

And it is a huge body of lyrics, most of them short, than can be combined to produce the messages you want. There is also a massive amount of enchanting melodies with an ancient bewitching sound.

Son is performed mainly with percussion and voices. A light accompaniment with string on drone, with the rabel (rebec), can be included. In the picture above you see some instruments used for the son: frying pan, saucepan, mortar, cañera, zambomba, frame drum, bladder rebec.

If there are plunged strings, they are used like percussion, because son is modal, not tonal. The drone can be provided also by the zambomba, that is tuned. In this piece below, the singers sing in several different tones, all of them are allowed by the armonics of the zambomba. Despite being a percussion instrument, zambomba can be tuned to produce the armonics you want.

Vigüela are preparing their new album, which will include some sones. In the meantime, you can listen to this piece that we recorded last Tuesday. 

Araceli Tzigane, Mapamundi Música, Spain. +34 676302882 

What is “jota”? Didn’t you ever heard that word? Learn the basics of the most popular traditional style all over Spain

JOTA FOR NON-SPANISH
Learn the basics of the most popular traditional style of music in Spain

 “After decades of flamenco fusions and mestizo mélanges, Spain is probably in dire need of some raw, honest roots music […] Folk group Vigüela have the ultimate credentials.” 
Since I read these words by Chris Moss in Songlines, it has been in my mind the idea of how needed it is to disseminate the traditional music from the center of Spain. A music that is so unknown, not only abroad (that is logical, as very few efforts have been done so far to explain it for the international audiences), but also very neglected inside our country.

I won’t hide how much perseverance this vision made us develope, but also what a pleasure is for us to share it: the music from this land, from this landscape, that inspired such big epitomes of the creation of histories, from Don Quijote to some of the most inspired images of Pedro Almodovar films. In the last months Juan Antonio Torres and me are creating some videos with a didactic approach and now we wanted to share with you this one, made specially for not Spanish people, that explains, from the basic, the style that is the most popular: jota. Here you are the video and, below, you’ll find some concepts that will be useful if you want to delve more.

*** A short digress: we can make a lecture about this and also Vigüela is available to perform in concert. More about the band, here. ***

IF YOU WANT TO DELVE:

As promised above, here you are some concepts to delve into this huge universe of Spanish traditional music:

Concept of style vs. repertoire

This concept must be explained using a term that would like a kind of opposite: the repertoire. Style is not a song, it is not a corpus of songs. It is a language of communication through music.

Style has some rules, codes, ingredients, let’s say. When performing style, the rehearsal is not present. The performers use the code to create a conversation. It is like when you speak English: you don’t know the conversation from before and you don’t make rehearsal of the conversation. You just talk with the other and you wouldn’t say the same things if you were talking with other people in any other moment. It is a conversation between all the people involved. What will be said, is not predetermined. So you have to pay attention to what is been said. Also the moment to end is not set in advance. Style is fluid. Anyone who speaks the language / knows the code of the style can participate. That’s what it makes it so thrilling.

But, in the opposite, the repertoire concept is prefixed. Songs are premade. Only the ones who know the song can participate. The song has the lyrics, melodies… already predefined. In traditional music in Spain sometimes it is used the term “jota of the village X”. And what is performed under this name is like a still picture of the stream of a river. The style is the stream, moving and unpredictable. The repertoire is the still picture. Moreover, that denomination of “jota XXXX whatever name” is most of the times product of a deliberate creation in order to have something to rehearse and to put in a stage.

Other styles

Jota is one of the styles. You find jota all over Spain in the peninsule and also in the Islands. It is probably the most disseminated and popular of the styles. The others are:

  • Son. Learn more in this other video.
  • Fandango. Its family is composed by many variations: rondeña, malagueña, verata… It is not the flamenco fandango, that has other codes.
  • Seguidilla. It also produces many variations, some of them very known, like the “sevillanas“, that are “seguidillas sevillanas“, so, from Sevile city. In the South East there are parrandas, peretas, manchegas, gandulas, poblatas… And, well, even when we love it, the “seguidillas” by Bizet composed for Carmen opera are not proper seguidillas because it doesn’t use the codes of seguidilla X-D.
And we have also free singing, that is tonada. We have videos too: this is the first and this is the second. Tonada is not style.