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Written in fRoots issue 198, 1999


VARIOUS ARTISTS
World Library of Folk And Primitive Music - Vol. IV - Spain
Rounder 11661 1744-2 (1999)

In many areas of Spain during the 70s and 80s traditional music in its normal social context was masked and sometimes virtually extinguished as TV, recorded music and cars proliferated, but some living traditions still persisted around the country.
      Meanwhile there arose a fairly small “folk scene” of groups performing traditional material other than flamenco (which was a whole different scene). Despite their best intentions, many were prone to deliver rather careful, worthy versions of the traditional material they sought to revive or preserve. As a stage performance or recording, separated from its social environment, it lost relevance and at that time often failed to really excite an audience which had access to pan-global pop delights and had become conditioned to see its own local music as nothing special compared to big glitzy shows and international stars.
      Just now, however, there’s great popular success for aspects of the roots musics of certain parts of Spain, for example Galician and Asturian bagpiping, the trikitixa of Euskadi, and of course flamenco which has never really dipped in popularity. The music’s social rôle has changed, though; it’s taken on the staging and promotional methods of the international music industry.
      In the 1950s it was almost impossible to move around Spain without coming across music of great character and energy being made as a normal part of work and social life. Alan Lomax and Jeannette Bell, in collaboration with Spanish folk music researchers, made a recording trip there between June and December 1952, and the 39 tracks here are in effect a sampler of the vibrant stuff they found as they covered much of the mainland, plus Ibiza and Mallorca, picking up on the very different regional musics and instrumentation, full of energy and rich character. Particularly notable is the wild, strong singing, a central feature in much Spanish music but one which tended to get softened by the revivalists as they concentrated on making instrumental accompaniments.
      Most of the tracks are short, often just snatches rather than whole songs or renditions. The notes explain that the original vinyl issues aimed to give “a broad and vivid introduction to the range of musical expression in a region... individual recordings were frequently edited or faded. If complete performances were used on the CD reissues, many volumes would exceed the limits of even that format, and the virtues of the original programming would be lost as well. For these reasons, the timing and composition of the original albums has been kept”. So it seems there’s nothing previously unreleased, but what’s here is indeed a fine introduction to and reminder of some of the raw traditional music of the time. The notes by Lomax and Eduardo Torner have been kept too, but given updated additions by Josep Martí y Perez.
      It’s unfortunate, though, that the reissue has retained the original 1955 Columbia series title World Library Of Folk And Primitive Music. The culture of another place or time is not some sort of linear antecedent to our own “civilised” condition; anthropologists dropped the unhelpful and condescending term “primitive” years ago.
  

© 1999 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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