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Written in fRoots issue 233, 2002


VARIOUS ARTISTS
The Spanish Recordings – Extremadura
Rounder 82161-1763-2 (2002)

The Spanish Recordings – Aragón & València
Rounder 82161-1762-2 (2002)

The Spanish Recordings – Galicia
Rounder 82161-1761-2 (2002)

Las Bodas De Inesilla Y Brillante, sung by five women in Arroyo de la Luz in Extremadura, is a happy wedding song, but the mode of its tune is exquisitely sad, and it somehow articulates the sense of loss about the recordings on these three albums, which are part of the collection made by Alan Lomax and Jeannette Bell, with guidance from Spanish informants, during their seven months in Spain in 1952.
      In those days singing and playing music was still in most parts of Spain a normal part of village life, with song lyrics from ancient balladry or reflecting recent events. But the last fifty years of social and political change, urbanisation and the mass media have greatly modified the context, circumstances and ambitions of music-makers, and what remains is in various states of continuity, preservation, revival and new development, so these recordings are a rare window on the music of Spanish villages and towns of a past era.
      Each CD has over thirty tracks, with plenty of information about them in the fat booklets’ new-written notes. On all of them song is the main component, often out of its usual context, and perhaps a bit formalised in honour of the presence of the foreigners passing through with the big heavy tape recorder, but nevertheless rich in strong characterful voices, most of which were probably never otherwise recorded. Instrumental contributions on Extremadura are just from pipe and tabor and tambourines, while the Aragón & València album shows a wider instrumentation: dulzaina, three-hole pipe and string drum, friction drum and castañuelas, and the arrangements, some including brass and clarinet with their guitars, laúdes and bandurrias, of directed town bands and rondillas. Galicia features its characteristic bagpipes, side-drum, tambourine, triangle, scallop shells, bottles, and the little pan-pipe used by tradesmen, in this case a pig-castrator, to announce their arrival in a village.


© 2002 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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