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Os amores libres 1999

"From North to South, East to West, the music of the landscapes of the soul. The festive and pasional encounter of the strain of freedom" Manuel Rivas

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“From North to South, East to West, the music of the landscapes of the soul. The festive and pasional encounter of the strain of freedom” Manuel Rivas

Playing the gaita around the world and coming from Galicia, an unknown country “which is in the northwest of Spain, just above Portugal”, makes you confront the cultural clichés that identify us internationally – which are generally Andalusian – and takes you on an exciting musical expedition: Celtic music in Galicia – and by extension Asturias, Cantabria, the Basque Country, even Catalonia… – has a lot to do with the desire to differentiate it from this Spanish/Andalusian stereotype. Until now, the politically correct way to explain our music was through the cultures of cold, but we also owe a lot to those of heat – it is the opposition of the Atlantic versus the Mediterranean, the rain and the sun, the north and the south, the rising sun and the setting sun …..

Fortunately we have made Celtic music fashionable, but unfortunately it now sometimes has the poor taste of the plasticised. In countries like France or Italy, Celtic music has even been taken up by the extreme right of the National Front or the Northern League, as a symbol of the “pure and epic”.

In Galicia, the Celtic groups born out of the festivals of the 1970s played muiñeiras, pandeiradas, alalás or foliadas – passed through a romantic sieve – but almost never certain jotas or pasodobles – which could sound Spanish – or harvest songs – which, worse still, sounded Moorish. There was a “political” selection of repertoire.

To our surprise and despair, even the Galician pieces that seemed more Celtic to us, sounded familiar to the Irish, but at the same time very “Spanish”. In fact, much of the classical music with Spanish roots actually came from Asturias, from the Basque Country, from the north in general, rather than from pure flamenco, which certainly did not exist in the form we know it today. Since the 18th century, this music has been part of the universal imaginary of “Spanishness”.