Challenges through Cultural Heritage in the North-Spanish Rural Musical Underground (original) (raw)

Flamenco ¿Algo Nuestro?: Music, Regionalism and Political Geography in Andalusia, Spain (Ethnomusicology Forum)

In recent years, flamenco has become one of the most prominent symbols of regional identity in Andalusia, Spain. The Andalusian Government has embarked on an ambitious project aimed at developing flamenco within and beyond the region. In this article, I explore how flamenco is being ‘regionalised’ at the institutional level, framing this process within the context of identity politics in Spain. Moreover, I consider the ways in which this process has been received among some Andalusians. Focusing on ethnographic research conducted with members of the Platform for East Andalusia (a sub-regionalist movement that contests the concept of a unified Andalusia), I examine responses to the development of flamenco, and in doing so problematise a fixed correlation between flamenco and a single understanding of Andalusian-ness. By drawing upon theoretical perspectives in political geography, I reveal a fragmented reading of the relationship between flamenco and regional identity in Andalusia. This research adds to a growing body of literature concerned with music and regionalism in sub-national contexts.

New Tradition and Activism in Minoritized-Language Communities: The Time of post-2008 Asturian Music / Nueva tradición y activismu en comunidaes de llingües minorizaes: La dómina de la música asturiana depués del 2008

Lletres Asturianes, 127, 2022

This paper analyzes the recovering of tradition as well as the new forms of activism and community engagement in music in Asturias following the 2008 financial crisis. Specifically, I study Rodrigo Cuevas, arguably the most recognized new musician inside and outside Asturias; Ún de Grao, the musical project of Xosé Martínez Álvarez, a member of the so-called «post-folk» generation whose main aim is to revitalize the tonada; and the Coru Al Altu la Lleva, which, born in the environment of the association of musicians Caja de músicos, continues the tradition of choral music and explicitly engages in activism, both with noted Asturian musician Nacho Vegas and as an independent ensemble. Recent Asturian music signals new trends in its relationship to space and also to time. Musicians hope to participate globally, not by blending into any pattern, but through their local difference and through activism. Some of the issues Asturian musicians relate to are the role of the many languages and cultures that coexist in a territory, the revival of a lived past while questioning certain ideas of the previous generation, the awareness of sexual diversity, the new-rural tendency after the economic recession and the pandemic, and the rise in community activism after the Indignados movement following the 2008 global financial crisis. Through music, Asturias and the Asturian language both participate and respond to local, national and international trends which, drawing upon tradition, create unique ways of resignifying the past and of influencing the present and the future.

The Musical Bridge-Intercultural Regionalism and the Immigration Challenge in Contemporary Andalusia

Genealogy , 2020

The ideals of tolerance and cultural exchange associated with the interfaith past of Muslim Spain (al-Andalus) have become a symbol for Andalusian regionalism and for the integration of Moroccan communities. Nowhere is this more keenly felt than in the context of music. In cities such as Granada, Moroccan and Spanish musicians actively promote the ideals of intercultural dialogue through the performance of repertoires such as flamenco and Arab-Andalusian music that allegedly possess a shared cultural history. In this article, we examine the interrelationship between music and 'intercultural regionalism', focusing on how music is used by public institutions to ground social integration in the discourse of regionalism. Against a backdrop of rising Islamophobia and the mobilization of right-wing populist and anti-immigration rhetoric both within Spain and internationally, the authors consider how music can be used to promote social integration, to overcome Islamophobia and to tackle radicalization. We advance two arguments. First, we argue that the musical interculturalism promoted by a variety of institutions needs to be understood within the wider project of Andalusian regionalism. Here, we note that musical integration of Spain's cultural and historical 'Other' (Moroccans) into Andalusian society is promoted as a model for how Europe can overcome the alleged 'death of multiculturalism'. The preferential way to achieve this objective is through 'intercultural regionalism', envisioned as the combination of regional identity-building and intercultural interactions between communities that share a common cultural heritage. Second, we assess some of the criticism of the efficacy of al-Andalus as a model for contemporary intercultural exchange. Combining approaches in political science and ethnomusicology, we focus on one case study, the Fundación Tres Culturas (FTC). Through interviews with figures within the FTC, we examine why this model has become partly insufficient and how it is borne out in the sorts of musical activities programmed by FTC that seek to move beyond the 'andalusí' myth. We conclude by recognizing the continuing regional and international importance of this myth but we question its integrating capacity at a time of radical political, economic and environmental upheaval.

Occitan Music Revitalization as Radical Cultural Activism: From Postcolonial Regionalism to Altermondialisation

Popular Music and Society, 2016

The resurgence of Occitan popular music traditions in France is coterminous with the emergence of postcolonial regionalism during the 1970s Larzac protests, following the wave of decolonization in the 1960s and anticipating the anti-globalization movement in subsequent decades. Situated within this continuum of postcolonial and transnational cultural activism, Occitan music practitioners are uniquely positioned to embody a radically inclusive conception of Occitan identity by embracing the intercultural dimension of their Mediterranean musical heritage. Reconciling regional specificity and cultural hybridity can thus offer creative ways of resisting nationalist constructions of identity and neoliberal representations of global culture. This article examines the political implications of the traditional music revival movement within the "imagined community" (Anderson) of Occitania, a vast and bio-culturally diverse area extending from Bordeaux and Toulouse in southwestern France to the Piedmont valleys of Italy, and from Marseille and the Provencal Alps in southeastern France to the Aran Valley in Catalonia on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees. Ethnomusicologists Luc Charles-Dominique and Yves Defrance identify France as the only European country whose high culture and popular culture remain in a critical situation of total and irremediable rupture (6). They specify that the historical split that took place between the ethnomusicology of France and the ethnomusicology of faraway cultures within the French university system is unique in the world of academic research (7), and suggest that such a dichotomous conception of ethnomusicology's purview reveals a serious and recurring problem in French society manifest in its fraught relationship with its own popular culture, including regional forms of traditional music (15). Hence, the French folk revival campaign of the 1970s and 1980s was carried out not by ethnomusicologists benefiting from university funding but by young musicians who employed the grassroots ethnographic practice of collectage to come into direct contact with, and to learn from, elders living in rural communities whose musical traditions appeared threatened by the dominance of modern urban consumerist culture foreshadowing the advent of globalization (16). Occitan music revitalization was significantly influenced by the American folk revival through the work of Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger, whose open letter titled "Ne vous laissez pas coca-coloniser" (Resist Coca-Colonization) appeared in 1972 in the French popular music magazine Rock & Folk. In

Diaspora, de/reterritorialization and negotiation of identitary music practices in “La Rumba de Pedro Pablo”: a case study of Cuban traditional and popular music in 21st Madrid

Artelogie Recherche sur les arts, le patrimoine et la littérature de l'Amérique latine, 2021

The dance and music project known as “La Rumba de Pedro Pablo” brings those who are interested in Cuban popular music face to face with a revitalized field of study. The resignificance of Caribbean cultural codes that shows its growing hybridization of music-dance genres and styles (son, timba, flamenco, jazz, rock, reggaeton…) reveals the complex dynamics of negotiation encountered by rumba –one of the most representative practices of the cultural and musical Cuban heritage- in its adaptation to a new space of welcome: the 21st century Madrid music scene. The interest of the present text is centered, on the one hand, on the conditions that give origin to this transterritorial project, founded in Madrid in 2010 and, on the other hand, on the discursive treatment that it provides to the Cuban rumba as an artistic, festive and deterritorialized dance-music manifestation. With this aim, we have conducted personal interviews with Pedro Pablo Rodríguez, founder and director of the project and we have also consulted weekly journals and newspapers as well as theoretical proposals of authors such as Frith (1996), Brah (2002), Braziel and Mannur (2003), Fabbri (2006), García Canclini (2008) and Haesbaert (2013).