Hello everyone and welcome back to my weekly post on my blog, where we talk about Art and Culture. As you know this week’s blogs are about music, and more specially the traditional music of two countries, my country (Spain) and my Erasmus destination country (Turkey). On the last entrance I talked about Turkish music, and in this blog, I will talk about the traditional music of my beloved region in Spain.
It’s usual the misconception that in Spain the only traditional music is flamenco, but nor the less. Each region has its own music, own dance and own traditional garment, but today I’ll talk about the one that represents me the most, Galician music, the Muiñeira. This music is usually plaid by the tambourine (pandereta) Galician bagpipes (gaitas), drums (tambores), other type of percussion instruments like castañuelas and the voices of the singers (panderetieras and pandereteiros); later, some instruments like the clarinet or the saxophone where added. As all traditional music, this one was created by the people and their stories, and they gathered all together to sing and dance their songs. Specially at the end of the day on the sunset after a long day work on the field, this time was called Serán. All together celebrated the end of the journey sharing their food and stories. These traditions are still being done on some small villages, not going so far, my mom had a lot of wonderful Seráns when she was a child after working the field.
Muiñeira is memories, tradition, past, present and hopefully future, we should keep it alive and it’s our task to do it.