Programme:

Sacred music in the popular sphere

In the tradition of the peoples from Spain, music with a religious theme has been performed in association with festivities or specific rites, as well as to make supplications in the face of a specific problem, such as a drought. It has also been used in everyday life for didactic purposes, by means of repetition in cumulative chants, to help memorise aspects of the sacred scriptures.

This programme for concert includes Christmas pieces, some associated with ritual dances, Holy Week pieces, and praises to the Virgin and saints associated with ceremonies. Some of these have an almost cathartic use for the community that performs them. Community and communion unite their meanings more than ever at these times, when music catalyses the devotion, hope and spirituality of the people.

The following is an indicative repertoire that can be adapted to suit the time of year:

Singing for the Christmas time

  • Romance (story) of the lost boy
  • Fleeing from King Herod
  • Romance of the Virgin and the blind man
  • The pastorela (ritual dance of the shepherds) from Braojos (Madrid)
  • Carols:
    • I offer you, my child
    • Let’s sing to the child
    • The maidens
    • The jobs

Ceremonial and processional songs

  • Saeta to the Sorrowful Virgin and Christ (watch a video below)
  • Prayers and Salves to the Virgin of Ronda
  • Songs of the flowers of May
  • Auroras (singing for the daybreak)
  • Water rogatives

Other traditional songs with religious themes

  • Songs from the bunch of the Magdalena from Garciotún (Toledo) (Traditional festivity, here you can see what is that “bunch”)
  • Couplets for the Jarramplas in San Sebastián festivity (from Piornal, Cáceres) (Traditional festivity, the Jarramplas is a fictional character who is the incarnation of a bandit against whom the people take their anger out on, at the time of Saint Sebastian, meet him here)
  • Cumulative songs:
    • The twelve holy words (watch a video below)
    • The pack of cards

Saetas are religious songs a capella that are usually performed during the processions, and are directly addressed to the Virgin or the saint that is carried in the procession. Here you have an example: 

 

This is a cumulative chant used to learn the twelve protosymbolic semantic units related to facts in the passion of the Christ: