Last Tuesday we returned from Kolkata after two weeks of travel that took us to three locations in West Bengal, where Vigüela gave concerts, workshops and made collaborations with local artists. Our participation in the Sur Jahan festival, organiced by Banglanatak dot com was made possible thanks to the support of the Embassy of Spain in India. It has been a fascinating adventure, full of contrasts, and we’d like to share a few moments with you:
FIRST LOCATION: KOLKATA
In Kolkata we gave a concert, a workshop, and rehearsed and presented to the public the collaboration for the “Grand Finale”: a panoramic piece with the participation of all the groups programmed on the bill. Click to watch a snippet of our performance:
In the one-hour workshop we had time to explain some key ideas behind our music and a few basic notions of jota dance:
We worked a lot! Here we are with the rest of our colleagues at the end of the rehearsal for the Grand Finale:
But we also had time to enjoy ourselves. Here we are attending the opening ceremony, where our Carmen helped water a plant together with representatives of the other groups, as a symbolic gesture:
SECOND LOCATION: BANNABAGRAM BAUL ASHRAM
At the ashram—an encounter space for baul musicians (a tradition of mystic singers and musicians from Bengal who convey a spiritual and life philosophy through song, poetry and music), located next to a small village in a very rural area—besides our own performance we had the pleasure of preparing and presenting a collaboration with several baul musicians. Click to watch the beginning of the rehearsal and be amazed by how Girish Baul interacts with our peretas. Below you’ll find some musicological notes about this collaboration:
After briefly listening to Vigüela developing several stanzas in peretas genre, at this point in the video Girish Baul listens to the peretas prelude and comes in, placing his stanzas from the baul tradition in exactly the right place. How is this possible? We explain it. Peretas and, more generally, many traditional styles have a harmonic code that unfolds over metronomic rhythms, that is, rhythms characterized by a constant regularity of pulse, comparable to the tick-tock of a metronome. This also happens in baul music and in many other musical traditions around the world, as a globally shared principle. On this metronomic basis, and listening to the harmonics of the guitar as it develops the peretas genre, Girish starts singing his melodies, moving them within the pulse, just as he does in his own baul music.
Later in the day, a musician with a cajón was introduced, marking the rhythm from a different concept. This musician tried to identify the “rhythms” of baul music and to “guide” the baul musicians to follow that pattern. This caused the baul musicians to have to alter their performance, modifying the places in the melody where they placed the accent in order to try to constrain themselves to what the cajón was doing. Girish Baul placed accents in his music in positions that seemed illogical to the cajón player from their perspective of meter understood as a pulse divided into closed bars. They seemed illogical because they did not fit into those bars, but the accents Girish used are, for him, completely logical. By trying to force the melody into a meter of closed bars, baul music stopped working in the same way, because a rhythm that is not its own was imposed on it, thus forcing the baul musicians to do something that is not the music according to their tradition. This text has been developed together by me and by Juan Antonio Torres, musical director of Vigüela.
The result of the collaboration was presented on stage during the festival programme. Click to watch it:
Some of the group slept at the ashram and others at a nearby hostel where monkeys serenaded us every night 🙂
At the ashram they have a vegetable garden with lots of produce, and there’s a nearby river where they fish. The background image of this email is from the ashram. On all our road trips we also saw shops with live chickens that you can buy and they sell them freshly slaughtered—so fresher is impossible. Here’s a typical dish of what we ate those days: fish or chicken, chapati bread, rice, lentil soup and several vegetable stews. This is the kind of menu we also had at the next location.
THIRD LOCATION: IIT KHARAGPUR
And the third stop was at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, a university specialized in technology that also pursues the holistic education of students from a humanistic perspective. There we carried out many activities, such as this workshop. We’re sharing a moment here practicing hand clapping with students in some seguidillas sevillanas. Click to watch it:
We also gave our own performance. Here’s a fragment of tonada and jota in the style of Candeleda:
We attended the conference by Prof. Dr. Denis Laborde about the festival Haizebegi, a cross-border Basque festival that combines vocal traditions and contemporary creation with a clear political commitment to cultural diversity, minority languages and social engagement.
And we once again opened the Grand Finale with a wedding song from Extremadura, in which we collaborated with colleagues from Transylvania, Latvia, Denmark and India:
It’s hard to condense everything we experienced over these days into one email, but we hope we’ve conveyed a little of our journey. It has been a pleasure and an honour to bring the music of our land once again to faraway latitudes and to see how its beauty and energy win hearts wherever they go.
Vigüela
Castilla-La Mancha
Rural Spain, raw voices, timeless power
40 years, 10 albums and the same fire. They have performed at top-level festivals and circuits across Europe, Asia and the Americas.
🔸“Interpretive nuances of folk styles that embody emotional depth and cultural storytelling. Their work resonates with audiences of all ages.” World Music Central, USA
Their latest album, We, included in:🔸the Bestenliste (honor list) of the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik 🔸Top 10 Flamenco and Roots Music Albums by the veteran Spanish music magazine Mondo Sonoro
Last year in May, when I received Ali Doğan Gönültaş’s digital album, Kiğı, his voice and his music captured me. I felt compelled to talk to him to explore the possibility of a collaboration.
Today, 18th of August, they will play in Dersim, the cultural capital of their homeland. 
The losses caused by the earthquakes that hit eastern Turkey and the border area of Syria last February could hardly ever be estimated. In cases like this, there is also the loss of the unique work that Mehmet Yıldırım (in Turkish), or Memed Desîmî (in Zazakî), could have provided to the world in the years to come, of studying and collecting a culture in such a delicate situation as that of the Zaza people.
