A look to the past: traditional songs from Asturias

Este es un trabajo realizado por el alumnado de 2º ESO CD de Música Bilingüe para el Proyecto eTwinning.

This is a music project done by 23 second-year bilingual pupils (aged 13-14). The main purpose of this project is to show our traditional musical heritage.

Our source is the “Cancionero musical de la lírica popular asturiana” a songbook that contains 500 tunes collected by the ethnomusicologist Eduardo Martinez Torner. The songbook was published in 1920: this means that all the songs were part of the Asturian traditional repertoire: at least from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.

Eduardo Martínez Torner travelled all around Asturias listening to people’s voices in order to register chants and dances that were about to be forgotten as a consequence of the emigration from the countryside to the cities due to the industrialization process that happened in the second half of the 19th century.

Every pupil transcribed one melody from the facsimile edition of 1920. They did this task by using Musescore, a free score editor. Apart from the tune, files include relevant information such as title, genre (dance, lullaby, worksong..) and the village where the music was collected. Due to the fact that traditional music is trasmitted orally we do not know the name of the authors. Tunes were created collectively over the years. This information was traslated into English by the students with the support of the English teaching assistant.

After transcribing the tunes, every piece of music was saved as picture (PNG) and audio (MP3) formats so that they can be shown. The music was uploaded to the audio distribution platform Soundcloud.

Every note in this Padlet Maps includes the picture of the transcribed score, the song title, the genre it belongs to, the place where it was collected and the name of the pupil who did this work and uploaded the note.

You can listen to the tune by clicking on the title . In addition, you can expand your knowledge about Asturias if you click on the name of the place where the song was collected.

Our selection of tunes is based on demonstrating different types of songs from different places in Asturias. It consists of 23 short and simple tunes in 2/4 and 6/8 times. We hope you enjoy them!

1st row (from left to right): Diego Martínez, Asur Rodríguez, Ikram Elliya, Nora Hidalgo, Nerea Gómez.

2nd row: Adrián Lozano, Mateo Bueno, Celia Coma, Enzo Pérez, Iyán Arce, Lucas Alfonso, Lucas Salas, Marina Fernández, Martina Pérez, Hugo Gutiérrez, Nicolás Sánchez.

3rd row: Llara García, Mencía García, Marina Arboleya, Claudia González, Carmen Arboleya, Lucía Gutiérrez.