Challenges through Cultural Heritage in the North-Spanish Rural Musical Underground

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes musical practices of rurality in Asturias (northern Spain), focusing on these practices as transits beyond rural-urban, local-transnational, and music-life dichotomies. We map out three modes of the production of locality in relation to musical heritage in order to point out a prevalence of the phenomena of “aural friction” (García-Flórez) and “mutuality” (Colón-Montijo) in expressive practices connected to this underground scene in the context of 2008’s rise of neo-liberalism. The introduction of these two concepts leads us to point out a correlation between the current transformation of the local and the social that coincides with a general questioning of the multicultural politics of recognition in Spain.

KEYWORDS:

• Acoustic assemblage
• Asturian musical heritage
• decolonial folklorism
• Hispanic studies
• rural feminism
• underground

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A canonical and highly identarian vocal genre in Asturias, also deeply grounded in different ideas about rurality.

2. By “the changing nature of the social within the rise of neo-liberalism” we refer to a general more-than-human framework marked by what Isabelle Stengers has called “the intrusion of Gaia” (Stengers, especially chapter 4). This means that we conceptualize “the social” as a problem rather than an object properly understood. See Strathern and Latour.

3. “Dignification” was a concept widely used in this context. It named the desire for the State to get repaired the damage done by the Franco regime in various expressive practices (Asturian music, dance, language, traditions).

4. Coined by the women of LaKadarma to envoice the “dark side” of the ethnographic archive, the notion of “Furción” works here as a pseudonim. The quotation comes from the round table we organized “Alderique sol estáu de la cuestión del baille tradicional n’Asturies” (15 July 2016).

5. “Dance group” should be taken to mean a formally constituted group of persons who meet in order to share traditional dances.

6. “Matter than enable the movement of other matter” (Larkin 329).

7. By “aural friction” we refer general analytical framework based on the consideration of equivocity as an acoustic phenomena that stands at the heart of the global history of listening. For a detailed description of the concept “aural friction,” see García-Flórez.

8. On the development of the notion of mutuality and music, see Colón-Montijo and Ochoa Gautier.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Llorián García-Flórez

Llorián García-Flórez is a PhD Candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Oviedo. His dissertation, Music, Tradition and Spectral Politics of Aurality in the Postfrancoist Impasse, a deeply grounded ethnographic work, focuses on the way musical ambiguity could be used to make designs for the pluriverse. He has been Visiting PhD Scholar at Columbia University (2016) and contributed to the collective work Dance, Ideology and Power in Francoist Spain (1938-1968) edited by Beatriz Martínez del Fresno and Belén Vega Pichaco (Brepols, 2017).

Sílvia Martínez

Sílvia Martínez is Lecturer and Serra Hunter Fellow at the Department of Art and Musicology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She has been researcher at Forschungszentrum Populäre Musik-Humboldt Universität Berlin (Germany) and Spanish National Research Council-CSIC (Spain). Significant publications include the volume Made in Spain: Studies in Popular Music (Routledge, 2013), and contributions in collective works such as The Singer-Songwriter in Europe edited by Isabelle Marc and Stuart Green (Ashgate, 2016), and Mediterranean Mosaic: Popular Music and Global Sounds edited by Goffredo Plastino (Routledge 2003).