History of the singing

"Unlike the tense and somewhat theatrical sentimentalism of the Latins, and the tormented despair of popular songs of the Balkans, Basque songs are imbued with a spirit of calm and contemplative melancholy, serene and objective like the Basque people themselves".

Rodney Gallop, British researcher

Everything may have began with a vulture bone, pierced with three holes, around 20,000 years before our era. A prehistoric flute, discovered in 1961 by the archaeologist Eugène Passemard, in the caves of Isturitz (province of Basse Navarre), proves to be the oldest musical instrument ever found in Europe. Its form and the disposition of its three apertures make it an ancestor of the present-day txistu (a straight flute with three apertures) and its Souletin variant, the xirula.

Another discovery also testifies to a very ancient Basque culture: in 1960, the ethnologist José Miguel de Barandiaran uncovered, during excavations in the caves of Atxeta, a few kilometers from Gernika (province of Biscaye), a deer’s antler with three points. This is a horn capable of producing up to four different notes. The instrument, now exhibited in the Archeological Museum in Bilbao (Spain), could be roughly 8,000 years old. No doubt the musical practices of proto-Basque peoples, whose affiliation with contemporary Basques has been proved, was accompanied by an autochthonous vocal tradition.

But in the absence of any concrete traces and documents, certainty has to cede to hypothesis and interrogation.We had to wait until the beginning of the Roman Empire for a written account by the Greek geographer Strabon, describing the Vascones as "dancing to the sound of the flute and leading the dance with a trumpet". An account which anthropologist Julio Caro Baroja saw, in the 20th century, as describing the "drinking dance" (edate dantza) still known today in the Basque Country. It does therefore seem indisputable that Basque music existed already at this time, a fact confirmed a little later by two sons of Kalagorri-Calahorra (an ancient Basque town in the province of Rioja): Marcius Fabius Quintalanius and Aurelius Prudencius, left priceless testimony to the music of their day, evoking notably the polyphonic singing in two or three voices, practised in the country of their birth. Subsequently, despite probable Greek, Celtic and Roman influences, Basque music was to undergo little radical change until the Middle Ages.

GREGORIAN CHANT AND POLYPHONIC CHANT

In the Middle Ages, with the propagation of Christianity, music of the Basque Country was to be profoundly influenced by the introduction of a form of monodic chant, composed essentially in abbeys: Gregorian chant. At first reticent about this new way of singing, theBasques were little by little to accept its structure and appropriate its melodies. Several choir books from the 11th and the 12th centuries testify to this adaptation. Some of them have music written on a single line (anterior to the notation on four horizontal lines introduced in the mid 11th century by the Italian Benedictine father Guido d'Arezzo). Gradually, Gregorian music was to modify the scales traditionally used in Basque popular music, without ever managing to impose its melismatic style of singing (several notes of music for a single syllable of text). Popular Basque singing was to remain syllabic (each syllable being assigned to a single musical note).

From the 15th century on, with the secularisation of church music, polyphonic singing, taken into the public arena by the troubadours, experienced a truly golden age. At the beginninng of the 14th century, there was a school of polyphony in Navarra, and José de Anchorena, who in 1436 was choirmaster of a children’s choir in Pamplona, was already composing polyphonic music differentiating voices from instruments. Two other composers were at the heart of this development of polyphonic music: Joanes de Antxieta, born in 1463 in Azpeita (Gipuzkoa), who held the positions of cantor and musical chaplain at the court of Ferdinand and Isabelle de Castille, and Gonzalo Martinez de Bizkargi, born in 1460 in Azkoitia (Gipuzkoa), no doubt the first Basque musician of European renown, and noted for his work on singing theory. The first landmarks of so-called "art" music were laid. It would continue to develop independently of popular music and singing.

POPULAR SINGING

If songs were no doubt essential to Basque popular poetry since time immemorial, a lack of written archives long deprived researchers of any solid basis for ascertaining this. Though popular song was already prolific in the Middle Ages, according to Jean-Baptiste Orpustan, the author of a Summary of Basque literary history, "almost everything prior to the 13th century was lost in the course of time". The only texts to have reached us are "fragments of an almost everyday literature born of oral improvisation". And we have to await the 19th century and the intellectual ferment of the period of "Basque Enlightenment", until a few audacious scholars become interested in this popular tradition.

The first would be Juan Ignacio de Iztueta, author in 1826 of one of the very first song albums in musical notation to be published in Europe. In the words of the author himself, this work, entitled Euscaldun Anciña Anciñaco, and produced in collaboration with the musician Pedro de Albeniz, "should not be considered as an object of leisure, but as a veritable national monument". It marked the beginning of a movement that would continue to grow throughout the century. The Basque Country was in fact not to escape the infatuation for popular traditions prevalent in Europe at the time. This was the time when Antoine d'Abbadie, future president of the Academy of Sciences, inaugurated his "Fêtes basques" in the Northern Basque Country, a kind of floral parade which contributed to the valorisation of Basque singing. The albums and critical works of several authors would follow.

Augustin Xaho, Francisque Michel, Mme de la Villehelio, Pascal Lamazou, J. D. J. Sallaberry, José Manterola, Charles Bordes and Bartolomé de Ercilla were all pioneers in a field that helped to create the "popular" or "traditional" song. In 1912, a competition organised by a delegation from the provinces of Alava, Biscaye and Guipuzcoa, for the author of the best popular Basque song album, was the occasion for two eminent Basque musicologists to constitute a monumental, determining work for the history of Basque singing. Resurreccion Maria de Azkue (1864-1951), the winner of the competition, published a few years later his Cancionero Popular Vasco (Popular Basque song-book), an album of some thousand melodies, in musical notation, along with commentaries and analysis, their complete texts and variants, and a translation of the ensemble into Castilian. Father José Antonio de Donostia (1886-1956), second prize-winner in the competition, published in 1921 an album of nearly four hundred melodies entitled Euskal eres sorta. He subsequently devoted his whole life to the work of collating repertoire. These two albums would finally constitute the body of works that the Basque Country needed, and allow the discovery of the gems of Basque oral literature that are still part of popular repertoire today.