Galician Session Oxford June 2019

This month the Galician session will happen on the last Wednesday of the month, as usual, specifically:

Wednesday 26.6.2019, 20:30 – 23:00.

We are now back at the newly refurbished

Port Mahon, 82 St. Clement’s St., Oxford OX4 1AW

The new session space in the pub looks like this (check the February announcement if you’re unsure where to find it):

This month, in the twenty-third session in the new sequence, we’ll again play lots of lovely tunes from our vast collection of Galician traditionals (and maybe the odd one from other traditions as well). The Oxford Pandeireteiras will play their tambourines and sing some of the songs they practise in their weekly meetings (you can also join a new monthly singing class with them!). Sheet music will be provided for anybody who brings an instrument and wants to join in (I also have a PDF file with 19 of our favourite tunes which I can email on request). There will be space for dancing, which has been used enthusiastically in the first sessions at the new venue. A box of miscellaneous percussion instruments (including the very Galician cunchas!) is also on hand if you would like to rattle along with the rhythms.

Note that the pub has a 11:00pm curfew for musical activities, so the session will close before that time with the traditional anthem of “Fisterra”. If you don’t have to leave earlier, it would be nice if you could stay for that. The curfew also means that if we start late, we’ll just have less time to play music.

For further info about the sessions and sharing audio and video recordings of the tunes we play, subscribe to this blog or join the Facebook group. There is also a mailing list for email reminders sent a week before the sessions.

Other events this weekend:

This coming weekend there will be a few more notable events:

Friday: Clandestine Mazurka in the Broad Street / Catte Street area after the Rowan Rheingans gig in the Holywell Music Room.

Also on Friday: Latin American Open Mic at the Port Mahon.

Saturday into Sunday: The massive Galician St. John’s night festivity, Noite de San Xoan at Port Meadow.

Sunday: monthly session at the Tap Social (apparently it is officially on the second-last Sunday of the month, in case you were confused because the third Sunday was last week).

 

Looking ahead:

As school holidays begin on July 24th, I have booked the July session for this day, Wed 24th, which is the fourth but not the last Wed of the month in this exceptional case.

 

 

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Noite de San Xoán

The traditional celebration of St. John’s Night will happen a day early this year, i.e. on Saturday 22nd of June, from pm and until sunrise on Sunday 23rd, which will be just after 4am, so we tentatively scheduled the end of the event for 5am.

Like last year, it will happen at the Godstow Road (ie northern) end of Port Meadow, on the banks of the river Thames. There will be barbecues so bring food to put on them and drinks might be handy too. Once the food is out of the way, there will be a bonfire and we’ll play lots of music, so bring your instruments and your voices, too.

This is organised by the Oxford Pandeireteiras with REGA UK, and it tends to attract quite a large crowd (hoping that the weather has recovered by then).

Galician poetry events

they are a bit like London buses, so there will be two Galician poetry events coming in next week, which I guess is related to the fact that a Galician poet will be visiting Oxford and participating in both.

On Tuesday (5pm, Taylorian Institute) we have:

 

and on Wednesday (5:30 at the Galician Studies Centre):

Amodiño

back in 2017, we played the tune of Despacito (that year’s global summer hit, after Justin Bieber partially anglicised the original Spanish version by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, which had already been hugely successful in Latin America) at one of the Galician sessions in London, which was great fun. I am fairly sure I figured out then that the title would translate as Amodiño and I tried to find a Galician version but could only find one using the tune with a completely different topic, something about agriculture and the eucalyptus crisis.

Now I finally found a proper Amodiño when looking for something else entirely, and I really like this version by the utterly brilliant group De Vacas, we should try it one day. Essentially, they are keeping the sexual theme while subverting the machismo typical of reggaeton.

 

 

I’m still struggling to decrypt the lyrics, but here are a few bits and pieces that were quoted in Spanish press reports:

Amodiño,

quero ulir o teu pescozo amodiño,

deixa que che diga cousas ao ouvido,

para lubricarnos e vaia suaviño.

 

Amodiño,

quero espirte a bicos moi amodiño,

tocarno-las cachas só un pouquiño,

facelo seguro con preservativo.

sube sube ….

Quero cargar o teu pelo,

quero darche un bico,

acariñar as túas ingles,

os meus lugares favoritos.

favorito favorito neno

Déixame facerche as uñas, toda a manicura,

ir a clases de pintura, es da miña estatura,

 

map your language

this event about languages tomorrow (Tue 3.6.19) looks really interesting and I am told that Galician will be represented …

 

Update (5.6.): If you missed the event, you can still take part in the language landscape project here.  The recordings that were made at  the event are collected here. Looking at the website now, there seems to be no recording in Galician at all, we need to do something about that!

Port Mahon events in June

On Wednesday we had the privilege of being the first to play music in the newly refurbished Port Mahon, so I can confirm that it looks absolutely lovely and promises to host lots more music from now on.

There has been good coverage in the local news as well, eg in the June issue of NightShift magazine, and here is the Oxford Mail raving about the musical events planned for June including the French, Scandi and Galician sessions (on the 10th, 17th, 26th, respectively, all at 8:30pm).

So this is how the sessioning space now looks like – we just clear away the coffee table and have lots of space for people to join in and play, dance, and generally have a good time:

(Image source: Port Mahon Facebook page – forgot to take any pics on Wed as I was busy running the session and playing wrong notes at the wrong time!)

So today they’re having a massive launch party, which has also been featured in the Daily Info.

 

 

 

Muíño

This video was used in a lecture on Galician poetry recently, as an example of the “modern” things you can do with poetry – the audience looked slightly bewildered, and I was clearly the only one who knew the traditional song that’s been remixed here:

 

It’s A miña burriña – see a late night a cappella rendition filmed after one of our sessions here. (lyrics)

Update 10.6.2019: Catching up with the podcasts of Un Pais Mundial, I’ve just discovered that Baiuca (real name Alex Casanova) talks about his approach to music in the edition of April 16 (quite early on in the programme).

Galician session May 2019

This month the Galician session will happen on the last Wednesday of the month, as usual, specifically:

Wednesday 29.5.2019,  20:30 – 23:00.

After a brief interruption due to refurbishments, I can now confirm that we will be back at the

Port Mahon, 82 St. Clement’s St., Oxford OX4 1AW

Ahead of their grand opening event, they promised they’ll let us in as part of their soft opening schedule.

The pub looks like this (check the February announcement if you’re unsure where to find it):

(I’ll need to take a daylight pic for the summer months!)

This month, in the twenty-second session in the new sequence, we’ll again play lots of lovely tunes from our vast collection of Galician traditionals (and maybe the odd one from other traditions as well). The Oxford Pandeireteiras will play their tambourines and sing some of the songs they practise in their weekly meetings (you can also join a new monthly singing class with them!). Sheet music will be provided for anybody who brings an instrument and wants to join in (I also have a PDF file with 19 of our favourite tunes which I can email on request). There will be space for dancing, which has been used enthusiastically in the first sessions at the new venue. A box of miscellaneous percussion instruments (including the very Galician cunchas!) is also on hand if you would like to rattle along with the rhythms.

Note that the pub has a 11:00pm  curfew for musical activities, so the  session will close before that time with the traditional anthem of “Fisterra”. If you don’t have to leave earlier, it would be nice if you could stay for that. The curfew also means that if we start late, we’ll just have less time to play music.

For further info about the sessions and sharing audio and video recordings of the tunes we play, subscribe to this blog or join the Facebook group. There is also a mailing list for email reminders sent a week before the sessions. 

Dia das letras galegas

Next Friday (17.5.) will be the Galician Literature Day (Dia das letras galegas), which honours a different (safely deceased) Galician writer each year.  This year’s laureate is Antonio Fraguas Fraguas (yes he does have a Wikipedia page in English! not all past laureates do).

There will be two related events around here:

Wed 15.5., 17:15 – 18:30h  Galician Literature talk with Alba Cid, the current lecturer of Galician at the Galician Studies Centre at Oxford. Happening at Room 2, Taylor Institution Library, St. Giles.  Free, but booking required.

18.5., 13-19h. Dia das letras galegas celebrations in London. Facebook event page. Yaa Centre -1 Chippenham Mews, London W9 2AN.

 

Pub and session news May 2019

Hard times for St. Clements and for folk sessions as both Port Mahon and Half Moon are now closed for refurbishment. On the plus side though, the Harp Session is happening tomorrow, Tuesday 7.5. at a private address, message me to get details. French and Scandi sessions will be at the Victoria Arms, Old Marston, on the second and third Monday as usual. We are hopeful that the Port Mahon will be open again by the time the Galician session swings around. They have scheduled a gig for Friday 24th, so Wed 29th should be safe. In the meantime, if you’re in search of a pint, try the brand new Up in Arms on Marston Road (the former Somerset, revived thanks to local community engangement, hence the funny name).

Stop Press: I hear there will be an Irish session at the Up in Arms this coming Sunday, 19.5.  from 8 pm.