How it all began

If anybody out there stumbled upon our session and experienced the Oxford Pandeireteiras in full swing they may well wonder how this all started. I just discovered (as nobody tells me anything) a documentary from ~2012 with the first generation of pandeireteiras here, but without them playing any music. The brand new traditional music course launched by the Galician Studies Centre in January 2012 gets a mention.

This is part of a series of one-hour documentaries on Galician migrants around the world (each featuring one city) that ran from 1.7.2010 (London) to 2.7.2015 (episode 91: San Francisco).  Made for an audience back home in Galicia, this is more about the culture of the host country of course, and how the migrants experience it, so in the Oxford episode you’ll hear UK pop music (I need to listen again to check if they played any actual Oxford bands) rather than Galician ones.

 

Update: I just discovered a YouTube playlist which includes all 91 episodes in chronological order. Episode 9 on Brussels is of interest for fans of Galician music as one of the interviewees is Nuria from IALMA (she’s up second, so about 10 mins in).

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Galician Session Oxford July 2019

Two years since this session’s founding genius, Mano Panforreteiro, moved away from Oxford, but some of us are still here! Some others have also moved, so if any musicians out there would like to join, there is space for you!

 

So, anyhow, here goes:

This month the Galician session will happen a week before the last Wednesday of the month, specifically:

Wednesday 24.7.2019, 20:30 – 23:00.

We are now back at the newly refurbished

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

We’re normally in the downstairs bar, which now looks like this:

 

This month, in the twenty-fourth 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, i.e. scallop shells) 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 coming up:

Friday 19.7. 20:30h till late: After the success of the Midsummer Mazurka on the corner of Broad Street / Catte Street, there will be some more dancing in the streets this coming Friday.  Codename: July Jig. But if anybody wants to dance a Muiñeira or three, I am sure that can be arranged!

Saturday 27.7. 13:30h Romaria do dia da patria – a major festivity for the Galician national day  (25.7.) happening in Hyde Park, London,  The Statue of Achilles, London, W1J 7NT, organised by REGA UK

2.-11.8. Festival Interceltique de Lorient (Bretagne) – featured country this time is Galicia!

Events in July

Most importantly, our session will exceptionally happen _not_ on the last Wednesday, but on the 4th, due to impending summer holidays. I’ll do the official post later in the month, but wanted to flag this up here as an early warning.

Some exciting events coming up this month:

Sunday 7.7. Slow Session, earlier than usual at 2pm  Also: Cowley Road Carnival

Monday 8.7. French/Breton Session at the Port Mahon – also advertised on balmini.org, so some dancing likely to happen.

Tuesday 9.7. Scandi Folk Workshop / concert with the Oxford Fiddle Group and the band Doggerland, at Headington Quarry Village Hall starting 8pm. The split between concert and workshop will be roughly 50:50.

Saturday 13.7. Extinction Rebellion folk session in Cornmarket Street (outside Barclay’s Bank) 11-14h.

Wed 24.7. (NB exceptionally not the last Wed, but the 4th!) Galician Session Oxford, Port Mahon, 82 St. Clements St., OX4 1AW.  As the 24th is the last day of school and people tend to disappear for the summer, we’ll have the July session on the 4th Wednesday rather than the last.

Sat 27.7. I hear there may be a major Galician thing happening on that day in Hyde Park, London, details TBC.

 

Oh, and as a souvenir of last month’s amazing events, here is a video that our dancers made of the Midsummer Mazurka in Broad Street:

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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).