Magraner - Arrels [CD]

Arrels (Roots) represents a new approach to traditional Valencian music, interpreting it through the prism of the early music repertoire. After three decades working to recover our musical heritage, Capella de Ministrers felt it was time to undertake a re-evaluation of music from the oral tradition by seeking out the links between this tradition and the oldest known compositional forms (those found in threshing songs and lullabies, in instrumental pieces with irregular beats, and in the chants of the auroros ('dawn singers') as well as the more famous boleros, fandangos and peteneras, whose commonalities of form and harmonic structure with passacaglias and ostinatos suggest that they too originated in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Arrels presents songs and instrumental pieces that trace and reaffirm the oral traditions of a rich and diverse musical world, reuniting the early music of it's manuscripts or printings with the oral traditions of it's people. Beyond "flamenco" in Spanish musical tradition.