The songbook legacy. Ethnomusicological perspectives on the teaching of traditional galician female singers

Abstract

In this article, I reflect on the knowledge passed down by our cantareiras, or traditional Galician female singers. Unlike the kind transmitted through songbooks, this knowledge has emerged through the act of listening and remains inscribed in collective voice and bodies. This is a form of knowing that exceeds musical analysis as is commonly understood within Western academic practice and becomes visible in the very act of singing and dancing together. I therefore seek to explore ontologies of sound and movement: modes of existence and knowledge that go beyond written language. At the same time, I examine what it means to listen to these voices and bodies today. As the tradition of the cantareiras shows, the collective voice has also been a way of creating community, forging ties, and inhabiting territory. From this perspective, I propose that we understand community not as something given, but as something built and continually renewed through shared rituals conceived as constitutive and dissident acts. Therefore, beyond the logic of heritagization and nostalgia, their voices and bodies can help us to approach the present. At a time when late modernity tends toward sonic uniformity and the standardization of practices, the legacy of the cantigueiro or Galician songbook still offers another way of knowing and being in the world: one that understands our music and dance as living forces that continue to mark the collective coordinates of our territory.