La hermandad de los celtas
by Carlos Núñez
Espasa 2018
To those of us obsessing over Galician folk music, Carlos Núñez is a massive star – even if this ecological niche isn’t quite big enough to enable him (or anybody else) to lead a proper rock star life. We’ve had the rather amazing privilege of welcoming him to a special edition of our Galician session here last year, a truly unforgettable experience.
So of course I didn’t want to miss his debut book publication, especially not as it is about Celtic (including Galician) music and culture. Actually, preparations for his book were what brought him to Oxford back in May 2017, where he spoke to archaeologist Barry Cunliffe (who, as it happens, also has a new edition of his book on the Celts out this year). But I was also a bit anxious, wondering how he would be as a writer.
The good news is that he writes beautifully. The sentences sing, you can feel his musical talents in the way he writes them. So, as long as you’re caught in the moment, it’s great fun to read him, and it’s entertaining in the same way as it would be to chat to him or indeed to jam with him.
The trouble starts when you’ve read a few dozen pages and you try to get an organised kind of concept of what you’ve just learned. Unfortunately, you don’t get much help with that. There is no index, and the structure within each of the lengthy chapters isn’t really obvious if it exists. In a very conversational manner, Núñez recalls who he talked to, on what occasions, and reminisces about other influences that shaped his musical life or informed his foray into the wider Celtic cultural history. The typical connection between two items is “This reminds me of… “ While this may be absolutely true, it is not much help for the reader who wants to come away with a bit of structured knowledge, rather than just with the fuzzy feeling of having had a nice chat.
So, in an attempt at helping my poor old memory, I took some notes in the first half of the book (which is quite long enough to count as a book in its own right, so I am now having a break before I tackle the second half). Here are a few of the amazing but sadly disorganised bits and pieces that I noted:
* There is generally a lack of actual archaeological finds of musical instruments of the ancient Celts. The carnyx (war trumpet with animal-shaped head towering high above the player, as featured eg in Asterix), of which a nearly complete example was found at Deskford, and which you can now buy as a reconstruction, is a notable exception.
* Benjamin Franklin wrote about Scottish music. I can’t find it at GoodReads, must be an essay filed under Miscellaneous Writings? References in the book would have helped with this kind of thing.
* Marie Antoinette played the hurdy-gurdy. He just mentions that in passing, as something everybody is supposed to know, and as I didn’t, I looked it up. Apparently this was the tail-end of a wave of folk music being fashionable at the court of Versailles, which started under Louis XIV and ended within the reign of Louis XVI, so supposedly Marie-Antoinette also put away her gurdy at one point.
* To the same folk wave we also owe the musette de cour – a gentrified variant of the bagpipes. Nicolas Chédeville wrote the sonatas Il pastor fido for this instrument. Wrongly attributed to Vivaldi at one point, they are today part of the repertoire for flute and recorders.
* Music from Celtic traditions was considered primitive in the 18th century partly because it was rarely written down, and if at all, it was written just as a melody line, with harmonies left out. (See also: Bach’s cello suites. It took a Casals to convince the world that they are more than just finger exercises.)
* The fact that Welsh is today the most widely spoken Celtic language can in part be attributed to the popularity of Welsh male voice choirs. These, in turn, were created and supported in a bid to keep miners away from the booze.
* Galileo’s father wrote about the Irish harp. How random is that?
* Speaking of which, the oral tradition of harpers in Ireland (such as eg Turlough O’Carolan, 1670-1738) died out in the 19th century. The reason we know their music at all is that at the last of their regular reunions, which took place in Belfast in 1792, the organist of St. Anne’s Cathedral, Edward Bunting, wrote down some of the tunes they played. (Just a couple of weeks after reading that, I accidentally discovered an LP with this music in our house, recorded by Gráinne Yeats in 1980.)
* Post 1066 Norman rulers used the Arthurian legends to bond with the Celts against the Anglosaxons, which explains why Richard Lionheart had Breton harps playing at his wedding. (Plus lots more stuff about the Arthurian legends, and their various echoes in different parts of Europe.)
The take-home message is that everything in the history of the universe has some sort of Celtic connection. I love all these unexpected cross-links through history and across Europe (in the second half, Núñez also covers the Celtic diaspora around the world, so the connections will become global).
But what I really would have needed would be a set of maps with some arrows to reflect all these intercultural connections, some references and a very good index … Part of which would have been the task of the publishers, not the author, so this omission doesn’t diminish the author’s achievement. It just makes it less accessible to us mere mortals.
He repeatedly stresses his own lack of scientific expertise and says that he dreams of bringing the academic experts in the relevant fields together to one meeting and get them to sort it all out. Seeing that for this book he seems to have spoken personally to everybody who is anybody in any field related to Celtic archaeology, history, culture or music, I don’t quite see what’s stopping him from having that meeting next month.
the cover wants to be appreciated in fully unfolded form ...
The photo was taken, as he mentions on page 52, at the beach of Honón, with the Cies islands in the background. Stone monuments in this location are allegedly linked to the legend of Breoghan, and thus to everything else in the book.
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