The immaterial routes: from Castilian to Ladino and Mediterranean music. Michel Thomas-Penette. Le Jeudi. 26 August 2010.

 

Monastère de San Millán de la Cogolla

The discovery of immaterial heritage forms an essential part of the cultural routes: exploring how a festival, a tale, a language or a style of music has travelled Europe, revealing a shared identity.

 

The Route of language

 

“The Route of the Castilian Language and its Expansion into the Mediterranean, the Route of the Sefardic Migrations” is the first cultural route to be established on this basis. It all began in a monastery classed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1997: the monastery of SanMillán de la Cogolla in the Rioja. The Spanish route is based on the “GlosesEmilianenses” of San Millán from the eleventh century, recognised by numerous academics as containing the first written words of the Castilian language. 

The route is also based on a fifteenth-century novel written in what was to become a major literary language: Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It travels through the towns and cities which mark key stages in the literary, scientific and academic life of the language: San Domingo de Silos (Burgos), Valladolid, Salamanca, Ávila (home to two mystic writers, St Therese of the Child Jesus and St John of the Cross), and Alcalá de Henares. In the words of Julia Kristeva, writing about the saint’s texts in “Thérèse, mon amour”, “More than ever, the transmutation of values is needed to reinterpret tradition, notably religious, to the very heart of one’s love life, in relation to language, pleasure and others”.

 

Identities, intermixing and migrations

 

The European route continues, following the expulsion of those Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism from Spain in the fifteenth century. It encompasses the entire Mediterranean periphery: from Tetouan and Jerusalem in the south to Istanbul, Thessalonica and Sofia in the east, to Sarajevo and Ferrare in the north. “Red de Juderias de España”, a network of Spanish towns and one of the associations in charge of the Route of Jewish Heritage, takes an active part in the revitalisation of the heritage of Jewish quarters built before emigration. If there is a unifying theme in the complex and troubled history of the Jewish migrations, a history made of rejections and juxtapositions, it is Ladino – including Judeo-Spanish as spoken by the Jews of Morocco. Ladino is an identity, a liturgical language and a form of daily expression, transmitted in written, sung and spoken forms, that has survived the Holocaust to our days.

 

Walking this route, one meets expressions which have travelled in time and space. These expressions are linked to various musical styles which increasing numbers of contemporary musicians and singers are now revisiting and reinvesting with respect, sense and creativity. A new proposal for a cultural route is currently being set up in the great intercultural space that is the Mediterranean. 

With input from the group “EnChordais” and other orchestras and centres for music study and teaching, this route is to be based on the theme “Route of Byzantine and Mediterranean musical cultures”. Several projects have come together in relation to this, such as “MediMuse”, which searches for common musical roots, rhythms and instruments, and “Cantates des Rives”, coordinated by the Cité de la Musique of Marseille and which has organized a number of workshops, integrating Occitan chants and the traditional music of Greece and Northern Africa. 

This group has also promoted “ExTra!”, an initiative which searches for mixed musical influences between European minorities and migrants, and “The Tale of Music”, which looks for a Mediterranean equivalent to Prokofiev’s famous “Peter and the Wolf”, aimed at educating young children. Between ancient migrations, journeys of knowledge and musical meetings, the cultural routes follow in the footsteps of Fernand Braudel, for whom micro-histories turned into phenomena of long duration.