Coplas: Strangeness and awe

I am not sure what it is about the copla that exerts such a pull.  It may be something to do with the authenticity and democracy of the form. I was listening to a podcast  about the baguala. Leda Valladares spent much of her life gathering and singing Argentinian folk songs including this form. In a 1961 article on Argentinian folk music, composer Jaime Dávalos says,

La baguala es por excelencia el canto libre, sin ley, sin cánones, sin pauta. 

The baguala is free song par excellence, without law, without canon, without guidelines.

This, for me, is what tango is, stripped of all its urban trappings, its affectation and arrogance - free improvisation, without rules, the creative expression of the self, a profound connection with other people through music. It is emotion in music and movement and it is original, unique to each couple and different each time. This doesn't mean you happen to execute different moves in different orders. It is more than that, a different register altogether. I don't usually find what I mean in professional couples, whose bread and butter is selling moves. But this couple do show the dance and the connection in a simpler, elegant form with much respect for the music.

To a friend: Esta música [la copla] tiene un atractivo especial,  está lejos de la música occidental. Aunque la llamamos “música” como formas más populares, es más elemental.  A menudo pensamos en la música como entretenimiento, pero esto parece más fundamental, una necesidad, un acompañamiento para la vida.

This music [the copla] has a special something; it is nothing like Western music. Although we call it "music" like more popular forms, it is more elemental. We often think of music as entertainment, but this seems more fundamental, a necessity, an accompaniment to life.

And it is. The copleros and copleras speak of singing their vivencias, their lived experience. Sometimes we sing with pain, sometimes with hope. In  La Baguala: El canto de los Andes Gabriel, aged twelve, is asking his grandmother, the bagualera Estanislada Alarcón  about the coplas. She tells him he will need them.

Si una mujer esta enamorada de vos, te agarra y te echa la copla, y vos tenés que saber contestar la copla.

If a woman is in love with you, she grabs you and sings you a copla, you have to know how to reply to that copla.

Therefore, she continues, you have to study the coplas to know how to reply.

Hay coplas que se dice cuando vos estás conquistando a la chica.

There are coplas for when you are "conquering the woman". It is common to say that and not just in Argentina: old, young, everyone in between says it. I balk every time.

It is a profoundly different way of life: a boy takes love advice from his grandmother about how to act in song. And he says usted to her, addressing her with respect, as many people in the Americas do, depending on the person and the context. We have lost that blend of close formality too, if indeed we ever had it.

This is music that accompanies life and it is simultaneously funny and poetic. Gabriel asks his grandmother to say a copla so he can copy it down:

Vidita te estoy queriendo,

Lastima que tu dueno está viendo

Échale un puñado de sueños

Que se divierta durmiendo.

Light of my life, I love you

Too bad that your keeper is watching

Throw her a handful of dreams

That she may be have fun dreaming.

Gabriela's grandmother tells him:

Hay coplas para enamorar, para pelear...

There are coplas for falling in love, for fighting....

Then you see him going off with another woman and "le echa una copla de desprecio" - you sing him a disparaging copla.

Other copleras talk about exactly this - singing your own life into the copla. It reflects what is happening in your life right at that moment. It helps you with life. It seems to be both a form of support in song and in community. The songs reach into the past and a continuous vital thread, is kept alive now for future generations. The songs are receptacles for communal wisdom, revitalised every time they are sung.

Gabriel asks his grandmother what her favourite copla is.  She tell him one of them:

Cuando era chiquita, andaba de brazo en brazoY ahora que estoy grandecita, ni los perros me hacen caso.  

When I was young, I went arm in arm quite free,

But now I am old, even the dogs ignore me.

 

And with that she grins quietly and shuffles across the yard to make him a mate over the open fire.

Many of these conversations happen outside, under a tree or outside a house with dogs and chickens roaming around. It is a profoundly natural setting for a kind of music that is both ordinary and extraordinary. This is how I most like to hear the coplas, outside, rather than sung for a performance. The same idea seemed to strike Atahualpa when a coplero told him that it is the landscape that puts the beauty in his song. 

Although there are famous copleras and copleros, many songs are sung by ordinary people with ordinary voices. The aim is not singing for fame or fortune, to be applauded or to be liked which, in contrast, seem very modern, very western aims. It is singing alone or in community, or in the case of the vidala, sometimes in a harmony of two or three others.  It is singing for altogether different reasons.

In the Pequeños Universos documentary, Mariana Carrizo sits among tree with the musician, Chango Spasiuk. He seems quiet, respectful and sensitive, and, according to a friend who met him when he came to their town, was indeed so. Mariana explains the caja [handheld drum] comes from our ancestors. The melody is also ours. The coplas came from the Spanish, during the conquista, even from the Arabs before them. She says more than 90% of this form is native to that land and people because each place has different melodies and ways of singing and each person adds something of their own experience at that moment to the copla as they sing it. Things that can't be said with the voice can be said with the caja, she says, which is like the heartbeat of the earth and of the singer.

There is a clear statement about that this music is part of a particular culture, heritage, area and people but which the Spanish contributed to in a small way. It is more than a validation, it is a claim.

Paula Suárez, in Amaicha del Valle, the same Amaicha as in Atahualpa's introduction to his baguala, works, hoeing her land among her goats and singing. The pachamama, mother earth, the earth itself becomes happy, she says, with song. Again, those very different values and beliefs. I am reminded of having read something like: anyone who has ever set foot in the Americas knows that there is another pulse, another life below the surface; something, it was implied inexplicable, not to do with rationality and very un-European.

The narrator says that singing the songs is a way of evoking and validating their Diaguita origins in the Calchaquí valleys. The Diaguita were known for their courage, organisation and resistance to succeeding colonisers. In cultural stories about Argentina and the wider continent you hear again and again about past, even present disparagement of native cultures. Even now, indigenous cultures suffer more poverty and discrimination than other social groups. El indio is often described as being words of prejudice, that lacked dignity, respect, words to denote someone "lesser". I first heard this word, indio, sung by Atahualpa, maybe in Camino del Indio and it was a word sung with respect and honour. The way we are introduced to things is important.

Paula says: I sing what I feel... That authenticity of feeling again; the fact that we feel something being justification enough to express it, whereas, a European, I was told repeatedly, growing up, and we still are, not to be emotional, that emotion was problematic, was liable to spoil things, should be suppressed in favour of bloodless reason. It is that left and right brain thing again. I was appalled when a compañero from one of the American countries savaged me in an unexpected, unjustified and emotional outburst earlier this year. In shock, horror and distaste I recoiled into silence. It's what I felt! he said, later. Shouldn't I say what I feel? And I, who had repressed for months criticism of my own, because it would be impolite not to, thought, No, not if it's like that. I still feel raw and conflicted on the subject. It's what emotion does, I guess. The Greeks, the Romans advocated moderation in all things. A more cautious friend, European, said There is a line I don't cross. Maybe that is why we are still friends.

Paula continued, We affirm our roots. We are not ashamed when they call us “indios”...we look after the earth, we remember the advice of our forebears. Again, that very different way of life, connected to community and to the land. I am reminded for the nth time, of Mark Boyle, who, renouncing the values (and comforts) of the West went looking for just this, I think, in his book, not surprisingly called The Way Home.

Here is Mariana, accompanied by Chango, singing the lovely vidala, Te he'i de olvidar (I must forget you).  

Te he'i is a way of saying "I must" or "will have to" which I have only found in songs.  I think it comes from guaraní - a people, culture and language with a rich literary tradition, centered on Paraguay and adjacent regions.