Music for the Camino

[Sasha Vanderhyde]

thank you for that I will look them up they sound like they could be just the ticket
sasha
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Eldor Pederson 
  To: GOCAMINOaPETE.URI.EDU 
  Sent: Friday, April 02, 2004 5:03 PM
  Subject: Music for the Camino


  After a long absence from participating in this list (boring story as to why), I was intrigued by the recent question of music for practice walks and some of the responses to it. Rather than listening to pastiches written for the pop tunes market, my preference would be to listen to some of the marching (drinking etc.) songs medieval and early modern pilgrims heard enroute to Santiago. Many of those songs have haunting melodies and walking rhythms as they were sung as pilgrims marched. Not a few of them are devotional, often sung to or in praise of Mary, but others are secular. A few are even a bit bawdy. Nights in refugios then, as now, included many glasses of beer and wine!

  There is a large and growing discography of such music, and many of the recordings are excellent ones. Some keywords to find them are: 1) singers and musicians including Anonymous 4, Jordi Savall and his groups Hesperion and La Capella Reial de Catalunya, Montserrat Figueras, Alia Musica, and Discantus; and 2) titles or descriptions including the terms "Codex las Huelgas," "Llibre Vermell," and most particularly "Codex Calixtinus." Fairly inexpensive recordings of pilgrim music are available from Naxos, although the best ones tend to come from high-end European record companies like Harmonia Mundi, Jade, and Astree-Auvidis.

  My current favorite is a disc I found last year by the French female singing group Discantus "Compostelle: Le chant de l'etoile" (Paris: Jade). With a crystalline sound, the performances of various laudes to St. James and pilgrim songs on the disc are haunting indeed.

  E. O. Pederson
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