The Revival Of The Xeremía

Maybe it's the name. It can be confused with "poble". The village. The people. It doesn't mean that, and indeed there isn't a truly satisfactory translation. Sa Pobla: the colony, the settlement, the inhabitation, the populace. Perhaps the last of these is the most satisfactory, a derivation from the passive verb - to people - while there is the assertiveness of the Mallorquín definite article, "sa", a powerful linguistic symbol of distinction with Catalan that is rooted in ancient Latin. Maybe it is because of the name that Sa Pobla became the spiritual heartland of a cultural hybridism that followed the conquest of centuries ago and which nowadays might be termed Mallorcaness, a place on which was conferred the Catalan-Aragonese cult of Sant Antoni and which has thus become the location for the annual gathering of the tribes of Mallorca for the fearful night of witches, demons and fire.

In some ways it is an unlovely town. Anonymous ring-road and low-rise factory and showroom units are the external non-descript artifacts typical of many Majorcan towns. The interior is a confusion of equally anonymous roads and streets criss-crossing in a Romanesque grid formation. Yet within this town beat the hearts of Mallorcaness, of tradition and of revivalism.

As with so much of the island's tradition and culture, the intervention of war and political dogma and then the industrial revolution of tourism, allied to the migration to the coasts and to employment in the new industry, undermined the long history of the xeremía, the Mallorcan bagpipe. Among traditional instruments, it wasn't alone in falling into disuse and silence. Its fellow x-instrument, the ximbomba, underwent a similar decline. This, the xeremía, is a bellow from the past that fades way back into the antiquities of Mesopotamia and Egypt, of pre-Middle Ages France and of the conquering King of Aragon. Jaume I and his successors brought more than just language and the cult of Sant Antoni, they also brought a bagpipe, and it moulded its sack into the Mallorcan xeremía, the word itself having been handed down from the French, "charamie".

It was, perhaps inevitably, Sa Pobla which led the revival of the xeremía, and to the fore was the cultural association known as Albopas. Where does it get its name from? Think about it for a moment, or if not ... Sapobla backwards; going backwards in time in revivalist terms. The association covers much of the traditional life of Sa Pobla; demons and what have you are all Albopas. It was not so very long in the past - twenty or so years ago - that the number of bagpipe players, the "xeremiers", numbered only around fifty in all across Mallorca. The number is now over 500. And whereas xeremier troupes were not so long ago confined to a limited number of towns and villages, now every village has its xeremiers.

The Albopas association is this weekend celebrating the twentieth meeting of xeremiers in Sa Pobla, an occasion which has, since the mid-1990s, contributed greatly to the revival of the local bagpipe and its accompanying flute-whistle and drum. The meeting has also been central to broadening the appeal of the xeremía to a more youthful age group. Twenty or so years ago, those few recognised xeremiers were getting on, thus endangering the tradition's future even more.

The success of the revival, demonstrated by the formation of xeremier troupes across the island, has also been recognised internationally. Seven years ago, Albopas went to New York for the World Fair of Mediterranean Music. Demons, xeremiers, they all flew off, and the pipers played Central Park along with other troupes from Palma, Sencelles and Sineu.

At midday today there is a procession in which different elements of the Albopas association will take part. In addition to the pipers, there will be the "caparrot" big heads as well as the Sa Pobla "Grif", dragon and, somewhat strangely perhaps, eel (though this is not strange as far as Sa Pobla is concerned; eels, farmed in Albufera, form a key part of the local cuisine).

It is odd to realise that many Mallorcan folk traditions which are nowadays firmly established and all but taken for granted are the result of revivals which have their origins only some thirty or so years ago. And they are with us thanks largely to the efforts of local cultural associations like Albopas, which have ensured that rather than die out and allow centuries of culture to be discarded, they are alive and, in the case of the bagpipes, making one hell of a welcome racket.

Agony Without Ecstasy: Glosadors

At a Sant Antoni celebration in Muro one year, a friend and I took ourselves away from our group that was assembled at a bar terrace in order to investigate what could only have been described as a God-awful racket. It was being made by an elderly lady and a younger gentleman. She was playing the ximbomba, he wasn't, and they were taking turns in making utterances in a tuneless half-sung fashion. I knew what they were, as I had encountered such utterances before, though not with the "musical" accompaniment. They were glosadors, two of the many Mallorcan performers of the art of the "glosa".

It's impossible to describe glosadors as singers, as they specialise in singing only in the loosest sense of the word. What they aren't, are straightforward verse poets. The glosa can and does veer off at a tangent, an improvisational element being important, as the glosador rarely, if ever, performs alone; he or she is normally in "competition" with at least one other and quite often with several others. The improvisation, indeed the whole performance, can also be aided by alcohol. Some glosadors stick to water in order to lubricate the vocal chords, such as they are, but others can take on board copious amounts of wine or mezcla, so much so that the performances become more like drinking-song contests.

The glosador tradition dates back at least to the nineteenth century when "professional" glosadors emerged who would travel the island to take on rivals in glosa combats. The glosadors, historically, have played an important part in Mallorca's culture, not just because they are part of a folk tradition but also because they were a vital conduit for disseminating information.

Mallorquín, as with other local Mediterranean dialects and lesser languages, used not to be written, and one reason why it wasn't written was because few Mallorcans would have been able to read it. Lack of education and little by way of print media made the written word pretty much redundant. Those who could read were the elite and they wouldn't have been reading Mallorquín, even if scripts or texts had been available. So the glosadors were a means of communication. Their songs could be ribald, but they also provided political and social commentary, with satire an essential ingredient.

The lack of written Mallorquín means that little of the work of glosadors from years ago has been captured for posterity. While some will have been handed down, in the time-honoured fashion by which storytelling is passed on, only fragments will have been. The essence of the glosa was, in any event, of the time, rather than it being folk storytelling. There is an example, however, of a combat that took place in 1944 in Felanitx and which was written down. What is quite revealing about this contest was that it was of course conducted in Mallorquín, and yet it took place at a time when Catalan and Catalan dialects were supposedly banned - for public purposes at any rate. Perhaps it demonstrates that the totality of proscription wasn't as total as is generally assumed. And perhaps it also shows that it was the glosadors who helped to keep the popular use of Catalan and Mallorquín alive before the Franco regime did start to relax its linguistic prohibition.

Nowadays, the glosadors are identified with the politics of language. One of them, Santa Margalida's "Xurí" (most glosadors have nicknames), contributed to a publication in defence of Catalan in which he referred to history repeating itself in Catalan being attacked. The glosadors are, therefore, very much part of the wider movement to defend the island's Catalan culture, and at a dinner ahead of the Sant Antoni fiestas in Sa Pobla, mayor Biel Serra, a member of the Partido Popular who is one of the more sympathetic towards language defence in the party, fought an impromptu glosa battle with opposition political leaders. 

The glosa is most certainly an acquired taste. The chances are that you wouldn't have a clue what the glosadors were on about, while the style can verge on the excruciating. But this is down, in no small part, to the fact that the local accent sounds as though it is being spoken/sung by someone who is in agony. This is the nature of the Mallorquín dialect and accent, however. The vocal sound isn't lovely; it isn't ecstatic, it is in pain. Yet for all that glosadors may seem impenetrable to the foreign observer, it should be noted that they play and have played a significant part in the island's culture. Go along and see them some time, and just laugh when the Mallorcans laugh.



Xurí featured in this glosador combat; Xurí is the young one.



 
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