Arrels

Blending tradition and heritage

Beyond «flamenco» in Spanish musical tradition. Arrels (Roots) represents a new approach to traditional Valencian music, interpreting it through the prism of the early music repertoire. After three decades working to recover our musical heritage, Capella deMinistrers felt it was time to undertake a re- evaluation of music from the oral tradition by seeking out the links between this tradition and the oldest known compositional forms (those found in threshing songs and lullabies, in instrumental pieces with irregular beats, and in the chants of the auroros (“dawn singers”) as well as the more famous boleros, fandangos and peteneras, whose commonalities of formand harmonic structure with passacaglias and ostinatos suggest that they too originated in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Arrels presents songs and instrumental pieces that traces and reaffirms the oral traditions of a rich and diverse musical world, reuniting the early music of its manuscripts or printings with the oral traditions of its people.