Spain 1955 | 2 Hours of Vintage Forge Songs, Struck Plank and Mountain Voices

🌍 Country 166 of 197 | The 1955 Series | Around This Dot 1955 Spain, twenty-nine million people, still largely rural and only beginning to emerge from years of self-sufficiency and rationing, in the year it was finally admitted to the United Nations. Over two hours of music as it might have sounded there in 1955, across four suites: the unmetered songs of the northern valleys; the struck plank of the cider houses and the anvil of the forge; the reapers of the high tableland; and a closing pair of heritage settings leading into the Pan-Spain Inter-Region Folk Extended Suite. CHAPTERS 0:00 Suite I: Songs of the Northern Valleys One woman alone on a green slope above a valley of slate roofs in the north with cloud sitting low on the peaks behind her, the phrases very long and with no beat under them anywhere, the voice wide open and pushed hard from the chest and turned through long slow melisma. Beside her an old man in a whitewashed doorway on a hot still afternoon, singing far down at the bottom of his range. Closes with the Songs of the Northern Valleys Extended Suite. 34:55 Suite II: Plank and Anvil In the cider houses of the far north, two men lay a heavy seasoned board across two upturned baskets and bring wooden poles down on it so their strokes interlock and fill each other's gaps and the pattern never stops. In a forge doorway in the south, a smith's anvil is struck once with a heavy hammer so the iron rings on long after the blow, and one man sings entirely alone above it with no other instrument at all. Closes with the Plank and Anvil Extended Suite. 1:06:36 Suite III: The High Tableland A line of reapers moving very slowly across a wheat field on the high tableland in the worst of the afternoon heat, one of them giving out a long phrase in a hard carrying voice and the whole line taking it up before he has finished. With them a rough fiddle carved from one piece with a skin belly and three thick gut strings, drawn low with a short heavy bow that never leaves a gap. Closes with the High Tableland Extended Suite. 1:36:01 Suite IV: Heritage and Inter-Region A woman keeping watch through the night in a stone room with a candle burning and the shutters closed. Then the anvil again, struck and left to ring all the way out, over a short reed pipe with a horn bell at each end, blown with the breath taken in through the nose so the tone never once breaks. Closes with the Pan-Spain Inter-Region Folk Extended Suite. ABOUT 1955 In 1955 Spain was an independent country under the authoritarian government of Francisco Franco, in power since the end of the civil war in 1939. It had been excluded from the United Nations at that organisation's founding and was admitted in December 1955; two years earlier it had signed agreements with the United States, which brought military bases and aid, and a concordat with the Vatican. The population was about twenty-nine million. The country was still largely rural and poor, only beginning to emerge from the years of self-sufficiency and rationing, with the first foreign tourists arriving on the Mediterranean coast and hundreds of thousands of people leaving the villages for the cities and for the factories of northern Europe. The music heard here belongs to those villages. ABOUT THE SERIES Around This Dot is a journey around our planet through sound. The 1955 Series visits every country on Earth, one country at a time, capturing the music a listener might have heard there in 1955. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, 197 countries in total. DISCLOSURE Music composed by AI and audio performed by AI based on detailed historical and ethnomusicological prompts. These are approximations of regional traditions, not authentic recordings. One thing needs saying plainly. This country had one of the largest and most widely exported popular music industries in the world in 1955, and none of it is represented here. This series excludes strong recorded idioms everywhere and renders the older layer beneath them, which in the south means the forms sung dry with no accompaniment at all, and elsewhere the village and work music of the valleys, the cider houses and the harvest fields. Created for educational and ambient listening purposes. #Spain #Iberia #ForgeSong #Anvil #Txalaparta #Asturias #Harvest #FolkMusic #1950s #AmbientMusic #WorldMusic #AroundThisDot