In other musical news, I joined a community choir this fall! In addition to the normal church-songs-in-Latin repertoire, they also sing quite a lot of zarzuelas, a traditional Spanish musical theatre-esque genre. It's similar to what we would call operetta, complete with swirly, colorful dresses and cheesy lyrics. The choir is directed by an energetic Catalan guy who spends about 15% of rehearsal time trying to keep everyone’s desire to socialize in check. “Now we’re going to stand up and sing this again,” he’ll say, “but please, remain in silence. Silence. I SAID, SILENCE, PLEASE!” But he is an excellent and demanding musician, and the music is a lot of fun to sing. At our first concert, we were instructed to recreate the theatrical feel of an actual zarzuela performance. This entailed laughing artificially, pretending to gossip, giving what the director dubbed a “special sigh”, and, of course, shouting things like “Olé!” and “Viva Madrid!” I felt pretty ridiculous doing this, but the other choir members, all apparently zarzuela veterans, managed it with aplomb and no apparent loss of dignity.
Now we are preparing for a Christmas concert, which will be a mix of really old church music in Latin, traditional Spanish carols, and other songs from around Spain and the world—there’s a song in Catalan, one in Basque, one in Japanese, one from Peru, etc. For me the most interesting has been learning the Spanish carols, especially the ones from Andalusia—they frequently have snatches where the music echoes the rhythm of castanets or the aching melodies of flamenco. I’ve also been amused to see that (at least in several of the songs we’re singing) the Christ child is portrayed not as a tiny, saintly being, but as an actual baby. Sample lyric: “They made soups for the Christ Child/He didn’t want to eat them/So, since they were so sweet,/Saint Joseph ate them himself.” No “no crying he makes” here!
Beyond the realistic portrayals of Jesus, I must admit that the lyrics to some Spanish Christmas carols are just bizarre. The ultimate example of this is the song “Los pesces en el rio”, the chorus of which goes as follows:
“But look how the fish in the river are drinking!/To see the newborn God!/They drink, and they drink, and then they drink again/The fish in the river, to see the newborn God.”
Does this sound more like a Christmas song, or a recycled drinking song? Probably in your native language, songs like this don’t register—you’ve been singing them for so many years you cease to think about what they’re actually saying. Not so when sing carols in Spanish, during which my thought process is something like: “I think the melody is more or less like this… oops, that was supposed to be a sixteenth note. . . what the heck is that WORD?! Oh, well, I'll ask later! The fish drink and they drink and—what is this song ABOUT?” But it’s good company and a great mental workout--just what’s needed to ward off the sluggishness of winter.