6
She Plays the Pipe
Galician Female Bagpipers in the
Production of Local Tradition and
Gender Identity
Javier Campos Calvo-Sotelo
INTRODUCTION
In the extreme northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, Galicia has remained
for centuries isolated from its neighboring communities, due to its rough
terrain and underdeveloped communications systems. As a result, progress
and modernity arrived there later, allowing the survival of interesting cul-
tural practices, including some anachronistic remnants and demographic
constrictions, although not necessarily deterrents of the contemporary
emergence of female pipers studied in this chapter. In fact, the gender
marker was reified in unique ways around the instrument assumed as soul
par excellence of the Galician community and outstanding androcentric
(that is, male-dominated) fetish, which is the bagpipe.
However, within the Iberian sphere, Galician society is not essentially
different with regards to the secular discrimination of women. More-
over, in some respects the machismo found there surpasses that of other
regions. For example, in the muiñeira (miller dance, the most popular
Galician dance) the woman must keep her eyes down at all times, while
the male dancer looks at her frontally: “she receives submissive the mas-
culine homage, with the sight set on his feet” (Castroviejo 1983 [1970]:
579. Spanish original, hereafter SO
1
). According to Crivillé this forced
visual reverence is “almost unique in the varied typology of Spanish
dances” (1988: 255. SO). Clear evidence of discrimination, directly con-
cerning bagpipes, can be read from the nineteenth-century Galician dic-
tionary by Cuveiro; the entry Gaiteiro (male piper) is simply defined
as: “Piper. He who plays the bagpipe”. Instead, Gaiteira (female piper)
means: “Frivolous and slutty woman” (1876: 144. SO). Galician folklore
is unequivocal: bagpipes belong to men, and females very much appreci-
ate the masculinity of the instrument. For instance, in the popular song
“La gaita de Cristovo” (The pipe of Cristovo), he is kicked out of the
house by his wife because he sold the bagpipe. A phallic metaphor is
explicit in the following song: “A muller do gaiteiro/Muller de moita for-
tuna/Ela toca dúas gaitas/Outras non tocan ninguna” (The piper’s wife/
Is very lucky/She plays two pipes/Others play none. Losada 2002: 44.
Galician original, hereafter GO).
97
98 Javier Campos Calvo-Sotelo
Women devoted to popular music were rather infra-cultural figures
in Galicia, largely confined to begging; when American journalist Ruth
Anderson toured the provinces of Pontevedra and Coruña in 1924–1926,
she met several scenes of mendicancy. One of them consisted of two
women playing at a rural fair in Lalín (Pontevedra): “a blind violinist and a
seeing tambourine player, who went about collecting pennies” (Anderson
1939: 109–110); other sources describe a similar marginality (Arias 1980).
There are scarce testimonies of women playing bagpipes. It is likely that
they did play at times, but this almost never took place in public. In Scot-
land “[g]irl pipers, though they certainly existed, were relegated to the
background” (Collinson 1975: 193), and the circumstances were similar
in Ireland (Harper and McSherry 2015). The Galician figure of Aurea
Rodríguez (1897-?) has received some attention; she founded a pipe band
in Orense with her orphan brothers a century ago, but despite this and a
few more isolated precedents, women were detached from bagpipes for
centuries. The masculinity attributed to the instrument embodied a kind
of moral order, even a religious dogma, and any deviation was simply
unimaginable (Campos 2007, 2015). In Galicia:
Women’s musical practices were focused on singing accompanied
by small percussion (usually the tambourine) or linked to dance.
A woman was an ornament for popular music, lacking remuneration.
By contrast, men reigned supreme over pipes. . . . He was the musi-
cian, the “professional”, and was accordingly paid.
(Barreiro 2012: 143. GO)
On the other hand, Nacho González (bagpipe teacher) points out that con-
cerning the skills required to play pipes, gender is irrelevant; “even young
girls can do it just as an adult man” (Personal Communication, hereafter
PC, 2018
2
). According to Hipólito Cabezas (influential piper and teacher),
“a girl can play the bagpipe for more minutes than an adult male if she
masters the technique of the instrument. Piping is not a matter of strength”
(Graña 2013. SO).
Despite the weight of history, the “Celtic decade” of the 1990s (Campos
2017) witnessed a sudden emergence of young female pipers in Galicia,
who challenged the male-gendered realm of the instrument. The most out-
standing were Cristina Pato, Mercedes Peón, and Susana Seivane. A new
generation is currently taking over their initial outbreak, with significant
activities that revitalize Galician cultural capital. Forerunners of all of
them were a 1960s pipe band called Meniñas de Saudade (Nostalgic Girls),
from Ribadeo (Lugo), whose socio-cultural role was quite different due to
the historical context. The phenomenon here studied is rather uncommon,
as the figure of the female piper is not frequent in the world. Susana Seiv-
ane stressed in an interview how it was “outside Galicia” where people
were surprised to see a female piper (Rejas 2005. SO). This fact might
be explained considering Galician background culture. Firstly, the Gali-
cian matriarchy: an internal hierarchy that made it normal to see a woman
pulling the oxcart, driving a tractor, organizing the family businesses, and
99 She Plays the Pipe
ultimately playing bagpipes. This matriarchy was not due to the supposed
femininity of the Celtic ancestors, or similar fantasies, but to the scourge
of Galician significant male emigration.
The high levels of male migration from Galicia produced a remarka-
ble demographic imbalance in many areas. In some jurisdictions, there
were as few as eighty men for every one hundred women. . . . Thus,
Gallegan society was characterized by high rates of female-headed
households.
(Poska 2000: 314)
Local nationalism decisively interfered with the social reality. Miguélez-
Carballeira establishes how the myth of a “feminine” Galicia (sweet,
nostalgic, and traditional) was discarded at the beginning of the twentieth
century as inefficient in the construction of an active and pressing Gali-
cianism: “the early texts of Galician political nationalism reacted against
such metaphors by means of a heightened masculinist discourse bent on
recasting national insurgence as a question of virility” (2012: 367; see
Palacios 2009). The female “inherent inferiority” pervaded the twenti-
eth century; when Maruxa Miguéns (wife of Xosé Romero, founder of
the Galician traditional band Os Rosales) started rehearsing with her
husband’s band, the male members said: “what a shame she is not a
man to come with us” (Couto 2017: 57. GO). Years after she declared
that in the early 1960s “a woman was deprived of everything. . . . It
was totally inconceivable that a woman played in a men’s band” (Busto
2005: 65. Portuguese original). In the Casa da Gaita Museum (House of
bagpipe. Viascón, Pontevedra), some instruments of the exhibition are
classified as typically played by women; none of them are melodic, only
percussion, as if to suggest low female intellectual, rather than physical,
status (author’s visit, July 31, 2018). Therefore, the pipers’ revolution
of the 1990s probably involved an assault not so much on masculine
strength, but on talent and intelligence, and as characterized by a strong
determination:
[In the last decades] bagpipes are the most played instrument by
female musicians, above others such as the piano or the violin, which
had enjoyed a much wider preference among the institutions of music
education in Galicia.
(Barreiro 2012: 143. GO)
Secondly, and likewise related to male migration, a little-known fact is
that there have been many female bagpipers in Galicia in the last century
and up to the present. They constitute an essential support for the feast, the
maintenance and sustainability of Galician musical heritage, and the pro-
duction of spaces of positive social interaction: in the patron celebration,
summer events, carnivals, weddings, and the like. These girls and children,
wearing the regional dress, are totally apart from the music industry, and
normally ignored by the people around; they play traditional pieces with
100 Javier Campos Calvo-Sotelo
moderate technique, and will barely obtain any profit from their perfor-
mance. They articulate a conventional-touristic image of Galicia – accord-
ing perhaps to the interests of a local Council – but their contribution to
the celebration must not be disregarded; in many cases their formation
and activity come from individual initiatives, not from institutional and/or
commercial strategies (Figure 6.1).
Thirdly, with the Spanish transition to democracy and its cultural tide
(after 1975), there was a rediscovery of Galician traditional music by art-
ists and bands like Milladoiro, Emilio Cao, Fuxan os Ventos, and others,
which triggered a conscience of local-ness as the triumph of the aesthetic
sovereignty of Galicia (Campos 2009). The pipers of the 1990s thus incor-
porated a burden of overcoming symbolically the past, helped by a strong
revival that spread worldwide since the mid-twentieth century. Finally,
despite Galician long-established backwardness, the feminist movement
also left its mark, and a woman holding a bagpipe began to suggest refine-
ment and cosmopolitanism (the reverse of older times), in addition to the
pure bodily attraction (on female creativity, gender stereotypes, and domi-
nation models, see Eisler, Donnelly and Montuori 2016).
To summarize, in the late twentieth century a synergistic combination of
facts paved the way for the success of female pipers in the old and remote
Galicia. Pato stated in 2005 that:
I have never felt gender discrimination. . . . In my record label [Fono-
folk] in 1999, the slogan was something like “Cristina Pato, the rst
Figure 6.1 Pipers in Cambados (Pontevedra), celebrating the Albariño Wine
Feast. August 6, 2016
Source: Photo J. Campos.
101 She Plays the Pipe
woman to release a bagpipe album in Spain” [Tolemia]; as far as
I know, that headline opened for me many doors to the media, and
maybe my success is due to that phrase. . . . Honestly, my case has
been a clear example of “positive discrimination”.
(PC 2005. SO)
3
Seivane concurred when asked if to be a woman hindered the access to
solo piping: “not at all. Nowadays there are many women playing the bag-
pipe. . . . It is already a normalized fact” (Mouriño and Sánchez 1999:
23. GO). Galician cultural micro-cosmos, at the turn of the century, was
experiencing via bagpipes a process of redefinition of the female figure,
the birth of a local ecofeminism, and a remarkable gender leveling that
went far beyond the strict limits of music. Three pipers stood out within
the process, but they had a noteworthy precedent.
MENIÑAS DE SAUDADE
Meniñas de Saudade were a pipe band founded in the northern village
of Ribadeo (Lugo) in 1961 on the initiative of the cultural promoters
Amando and Carlos Suárez Couto; their teacher and manager was the
piper Primitivo Díaz. Initially they were eight girls, and eventually ten or
more, forming a main section of pipes accompanied by snare drum and
tambourine or square drum. María Acuña, journalist and researcher, is
the daughter of Teresa Rodríguez, piper of Saudade. According to María,
the 1960s were a turning point in the history of Galicia, a time of socio-
political effervescence in which the vindication of women’s role in music
relied upon a group of pipers, Saudade, the first band entirely formed
by women in Galicia and Spain, although there were precedents abroad
(PC 2018–19).
4
From a contextual perspective, nonetheless, the band possibly responded
to the Francoist patriarchal imperative, playing in demure style, and con-
fined to an ornamental function (see Campos 2009; Hernández 2014).
5
Moreover, their organization and decision making belonged to men
exclusively. To some extent they could fall within the category of ‘sexual
exoticism’ (Giuliani 2016), meaning gender otherness exploited as enter-
tainment (playing pipes in this case). Some marginalizing mechanisms
were influential; for example, Teresa Rodríguez remembered how joining
the band altered positively her adolescence, because at that age girls were
deprived of continuing to study: “we had to devote ourselves to learn sew-
ing, to be dressmakers” (Cuba 2012. SO). A particular trait of Saudade is
that they always played in strict unison, avoiding the complexities of poly-
phonic and rhythmic combinations (PC 2018–2019). Their monophony
perhaps reflected the then widely accepted belief that women were unable
to understand anything that required mental effort (more information and
some pictures of the band are available on http://bit.do/eS8YH, and mostly
on Acuña’s 2013 online paper: http://bit.do/eTefc).
Despite the submission connotations, Meniñas de Saudade achieved an
impressive success all over Galicia and beyond, displacing women from
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.