cantai cantigas / sing songs

 

 

Trás-os-montes, a poor region in the north of Portugal.

2 trips, one on the summer, another on the winter time, searching for people and songs.

Bruno, 8 years-old ‘sings with the tapes’.

 

 

Deolinda ‘walks with the cows’ and show us the village cemetery that ‘has a lot to see’. Ti Ana, 90 years-old, sings songs by the fire with the neighbors who ask her to ‘sing another one’. Oral tradition songs, learned from her mother and grand-mother, sang in ‘mirandes’ a local dialect. The songs tell us tragic stories that might remind one of Shakespeare.

 

I shot this documentary in 1999 but just finished it in 2006. I always thought I would go back there one day. What I shot in 1999 I thought would be the first step in my research, not the entire film, but I never went back there. It is a project that I was dedicated to, so I decided to look at the footage I had with an open mind, trying not to think about what I wanted to do by then, but just watch what was actually in the images.

 

I was surprised how things made sense. My affection for the persons I was shooting with and the respect I felt for those were in the images and it already had an inner flow. This was the first time I felt my images were so clear, sharp, with everything right inside. And I could listen to those songs forever… there’s something primal and essential in them, in the way people live and relate with the landscape, the Nature, the fire…

more in claudiatomaz.com

Cante alentejano - Candidatura a Património Imaterial

Related birds evolve different songs and colours

Canadian Researchers have discovered a pattern in birds' songs and plumage that help explain some of the colourful and tuneful variety in nature.

The team found that closely related birds that share the same habitat tend to look and sound different.
This evolutionary rule of thumb seems to help birds to identify members of their own species.
Dr Paul Martin presented the findings at the First Joint Congress for Evolutionary Biology in Ottawa.
He and his team studied 250 bird species throughout the world.
With the help of the Macaulay Library of birdsong, they were able to compile a database of where the birds lived and what they looked and sounded like.
"We found, repeatedly, that birds that [live in the same location] with a close relative have more divergent songs and colour patterns," he told BBC Nature.
By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature, Ottawa, Canada
more BBC Natures