Cape Verde music and songs

Music is the richest and most universal manifestation of Cape Verdean culture. Founder of a new nation of dozens of cultures of origin, the people of Cape Verde have developed original models of a musical culture where joys and sorrows, encounters and separations, land and sea, hunger and abundance, solitude and a night of nostalgia, love, life and death now become wounded melopes, now desperate, swirls of murmurs now still waiting for melodies or shouts of joy and festive.

In this way more or less rudimentary forms of music are generated, such as cantigas de monda (bark songs, such as watch-sparrow, clock-crow and chicken-watch), traditional agricultural islands (Santiago, Santo Antão, S. Nicolau and Brava), sung by children.

In Brava, he developed a genre called bombena,which was sung in chorus in agricultural work, and which followed the cadence of the work itself. Santo Antão, where widespread usage of the mill (mill) produced the so-called toadas de aboio,sung to encourage oxen to speed up the past on the ground.

Even in the sea, they sang and as cantigas marìtimas were particularly faithful to Cape Verdean physiognomy and its strong connection with the sea.

Particularly noteworthy were the cantigas de ninar (canção de ninar), usually tuned by his grandparents, who stayed home to take care of their grandchildren while their parents were at work. And they are still worthy of note to cantigas de roda, which animated the students during recreations, accompanied by body mime. Lenga-lengas, litanies(Santo Antão), religious prayers (Santiago), as well as the praises and eve are emanations of the Catholic ceremonies worship, but transported to defile the environment, usually in a warped Latin.

It is also worth mentioning the pastoral songs, chanted at the end of the year (S. Silvestro) and at the beginning of January, originating in traditional janeiras and reizados de Portugal.

There are also references to other types, defined as the rill small or maxixe (landum variant), both in Boavista, definitely a community known for its musical creativity.

Curiously, some stories like Goat’s Sheep, Blimunde and ninth Tiguera are sung on a pentatonic scale, used in the Far East.

Of great importance, in several islands like Santo Antão, Fogo or Boavista are the pilgrimage festivities (pilgrimage), influenced by the celebrations of popular saints in Portugal, but capturing in Cape Verde, its melodies and drums with drums, beat the edge of pylons, led by an old woman, colladeira, carrying a chorus of women singing a melancholy melody and monotone like a whimper that evokes people and scenes from real life. Among these the colà-Son-Djòn, dancing in the light of fires for the Feast of St. John in June, is the example of Príncipe, apparently originating in umbigadas or chegancas, at the time prohibited in Portugal. Also of European origin, Cape Verde remains in their original version (as with any transformation, they say), dances like the waltz, the Mazurca e o contradiction (dance of the country, originating in England).

Finally, a reference to funeral music, which has a deep tradition in Cape Verdean society, which want to remember, on the one hand, loved ones who go from this world and on the other hand, exorcize any death in a way and relieve the pain of those who remain. The dance music of the mourners (prefiche), which regularly invades during the long funeral vigils and crowded in Cape Verde, in the middle of the reverent silence that is established, is to shiver the hair.

The island of Boavista is mainly referred to as the Morna, a slow rhythm and musical melancholy, remembered in the world thanks to Cesaria Evora.

Modern music, as well as the emerging singers of Cape Verde, produce songs and melodies already very mixed with western genres, but in the lyrics (written especially in Kriol) they recall many everyday situations in which young people can easily find themselves.