¿Cuándo empieza una melodía a decir de dónde eres?

We ask ourselves

• How do you know where a phrase ends in music that has no words?
• Why do whole regions adopt songs that nobody from there actually wrote?
• If two people play the same notes, what tells you who is who?
• What happens to a folk dance when forty musicians play it off a score?
• Who decided that the jota is played on guitar, bandurria and lute?
• Can a song defend something at a time when saying it out loud is banned?

Don't answer yet. We come back to these at the end.

The fragment

Before we play anything, we sing. On the board, an ordinary jota stanza:

• Si tuvieras olivares
• como tienes fantasía,
• los molinos del aceite
• por tu cuenta correrían.

Four lines. But a jota does not sing them four times: it sings them seven, and not in the order on the page. First line two, as the way in; then lines one, two, three and four; then line four again; and it closes on line one. That pattern has a name: 2-1-2-3-4-4-1.

What we do in class is simple. We count 1-2-3 with a hand, because a jota is in triple metre, and we sing the seven phrases straight through. Tuning does not matter. What matters is noticing something else: where you need to breathe. That is where a phrase ends.

Now the same melody somewhere else. The Jota from Falla's Siete canciones populares españolas is a jota with a piano, written in 1914 to be sung in a drawing room or a concert hall. Listen to all of it with nobody talking over it. Then we decide together what has been gained and what has been lost.

What changed

For centuries the question of what music was for had a short answer: whatever the payer wanted. The church paid for masses, the court paid for entertainments, the theatre paid for operas. In the nineteenth century a new customer shows up, and it is a strange one, because it has no face: people who want to recognise themselves in something.

Look at the extreme case. Poland disappears from the map as a state at the end of the eighteenth century, and for more than a hundred years there is no Polish flag you can carry down a street. What you can do is play the piano. Chopin writes at least 58 mazurkas and 23 polonaises, and those two dances end up doing the job a state could not.

And what exactly is Polish about them? One very small, very specific thing: where the accent lands. The mazurka is in triple metre, like the waltz, but it stresses the second and third beats instead of the first. Count 1-2-3 and feel the push arrive in the wrong place, and you have heard the difference without knowing anything about Poland.

This is where the technical part of the unit comes in, and it is the part that pays for everything else. A melody is not a row of notes: it is a row of phrases. A musical phrase is a unit that makes sense on its own, like a spoken sentence, and you know where it ends because that is where the singer breathes. Playing in a way that respects those phrases is called phrasing.

On top of that skeleton the nineteenth century puts two different tools for making a note stand out. You know the first one: dynamics, accenting with volume, louder or softer. The second rarely gets named in class and does half the work: agogics, accenting with time.

Accenting with time means holding a note longer, easing off before an arrival, or coming in slightly early. The theorist Hugo Riemann called it the agogic accent: a note stands out because it lasts longer, not because it is louder. Do that continuously and flexibly and you get rubato, which is Italian for "stolen".

Carl Mikuli, who studied with Chopin, wrote down how his teacher did it: the accompanying hand kept strict time while the other hesitated or ran ahead, "as in passionate speech". The time one hand steals, the other gives back. Two people playing the same notes sound different because of this, and not because of anything else.

At the same time, in German-speaking countries, folk song walks into the middle-class drawing room through the Lied: a poem, one voice and a piano, with none of the opera house's display. Schubert develops it from 1814 and Beethoven writes the first cycle in 1816. The melody stops decorating the text and becomes the argument.

It is worth saying what is not settled, because that is the interesting part. In 1852 Liszt wrote that Chopin drew straight from Polish folk music, and readers took "national" to mean "folk". Out of that came what Chopin scholarship calls its longest-standing myth: most likely he heard this music in the city, in Warsaw, not in a village.

That does not make it worth less. It moves it. A musical identity is partly collected and partly built, and the nineteenth century did both at once without asking permission.

Hard facts: Chopin, at least 58 published mazurkas written between 1824 and 1849, and at least 23 polonaises for solo piano, the first in 1817 at the age of seven and the last in 1846. Lied: voice and piano on a poem, with Schubert from 1814 and Beethoven's first cycle in 1816. Agogic accent, Riemann's term; rubato, as described by Mikuli.

The same device elsewhere

A melody working as a flag is not a nineteenth-century or a European idea. These three do it on three continents a hundred years apart, and they are worth hearing back to back:

• Sweet Home Alabama, Lynyrd Skynyrd (1974) — three chords and a two-bar figure that an entire state took as its own. It also brings the problem along: it is an answer song, and a line about Alabama's governor is still argued over. Flag melodies carry politics inside them.
• Finlandia, Sibelius (1899) — written while Russia was cutting back Finnish autonomy. It circulated under invented titles to dodge the tsarist censors; the music was the same, the title was not. Finland still has no official anthem.
• El cóndor pasa, Daniel Alomía Robles (1913) — an Andean melody placed inside a zarzuela premiered in Lima. Peru declared it national cultural heritage in 2004, and in 1970 Simon & Garfunkel turned it into a worldwide hit in English.

All three do the same job: give a group of people something they can sing all the way through, from memory, together.

And here at home?

Here the answer has a name of its own, and it deserves telling slowly, because it is the best documented of the lot.

What a jota is, from the inside. Triple metre, a diatonic scale, major mode, and a harmony of alarming simplicity: tonic and dominant seventh, and not much else. It opens with the llamada, four strummed chords from the whole band on the tonic, and it ends with four heavily marked chords.

In between, two things alternate. The variaciones are instrumental, eight bars long, half on the tonic and half on the dominant, and they are where the players show off. The coplas are what the singer sings: the four-line stanza spread across the seven phrases you built in the previous section.

One detail you hear the moment someone points it out: the opening phrase is sung on the dominant, which is why it sounds as if nothing has started yet. Older singers used a different order of lines, 1-1-2-3-4-4-1. Today's 2-1-2-3-4-4-1 is the modern one.

Who plays it. Today's rondalla is plucked strings: the guitar takes the bass and is strummed, the bandurria carries the melodies up top, the lute does the counterpoint, and castanets and tambourines mark the beat. What tends to go unsaid is that this is a selection.

Folklore research documents that the jota was also played on the gaita de boto (the Aragonese bagpipe), the chiflo, the dulzaina, violins, flutes and even accordions, with drums and earthenware jars for percussion. The plucked-string band that now looks like "the" jota was fixed that way partly by the standardisation the genre went through under Franco. What you hear at a competition is not everything that used to be sung.

How far back. Less far than you would think, and with gaps. The name is not securely documented until the end of the seventeenth century, in a codex called Cifras para arpa found in Ávila, at the head of folio 25. Demetrio Galán Bergua proposed an earlier trace from 1666: a villancico by José Ruiz de Samaniego, chapel master at El Pilar, which already has the jota's typical sixteen-bar opening.

Antonio Beltrán Martínez, one of its sharpest scholars, holds that the genre is not born before the eighteenth century and spreads across the peninsula in the nineteenth. One fact helps: no jota lyrics are known from before the nineteenth century. It was danced first, and sung a good while later.

The oldest scene we can describe in detail is from 1828. An account of a commemoration held in Zaragoza in honour of Fernando VII records young men going out at midnight to sing jotas outside girls' houses, with guitars, requintos, bandurrias, violas, violins, bassoons and flutes. That is the street: at night, free, and with no stage.

Imagen: Bibliothèque nationale de France, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

How it reached the hall. The first step is taken by an Aragonese man at a piano. Florencio Lahoz y Otal, born in Alagón in 1815, moves to Madrid in 1840 and publishes his Nueva Jota Aragonesa there: five sung sections, forty-two variations and a coda, built on tunes from the Ribera Alta del Ebro. It was reprinted and expanded across Spain and Europe.

The second step is taken by a Russian. Mikhail Glinka travels through Spain and in 1845 writes the Capriccio brillante on the Jota aragonesa, known today as his Spanish Overture No. 1. It is a jota for symphony orchestra, played by people who had never seen a night serenade.

The third step is taken by the market. In 1874 a Paris press publishes La Jota aragonesa, boléro pour piano by J. B. Duvernoy, opus 309, priced at five francs and dedicated to a young lady. Look at the label: the French publisher calls it a boléro, which is a different dance in a different metre. For selling in Paris it made no difference; what was being sold was Spain, not the jota.

1894 is the year the jota gets organised. On 26 March, at the Hotel Inglés in Madrid, the Aragonese journalists Eusebio Blasco and Mariano de Cavia put on a "Fiesta a la Jota". The bandurria player Ángel Sola and Santiago Lapuente perform, and out of it comes the Lapuente-Sola collection, the genre's first major songbook.

That same year Zaragoza launches the Certamen Oficial de Jota, run by the city council during the Pilar festival and held every year since. It has been interrupted only three times: in 1898 for the Cuban war, in 1918 for the flu, and from 1936 to 1939 for the Civil War. The first winner was Blas Mora, born in Teruel in 1861.

A competition changes a music. From the moment there is a jury, a stage and a first prize, singing well stops being something done at night in a street and becomes something you prepare. You gain technique and a fixed repertoire; you lose the person who sang badly and sang anyway.

1895: the rondalla climbs onto an opera stage. Tomás Bretón premieres La Dolores on 16 March 1895 at the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid. It is set in Calatayud, and in the first act a rondalla walks on stage and everyone sings a jota. Bretón had studied the jota in 1890 in order to write it.

It worked as few things have worked here: 53 consecutive days in Madrid and 103 at the Tívoli in Barcelona, then the Teatro Real, the Liceo, Prague and Buenos Aires. A jota from Calatayud, sung in Italian in Milan.

1919: the jota ends up in London. The final dance of Manuel de Falla's The Three-Cornered Hat is a jota. It opened on 21 July 1919 at the Alhambra Theatre with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, choreography by Léonide Massine, conducted by Ernest Ansermet, with sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso.

Foto: Azahara00, CC BY-SA 4.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

And the way back. In 1940 Zaragoza city council founds the Escuela Municipal de Jota, whose first singing teacher was Pascuala Perié until 1950; Huesca opens its own in 1975 and schools follow across Aragón. Since 2017 the Fonoteca de la Jota, in the Biblioteca de Aragón, has held more than two thousand recordings.

Spain, at the same time. In 1891 Felipe Pedrell publishes Por nuestra música, arguing that Spain will have a music of its own the day it builds one on its popular song instead of imitating Italy. It is not a piece of music: it is a commission, and his students take it on.

The three names are his. Isaac Albéniz writes Iberia between 1906 and 1909; Enrique Granados writes Goyescas in 1911; and Manuel de Falla writes the Siete canciones populares españolas in 1914, whose fourth song is, of all things, a jota. The same one you sang at the start of this unit, with a piano answering it between phrases.

Classroom activities

• While the Certamen jota plays: everyone counts the sung phrases of one copla on their fingers, in silence. Afterwards we compare. Anyone who reaches seven has heard the whole structure.

• While the Chopin mazurka plays: we count 1-2-3 with a foot and clap only when the accent does not land on beat 1. We will get it wrong at first; twenty seconds later, not.

• While Schubert's Erlkönig plays: there are four characters and one singer. We raise a hand each time the character changes. The clue is not the words, it is the pitch and the force of the voice.

• While Falla's Jota plays: we breathe when the singer breathes, without singing. Counting breaths is counting phrases, and it is the fastest way to hear phrasing.

• Play: we build the jota copla with whatever instruments are in the room, first in unison and then with a two-chord accompaniment. Then we build Sweet Home Alabama, whose chart and tab are in the library, and compare two melodies that serve as flags.

• Create: take a melody the whole class knows and play it twice. The second time, change no notes at all: change only the dynamics and the agogics. If anyone notices the difference, the unit has done its job.

Key vocabulary

• Phrase — frase: una unidad de melodía con sentido completo; acaba donde el cantante respira
• Phrasing — fraseo: la manera de tocar respetando esas frases
• Dynamics — dinámica: acentuar con el volumen
• Agogics — agógica: acentuar con el tiempo (alargar, frenar, adelantarse); rubato es «tiempo robado»
• Copla — la cuarteta que canta el cantador de jota, repartida en siete frases musicales

Resources

The songs in this unit are in the library, each with its own article, full-band chart and tab: La flaca, Sweet Home Alabama, La Gozadera.

Songs in the library that are also flags, each with its own article, chart and tab: Sweet Home Alabama, La Gozadera, La flaca.

The sung jota, today and with a jury — Lucía Claver's prize-winning jotas, on Aragón Play. Count the phrases in one copla.

Who is playing behind — how the rondalla for Zaragoza's Certamen Oficial de Jota is put together. Guitar, bandurria and lute, each with its own job.

The same jota, with a piano and in a hall — Jota, from Falla's Siete canciones populares españolas (1914), sung by José Manuel Montero with Aurelio Viribay. This is the listening for "The fragment".

The jota for orchestra, written by a Russian — Glinka's Capriccio brillante on the Jota aragonesa (1845), by the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.

A rondalla inside an opera — the jota from Tomás Bretón's La Dolores (1895), conducted by Miguel Roa. The action takes place in Calatayud.

The jota in London, with sets by Picasso — final dance from Falla's The Three-Cornered Hat (1919), by ADDA·Simfònica.

Where the accent lands — Chopin's Mazurka in A minor Op. 17 No. 4, played by Eric Lu, on the Chopin Institute channel in Warsaw. Count 1-2-3 and hunt for the push.

Four characters and one voice — Schubert's Erlkönig, by Konstantin Krimmel and Ammiel Bushakevitz. This is the listening for the third activity.

A melody that dodged the censors — Sibelius's Finlandia (1899), by the BBC at the Proms.

An Andean melody that went round the world — El cóndor pasa, by Daniel Alomía Robles (1913), on charango, quena and zampoña.

• The element that comes before this one — "How do you know where you are in music you have never heard before?", on musical form, in the library.