Carvalhal de Vermilhas singing group: Between the field and the sky
Coordination by Luís Gomes da Costa

ISBN: 978-989-99856-0-5
Simultaneous publication by Edições Nodar (nodar.014) and Tramontana Sonora (TRS.006)
© Binaural – Associação Cultural de Nodar and Municipality of Vouzela, 2016

As part of the partnership that Binaural Nodar established in 2015 with the Municipality of Vouzela, a series of ethnomusicological publications are being developed from recordings made directly in villages in the Caramulo mountain range and with the help of local musical groups and cultural organizations to collect historical, informative and photographic elements that contextualize each specific musical tradition.

The rural villages of Caramulo mountain range are living examples of an old relationship between landscape, body and voice, The voice that relieves tiredness, the voice that accompanies work, the voice that questions and helps to form communitarian bonds, the voice that explains the past, the voice that denounces the present, the voice that provokes, the voice that seduces, the voice that laments etc.

One of the aspects that most impresses in the chantings of Carvalhal de Vermilhas is precisely its ancestral appearance as a current manifestation of an ancient cultural flow, which developed slowly and without interruption through a culture anchored in a rural mountain space, naturally with external influences limited by the roughness and difficulty of the landscape itself.

The Carvalhal de Vermilhas Singing Group is a fine example of singing forms divided by Portuguese ethnomusicologist Armando Leça into three typologies

• Monodies (chantings with one single voice), often accompanying farming manual activities.
• Choreologic singing, or chantings especifically for dancing.
• Choirs (one, two or three, or even four voices), with harmonic forms in parallel intervals (of thirds, fifths and octave voices parallel to the second voice).

The chantings that were chosen for this publication represent the cycle of the year, whether in an agricultural sense, sowing, watering, cropping etc., as in a religious sense, the birth of Jesus, carol singing, lenten songs or chantings to invoke the protection of the souls of the dead ones.