Dance and Music
Among the musical traditions, there is the very special music of the cobles, the wind bands that play sardanes. The sardana is a circular, open dance, that originated in the Empordà region (north of the country by the Mediterranean sea) and the Pyrenees (Catalan Pirineus), and is now danced in many squares and streets all over Catalonia.
Popular folk songs include "El Rossinyol", "La Balanguera", "La Santa Espina", "Virolai" and "El Cant dels Ocells". Some of them became something like unofficial national anthems under the years of General Franco's dictatorship. Some of those songs became popular all over the world with the success of the Orfeó Català choir around the beginning of the 20th century. Another song, created by the present singer Lluís Llach, L'Estaca, also gained sudden recognition as expressing the national feeling of Catalans. Despite its relative recent introduction, singing l'Estaca became a kind of tradition.
Another important Catalan musical tradition is the singing of Havaneres and burning rhum together at the Cremat which often happen simultaneously.
Read more about this topic: Traditions Of Catalonia
Famous quotes containing the words dance and/or music:
“Night is juba, night is conjo.
Pretty Malinda, dance with me.”
—Robert Earl Hayden (1913–1980)
“Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears;
Yet slower yet, oh faintly gentle springs:
List to the heavy part the music bears,
“Woe weeps out her division when she sings.”
Droop herbs and flowers;
Fall grief in showers;
“Our beauties are not ours”:
Oh, I could still,
Like melting snow upon some craggy hill,
Drop, drop, drop, drop,
Since nature’s pride is, now, a withered daffodil.”
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637)