Composing from the root: when music is the family name

I don’t start from zero. I come with centuries of inheritance at my back: my music doesn’t come from a score, but from a commitment to the community, to the village, to what that village needs at any given moment.

My profession has a strange duality. I’m hired to build the “festival day” in parishes and villages; I’m the one who provides the music at fiestas, at romerías, at baptisms. But I’m also the one who scores the most absolute silence. Everyone has that film image in their mind — the Scottish piper playing Amazing Grace at a funeral. In Asturias, that role isn’t a scene from a film: it’s a real responsibility, raw and deep.

So when people ask me how I compose, I don’t talk about notes. I talk about identity. I talk about Fervienza.

The weight of a word

Fervienza is my father’s surname. It’s the name by which my family was known in the village. For me, that word isn’t a collection of letters: it’s the exact synonym for “family”. Composing this piece wasn’t a musical whim — it was the need to narrate an emotional journey through my own life story.

I wasn’t looking for a pretty melody; I was looking to translate three stages of maturity that have marked us deeply.

1. Childhood: playing in the meadow

The piece opens with the light of childhood. That part of life where the gaita sounds like celebration without shadows. It represents play, discovery and the protection of those who came before us. The music is vibrant, reflecting the natural joy of someone who hasn’t yet had to say goodbye to anyone.

2. Youth: the blow and the grief

But life, like the music of the gaita, also has its tensions and its dissonances. My youth was marked by the harshness of loss. We lost many family members, among them my father. It was a dry, difficult process — one that changes the way you blow and the way you understand the instrument.

Musically, this section of Fervienza is a passage through suffering. It isn’t drawing-room sadness; it’s the real pain of watching the pillars of your house fall one by one. Here the music doesn’t seek to please — it seeks to hold the weight of those who are no longer here.

3. Maturity: becoming the root

The final section of the piece is the catharsis. My brother, my cousins and I went from being the children to being the parents. It fell to us to take on adulthood, to carry the legacy forward and to understand that the family continues even as its shape changes.

This musical phase is the most complex: it’s hard because it’s born of pain, but above all it’s full of hope. It’s the sound of continuing to grow, of continuing with the family, of continuing to be Fervienza. It’s the music that tells you that, despite everything, the roncón keeps sounding and we keep walking.

In the studio, this section needed the most layers. The main gaita carries two tracks of itself slightly out of sync — a tenth of a second apart — so that it sounds like voices searching for each other. It was the way to say in production what the notes alone couldn’t reach: that two generations are trying to find one another.

Listen

• Watch the music video on YouTube
• Listen on Spotify

Closing the circle

In the music video for this piece, my journey ends at the cemetery of our village. My grandparents and my parents are there. The final gesture is simple, but it sums up why I am a piper: I leave them a photograph of their grandchildren — the ones they never got to meet.

That is the bridge. Music serves to connect those who are here with those who are gone. Composing isn’t putting notes in order; it’s finding the way for my ancestors and my children to reach across to each other through a punteru.

In the end, when I play at a parish fiesta or at a neighbour’s funeral, I do it with the same honesty with which I wrote this piece. Because in traditional gaita, if there’s no truth and no memory, there’s nothing left but air.

If you want to see the compositional process from the technical side, in Writing new music from tradition I break down how I work the musical material before it reaches the studio. And if you want to hear what the result sounds like in the first piece I released, it’s in «Suañu de Gaita». To see how this way of understanding tradition applies to a choral project, in Ramu Nadal I describe how I reinterpreted two pieces from Torner’s songbook with the same honesty.