Ramu Nadal: reinterpreting the Asturian Christmas tradition

In late 2024 I released «Ramu Nadal»: a video with two pieces from Eduardo Martínez Torner’s songbook, reinterpreted as Asturian carols. It isn’t a Christmas album in the usual sense, nor a decorative piece. It’s an attempt to do something concrete: to make the Asturian gaita sound in December in its own language, not in the language of shopping-mall songs.

What the Ramu Nadal is

The Ramu Nadal —the Christmas branch (in Asturian, Ramu Nadal literally means the “Christmas branch”)— is an ornament of pagan origin that has been regaining presence in Asturies in recent years. The oldest documentation places it in the communities of Cuñaba, Peñamellera Baxa, Cangas del Narcea and the Ibias area.

It isn’t an exclusively Asturian tradition: in the province of León they have spent quite some time recovering this same decoration, part of a shared cultural heritage of northern Spain. The Leonese Christmas branch and the Asturian Ramu Nadal are sister variants of the same custom.

The structure is simple and precise. These are its elements:

Element	What it is	Meaning
Triangular frame	A wooden structure, held up by a vertical pole on a stable base	The body of the branch
Green branches	Yew, fir or holly	Greenery in the dead of winter
Twelve candles	One for each candle on the frame	The twelve months of the year
Hanging offerings	Cured meats, sweets, fruit, wool tassels, embroidery	Abundance and gratitude
Baskets at the foot	Chestnuts or walnuts	The fruit of the land

It isn’t an Asturianised Christmas tree. It’s something else: a ritual object with its own rules, its own aesthetics and its own vocabulary. And it has a music that goes with it.

The pieces: Torner as a starting point

I chose two pieces from Torner’s songbook —the collecting work of Eduardo Martínez Torner from the early twentieth century, a fundamental reference for Asturian traditional music—:

• «No hay tal andar» — aguilando, Torner’s songbook (collected early 20th c.)
• «Los pastores y pastoras» — aguilando, Torner’s songbook (collected early 20th c.)

Both are aguilandos: an aguilando is an Asturian Christmas carol of oral tradition, tied to the custom of asking for the Christmas box from house to house. They aren’t villancicos in the Castilian sense of the term, but rather the Asturian equivalent —songs of oral tradition collected by Torner. I reinterpreted them as Christmas pieces because they have the right festive character and fit the context of the Ramu: they’re cheerful without being trivial, Asturian without being archaeological.

The gaita doesn’t «cover» them in the popular sense of the term —it doesn’t add a synthesised bass or speed them up. It plays them in its own language: with the instrument’s own tuning, the punteru carrying the melody, the continuous drone of the roncón underneath, the phrasing of the tradition and the ornament that belongs to each note.

Why this project

I did it because the Ramu tradition strikes me as one of the most beautiful and least visible Asturian cultural objects, and because I felt there was a piece of music that could truly accompany it.

The gaita has a calendar problem: it’s almost always associated with the summer romería or with the Day of Asturies in September. That turns it into a seasonal, folkloric instrument in the worst sense: it only shows up when there’s that kind of festival. The Ramu Nadal was a chance to show that the Asturian gaita can also be the instrument of winter, of intimate celebration, of the real Asturian December.

Original composition or reinterpretation

«Ramu Nadal» sits on the border between the two, and that doesn’t strike me as a problem. It isn’t an original composition: the melodies are Torner’s (who in turn took them from oral tradition). But the treatment, the selection, the phrasing and the context are mine.

That is exactly what I think it means to work from tradition without repeating it: to take inherited materials and make something new with them that makes sense today. The same thing I describe in writing new music from tradition, though in this case the starting point is collected pieces and not invented material of my own.

Listen to it

The video is on YouTube. If you watch it in December, all the better; if you watch it in June, it works too.

→ Watch «Ramu Nadal» on YouTube

The release was covered at the time by Música Asturiana, with a review of the project and the detail of the Ramu tradition.