Ayes de mi país. Songbook by Marcial Valladares

Working with a song repertoire is always about comparison and cleanliness, as every reading becomes a registry update. The researcher must know that in the chain of custody from the informant to the new user of the folkloric object, there is always a loss of information which is hard to recover. From the bibliophile’s point of view, Ayes de mi país is the best possible scenario. The author is very well-known in the world of Galician culture and there is a vast bibliography on his literary and philological works, since he was commemorated in the Día das Letras Galegas in 1970. Regarding this particular text, Ayes de mi país, there was an autograph manuscript and two apocrypha, a few more autograph fragments, and considerable indirect tradition. The literary part had already been published by the biographers of Marcial Valladares, hence why we chose to do a diplomatic edition. The facsimile edition was essential for the scores, as the album remains unreleased to this day, and considering it is an original work of great temporal singularity. The author wrote it in 1865, which means it is part of the prehistory of Galician ethnomusical bibliography, as well as a true treasure, a historical and cultural heritage of our country. The aim of this critical edition is to present the reader with an updated score, free of mistakes, polished before being publicly presented. To put this critical edition on paper, the authors not only collected the different variants of each number of Ayes…, but also analysed every work by Marcial Valladares, which, while few, are equally relevant. This reconstruction implies a multiple perspective including history, musicology, linguistics, aesthetics, and a long etcetera which is difficult to cover. What we are offering is simply an interdisciplinary proposal stemming from honesty and the work of many years.