Cadernos de gaita. 25: Complete works of Henrique Otero: Pieces for a soloist bagpipes. D

O Gaiteiro do Fragoso represents the ultimate transition from traditional bagpiper to urban bagpiper, from oral tradition to a musician with academic education. He was the first person to teach Galician bagpipe, an official degree since the 1960s, at the conservatory of music of Vigo. He was also the first bagpiper-teacher with such a high number of compositions, almost three hundred, spanning over more than half a century (from the 1960s to his death in 2013). They include all the popular forms applied to bagpipe, showing a preference for muiñeiras, xotas, danzas and foliadas, but also pasodobres, alboradas, baladas or rumbas. They are conceived for different instrumental formats: soloist bagpipe, traditional quartet, bagpipe and other instruments, bagpipe and voice, etc. In this edition for soloist bagpipe, we can approach the compositional essence of O Gaiteiro do Fragoso, as the melodic lines can be appreciated without any ornamentation. It was not uncommon for Henrique to compose only for a bagpipe and, later on, (sometimes, after years) to add a second voice. These thirty-one pieces (almost 15% of all his works) remained this way as that was his wish. It was how he conceived them, and he believed adding more voices would not improve them.