Carlos Núñez with the Sean Culkin Dancers
Tuesday, March 17, 2015 at 8:00 PM
Music Center at Strathmore
http://www.strath…“>www.strathmore.org
Carlos Núñez —also known as the “Spanish Irishman” or the “Jimi Hendrix of the bagpipes”— will be leading 65 Washington Revels, 35 Seán Culkin Irish Dancers, the Ocean Quartet, and The Washington Pipe Band March 17th at the Strathmore, in Bethesda, Maryland, on the outskirts of Washington, DC.
Carlos Núñez is Galicia’s musical ambassador. He studied the recorder at the Royal Conservatory in Madrid, Spain, and quickly gained stature as a young virtuoso. An honorary member of the legendary Irish band The Chieftains, Carlos started performing with the band when he was a teenager and later he would appear on The Chieftains’ Grammy-winning Santiago, a CD that focused on Galician music and included other Latino artists such as Los Lobos and Linda Ronstadt.
Carlos is considered one of the world’s best pipers and since recent scholarly research indicates that bagpipes seem to have gone from Galicia to Ireland and Scotland, it is exciting that Strathmore has commissioned him to put together a big Saint Patrick’s fiesta with 100 musical guests, including bagpipers and dancers!
Carlos says that the bagpipe is full of “positive energy” and calls the traditional Celtic instrument “the electric guitar of the Middle Ages.” And he will bring to the Strathmore the ancient magic together with the Hispanic Celtic connection.
According to The Medieval Irish Book of Invasions, Ireland’s final group of invaders, the Sons of Míl —whose descendants, the Gaels, became the dominant people of the island— came from Galicia, in the North West of Spain. And Carlos emphasizes that the Irish, before coming to America, for centuries went to Spain when they had trouble with their English neighbors. Carlos enjoys putting history and legend together in order to display the unified tapestry that he wants to convey through his music and international collaborations: from Spain to Ireland, to Brazil, to Hispanic America, to Japan, to the US, to Israel.
One of Carlos Núñez’s guests in Strathmore will be Dr. Stephen D. Winick who works at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress. Winick recently wrote about ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s belief in Celtic Galicia: “There’s a trend in scholarship that is increasingly supporting Lomax’s and Núñez’s conviction, a recognition that the cultures of the Atlantic fringe of Europe, including coastal Spain and the modern Celtic countries, have been deeply connected through commerce and colloquy since ancient times. More and more modern archeologists and historians are embracing this view of an interconnected Atlantic culture that went back to ancient times and survives to some extent today.”
History and myth will intertwine at Strathmore thanks to Carlos Núñez’s sound. A music that brings to the world stage the miracle of Galicia’s unique existence.
It is more than a millennial bagpipe, it is an incoercible energy that surges from the Galician earth and can make us immortal.
Avendaño is Executive Editor of El Tiempo Latino
alberto@eltiempolatino.com
