musician He performs at the Palau de la Música on December 30

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Faithful to tradition, Carlos Núñez (Vigo, 1971) returns to Barcelona to fulfill a commitment made a decade ago and perform this Friday at the Palau de la Música as part of the Banco Mediolanum Millennium Festival. It is the Galician musician's traditional New Year's concert. Later, on January 7, it will be at the Girona Auditorium.


You have turned the concert at the Palau de la Música into a tradition.


— It's been ten years now, it's incredible. It even changed the image I had of Barcelona and Catalonia. I thought that here what people wanted was more modernity, that Barcelona was a more pop city, but suddenly you discover that secretly people also need tradition. I am very amused to discover this need for tradition.


Many artists relate to tradition in a different way, and does that contribute to making it more contemporary?


— Traditional music is oral in nature, and this means that it is constantly changing. It's not like a Beethoven or Mozart score, you have to play it as written. It is a living body, it passes from life to life, and we also have a little responsibility that it works and that it continues. When I started playing as a child, the older pipers would say to me: "You have the responsibility that this is done well, and moreover that it works. You can't pick up a bagpipe and play the fool, you have a responsibility." And I keep making the effort to continue giving life to these musics. That's why I like to work both acoustically, as it's always been done with all the musicians playing at the same time, and at the same time doing things like the one we're going to present at the Palau de la Música: a sword dance we've just recorded with DJ Yung Denzo.



Is the repertoire of the Palau de la Música concerts very different from your other concerts?


— Since it's already a tradition, I try to have certain highlights that people expect. For example, the entrance of the pipers with the sacks of moans that come from all over Catalonia, we like this epic thing to always be there, but we also try to always have something new. This year we will have Scottish singer and bagpiper Julie Fowlis, who recorded for the soundtrack to Disney's Brave . One of the things I would like to do is the main theme of Brave , which interestingly is the same one that Beethoven used 200 years ago in a piece of his Celtic music, Once more I hail thee , which he arranged from a other way, but which is the same tune from the movie Brave. One of the things I'd like to do with it is connect the Celtic Beethoven to that soundtrack.



How is the Celtic Beethoven experience going ?


- It's cooking. I discovered the existence of this music about fifteen years ago. We were on tour in Germany and we visited Beethoven's house in Bonn, and there I saw these scores, tracked them down, started researching. Then we visited the Beethoven House in Vienna. And then we found out that this man really liked it, that he didn't do it just for the money. He composed almost 200 pieces.


How do you take stock of your career?


— When I started playing it was the most difficult time, the Movida years. I was born in Vigo; my father is Galician and my mother is from Madrid. And, of course, a city like Vigo, which has El Corte Inglés on Gran Via, Plaça d'Argüelles, Puerta del Sol... is like a little Madrid in the Atlantic. Vigo wanted to be more Madrid than Madrid, and playing the bagpipes was a problem. I was very lucky that it was like that because then I spent my adolescence and early youth closed working with those of my generation; we were like those in The Name of the Rose:all day in the conservatory or studying traditional music, waiting for the sun to come out. when did the sun rise In the 90s the New Age arrives. Suddenly, Enya appears, the Chieftains start collaborating with stars like the Rolling Stones, Sting, Van Morrison, and suddenly the sun comes out. Then the Chieftains sponsor me, we do the first tours in America... and a trigger arrives: an article by Manuel Rivas in El País in which he called me "the new king of the Celts".


That's how the legends are written.


— Thanks to this article I signed for BMG and got to know the top yearsof the record industry. There were beastly budgets to record records. There was so much budget for the world of recorded music that we did concerts to promote the records, but we lived off the records. And from the year 2000 or 2001 we began to notice that a decline was coming. Music was the first flower that felt that there was a change of era, before cinema and newspapers... Then came the crisis of 2008 and some very hard years for music. Some left, and others tried to stand up. I am very happy because it is now that I feel that we have won the battle, that we are already in a new era and we have managed to make things work. Everything has changed a lot, especially since when I started I learned from the greats, from the Chieftains, from Paco de Lucía, my idols were old people, and now I'm learning from the younger ones, from those who are 20 years old, from those who make urban music. They're crackheads, they know a lot more than we do about technological things, and they bring very interesting things to traditional music. I'm delighted with it because it's like a second youth.


Now there are artists with a very high level of training who are making popular music without any complex.


— Indeed, the landscape has completely changed. When I started they laughed at us. It was essential to go to the United States. If you were successful in America, if you were there with The Who and Bob Dylan, then you were cool and El País took it from you. Now the younger ones have no complexes. Rozalén has just recorded an entire album of traditional music. Alizzz, who works with C Tangana, records with Amaia a beautiful Navarrese jota, very well produced. Vetusta Morla goes with a Celtiberian orchestra. There are the Tanxugueiras... I think it's beautiful what's happening at last, because it's what it had to be, what was already happening in America. Any American artist of any genre always tries to give something to their culture, looking to the roots. Here, on the other hand, it was a bit like Santiago Auserón said: "We were the first stateless generation musically speaking". I am delighted because the younger ones are also doing very interesting things.



There are even young audiences filling the Palau de la Música to see Rodrigo Cuevas , who is also working with sensitive materials from the tradition.


- Yes of course! It's fantastic. Whatever you do, jazz, metal , electronic, classical, pop... from any genre you can contribute to traditional music. Traditional music is like a foundation. Culturally, it's good to love what's yours. If you don't have tradition behind it, the whole thing is a bit of a copy of what comes packaged for you from Miami and in the end everyone does the same thing.


What is the most rewarding thing you have experienced as a musician?


— That I have always been fighting for all this to happen and it has finally become normal. I had a problem, which is that I have always taken a lot of hits: when I combined our music with the Irish, when I combined the Celtic musicians with the Flemish, that this was a very big problem in Galicia... I also went in Brazil to find the points of union between Brazilian music and peninsular music, and clatellada. Instead, today the younger people do what they want and everyone "bravo, bravo!". Well, I'm glad.