Basque Musical Influence: The Choral Component

       The main 4 choral 'components' of a Basque choir are the person, the cultural object, the community, and the product. The first, the person, refers to the individual singers in the choir. Basques sing fairly often in their day to day life, at church, after dinner, to their children. This article describes the reasons for joining a choir as first and foremost to become a better singer. However many Basque singers also find it is a great way to express their emotions. Because they are prideful, Basque people do not want to broadcast their emotions. Joining a choir is a great way to express themselves through song while maintaining their emotional privacy.
       The cultural object in this case is represented by the songs the Basque sing. Because Basque territory crosses the border between France and Spain, their musical influences are that of those countries. Even though their music style is influenced by these two countries, they make it their own. Basque country has its own unique language that aids the people in developing a style of their own. This article discusses how Euskara, the language spoken by those in Basque, has a melodic pattern to which it is spoken as well as fairly simple pronunciation. While this means that anyone can join a Basque choir and be able to sing, these people will still have trouble the complex meanings behind the lyrics.
       Community may seem like a straight forward term to most people, a group who all share a common area or interest. However the Basque choral community is more of a close knit family than anything else. Not only are there numerous rehearsals every week, but they also embark on the same emotional journey the music takes them on. Music is a huge basis for bonding in the Basque community because of the emotional ties it has. Basque culture highly values music and their distinct culture. In order to be accepted in a choir one has to respect music and embrace the 'Basque-ness' of it.
       The product is the final component to a choir. This product is the choir itself. Choirs are a distinct characteristic of Basque in that they are everywhere. There is an old saying that says " Put three Basques together and they'll form a choir". This fact demonstrates how significant music and choir is to their culture. In this section the article also discusses how mass is almost completely done in song. Music is such a huge part of their everyday life that it is custom to and melody to that which would be spoken in most any other place.

Bergadaa, Michelle and Thierry Lorey. 2015. "Preservation of Living Cultural Heritage: The Case of             Basque Choirs And Their Audience." International Journal of Arts Management Vol. 17, No.             3, p 4-15. Retrieved November 17, 2016

Gender Roles within Basque Society

The gender roles in the Basque community were very unequal in terms of the participation of women in Basque society. The society was mainly fixed on the general traditional gender roles with women staying home to take care of the house and children while men left the house to work. A woman could still seek extra work outside the home for extra income but would still be fully expected to fulfill her duties at home. Men distanced themselves from their families while women continued to feel responsible for all the domestic duties. The children were also raised differently with regards to the different gender roles. Young girls were expected to help their mothers with the housework while boys were not. (Jrank Articles Staff)

Franco Falangist created laws that further restricted women's rights. These laws denied women the right to work outside of home, divorce was not allowed, and severe penalties were established to punish female adultery. A woman also held no right to seek an abortion even if her life was at risk. During this time, women were heavily oppressed without the rights that they deserved. Changes of these laws were eventually brought into play but it is safe to say that they should never have been made in the first place if the equality of men and women was ever their agenda. (Jrank Articles Staff)

The importance of the mother's role is emphasized in Basque culture. Women are expected to fulfill their duties within the right of passage, especially with the rites related to birth and death. At birth, women are the midwives and are responsible for caring for the baby, and taking the baby to be baptized. The father has a more public responsibility at birth since his duty is to announce the birth of the baby to the community. At death, women are responsible for upholding ties with the ancestors and in this sense, are responsible for the overall well-being of the living as well as the dead. (Bullen 62)

Marriage was the ideal choice for both men and women. Being single was neglected in the Basque community except in the case of Serora which was a type of church warden. Women influenced the decision-making within the household, so much so that financial transactions were rarely made without the wife's consent.  Nevertheless, it was not acceptable for a wife to rule over her husband. Women were also severely punished if they committed adultery but pardoned if a man committed it. (Bullen 63-64)

    Bullen, Margaret. "Basque Gender Studies." (n.d.): n. pag. Web.

 "Basque Families - Gender Roles." Family, Women, and Home - JRank Articles. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Nov. 2016.

Website

Where did you come from? Where do you go? Where did you come from, Basque?

Do you like mysteries?  If that’s a yes, good for you.  If no, well you are in the same boat as me.  I study history as my major, and I found it quite annoying to do research for this project because there are no clear answers to the enigma of the Basque tribe.  A people secluded for years in the Pyrenees mountains not only have a culture and language unique to them and them alone, but they have a genetic composition completely devoid of the regular strains found among their French and Spanish neighbors, let alone the other Europeans sharing the continent.  Some claim, especially a good few of Basque nationalists, to have the answers, but I will take a strong stand along with numerous scientists of different fields to stay that is rubbish.  I looked through numerous sources all over the internet- nothing conclusive.  I also went back to my world history textbook to try to find answers- again nothing conclusive.  I ended up only citing only two sources because they all say the same thing.

                Hopefully, the reader understands the effort I tried to put in to draw out an answer; however, it did leave me with plenty of facts to lay out.  The Basque culture gives barely any indication of where they came from as they share common pursuits of most every people on this earth- smithing, leatherwork, spinning wool, music, etc.  On the note of music, they do have a strong love for unaccompanied choirs.  Sports focus on power and endurance such as the picture in the BBC article which shows two men using a style of saw used by the Basque people called a tronza to cut a thick log.  Their language has no connection to any modern or extinct language.  It has components of many “Caucasian languages and [a slight connection] to Berber” (an indigenous North African people) (Woodworth 18).  Its words for numerals have similarities to both French and Sanskrit (Woodworth 19).

                This strange mixture of all these components leads most scientist and historians to surrender to the idea that the Basque are part of the select few peoples on Earth that have survived from the Stone Age near completely intact.  A “root-word haitz” meaning stone is found in the names of common tools is a common word that linguists have traced back to that Age (Woodworth 18).  To further cement that idea, genetic evidence leaves no doubt that they are not Indo-European.  Their tribe survived intact as it migrated up from Africa, through the Middle East, down into India, and back up along the Southern border of Europe into the Iberian Peninsula where they eventually settled within the natural fortress of the Pyreness.  The only parts of their genetic make-up that seems to mark any significant change shared by their Indo-European neighbors is the genes of a distinctly agricultural people that migrated through Europe (BBC News).   They brought with them the agricultural processes they had knowledge of and eventually melted into existing hunter-gatherer tribes in Europe.  However, the next great migration at the onset of the Bronze Age from the Steppes does not show up in their gene pool (BBC News).  Somewhere between the end of the Stone Age and beginning of the Bronze Age the Basque seem to have consciously moved into their mountain fortress. 

I say consciously because they raided Visigoths who took over the territories of the Romans as their empire collapsed (Woodworth 26).  While out of any love for the Romans is hard to say because they did participate in very peaceful and constant trade with the Romans while managing to keep away the prying figures of the Romans to expand their territories (Woodworth 24).  “Trading settlements… [along] the coast of Vizcaya, Guipuzcoa, and Labourd” left no mark of Roman administration upon the Basque (Woodworth 24).  Much later in 711 AD, Muslim armies belonging to the Ummayyad Empire invaded the Iberian Peninsula.  After the conquest of most the peninsula and the start of a small kingdom along what is Northern Spain, the Basques were split in two as the two different governments that extended their control into the Pyrenees.  While being politically divided at this time, the “conquest” of their people did not show any changes in their genetics as it did the rest of Spanish descendants.

Works Cited

News, B. (2015, September 7). Ancient DNA cracks puzzle of Basque origins. Retrieved November 14, 2016, from http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34175224

Woodworth, P. (2008). The Basque country: A cultural history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Language

Language

Shannon LeGath

Introduction to Anthropology

There are many languages in this world, but for now lets talk about information within language from the Basque. "The concept of motion is present in all the world's languages" as said by the author, Ibarretxe-Antunano (2015:307). However, it seems to be that there are ways where speakers, especially of different languages arrange motion which tend to be not so universal. Languages offer so many different forms of structures to explain motion, and speakers pay attention to different parts within the motion events (Ibarretxe-Antunano 2015).

The goal of this blog post is to show others in great detail how motion effects the Basque language and also how motion makes the Basque language "their" language and why it differs from so many other languages. The Basque language is described and expressed in Basque communicating with talking to one another and written in books. This specific language is focused on three main areas: motion verbs, elaboration of Manner and elaboration of Path (Ibarretxe-Antunano 2015).

A lot of people say that Basque can be classified as a verb-framed language. Although, it happens to be argued more often than not that it is not a prototypical example of this group with respect of  Path. "Unlike other verb-framed languages, the description of Path in Basque motion events is very frequent and detailed, not only in situations when it adds new information, but also in pleonastic cases." (2015:307). This specific characteristic is seemed to be related to the Basque's rich lexical resources for space and such. Also it has high tolerance for verb omission.

All in all, the basis of this data is to scope Talmy's binary typology and determine if it is questioned. People have suggested that the verb-and satellite-framed language typology should be overlooked in order to account for so-called intra-typological differences (Ibarretxe-Antunano 2015). Obviously, the Basque has their own way of doing things and their language is like none other but, that is what makes their language so unique and I believe that is what makes it so different from other cultures as well.

References

Ibarretxe-Antunano, Iradie. 2015. "Going beyond motion events typology: The case of Basque as a verb-framed language." Folia Linguistica p307-352. 46p. 1 color Photograph, 3 Diagrams, 6 Charts.