Music was surely the first art, along with dance, that we as human beings cultivate. It does not need a canvas, nor paper, nor a brush, nor a pencil, nor a chisel, nor a hammer to become reality. Clapping, making sounds and jumping is enough. Even so, there is a moment in our history when we feel the need to create musical instruments to expand the repertoire. They were the distant great-great-grandfathers of our violins, our organs, pianos, guitars, drums, flutes, trumpets. All of them, gadgets that are completely forgotten today. All? No! An irreducible Galician musician, Abraham Cupeiro, stands the test of time.
He studied early music at the Higher School of Music of Catalonia (ESMUC), specializing in the horn and natural trumpet, but also exploring instruments from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque. Later, he expanded his horizons and ended up studying and reproducing with his hands other devices used to make music, thus recovering ancient objects that he brings back to life. It is not about searching for the original and authentic sound, but rather about moving us again after so many centuries: “There is nothing more authentic than a human being feeling something.”
It seems that, even though he has worked with other top-level artists—the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, for example, has invited him to do contemporary music concerts together—for Cupeiro, music is something like a game that he takes very seriously. . “I dedicate myself, within my possibilities, to generating fantasy,” he says, adding: “Music and art, for me, have no meaning if there is no fantasy. I can use ancient instruments, but I put them at the service of my musical discourse. “It’s a leg that I was missing when I was studying early music.”
His work has led him to collaborate on the soundtrack of ‘Gladiator II’ and on Steven Spielberg’s television series ‘Life on our planet’. He has a collection of nearly three hundred musical instruments, most of them made by himself, and many are replicas resulting from the study of archaeological remains, such as the Roman cornu with which he recorded his album ‘Mythos’ alongside the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra: It is a giant trunk, four meters and thirty-five centimeters long, recreated from remains that appeared in Pompeii. It can be seen in February in Madrid, at Teatros del Canal.
Another of their most attractive instruments is the karnyx. With this Celtic trumpet that evokes the head of a wild boar, he stood in the middle of the Celta field to cheer on the team before their last game against Barça. The context could not be better, since the monumental device was used to incite troops into battle and intimidate enemies. That day, with the Catalans intimidated and the Viguenses enraged by Karnyx, the Blaugranas were unable to get past a sad draw.
Traveling with such a quantity of junk gives rise, of course, to endless anecdotes. He has carried forty-two in a suitcase that, he says with a laugh, he bought in a supermarket for eighty euros. They know her well in Finland. Since you are required to check it in on flights, sometimes it is lost for a while, or for days. At a concert with a Finnish orchestra, the suitcase appeared half an hour before the performance. “During rehearsals I dedicated myself to singing and whistling as best I could,” he recalls. When it arrived, “I opened it with the entire orchestra in front: between t-shirts and socks, the instruments were appearing.” “I think some people were wondering, ‘Oh my God, who did we hire?'” he laughs.
Again, coming straight back from Tasmania… “I had to build myself a few instruments in a short time to get by.” In Lyon they stopped him at the airport. He carried a cornet, which is a Renaissance instrument, shaped like a horn. “They thought it was a throwing weapon, so I suggested they touch something.” Mysteries of life, he couldn’t think of anything better than the pasodoble from ‘The Wildcat’. “The gendarme started shouting: ‘Olé, olé’. “That actually said ‘Allez, allez’, but to me it seemed like ‘Olé, olé’.”
At the Galician airports, on the other hand, they already have it more cliched: “The opposite has ever happened to me, that they have recognized me and a civil guard comes and tells his companion: ‘This is Abraham Cupeiro, that man of the rare instruments, let it pass.’
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