Sitting on a bale of dry grass, a bagpiper played. The bandina members who accompanied him that day had stopped, but he continued. He did it with the conviction that that bagpipe had to continue playing. At the same height, a ten-year-old ‘guaje’ approached him and from the most innocent and clean curiosity, that which one only has during childhood, that guaje answered the question that the piper asked him. “Do you like the sound of it?” he asked. “I think it sounds a little sad,” the boy replied.
There was silence and, without letting go of the pointer for a moment, the piper and the boy looked each other in the eyes again. “It sounds sad because no one wants to touch it anymore.” In that look, the master piper Fariñas was handing over, without knowing it, to Luis Feito, who at only ten years old returned from that fair in Trevías with that pounding sound in his head and with the conviction that the Asturian bagpipe had to continue. ringing. And he was going to take care of that.
Feito has been and is one of the greatest teachers of the bagpipe in Asturias and, without a doubt, one of its saviors. Hundreds of people have trained with him and today he is the director of one of the great bands of Asturias, La Reina del Truébano. In his record he has played in New York, in China, in Dubai, several times at the Lorient Interceltic Festival (in Brittany) and, above all, in his record is having moved everyone who has ever had the opportunity. lucky to hear this band play.
When the director finishes the countdown and with a snap of his fingers starts the music of The Thunder Queen, there is no one who does not wince at its roar. It must be something similar to when Luis Feito was lost in thought listening to Fariñas’ bagpipes. There is music that takes you to places and sites that are not on maps, they are in your gut.
Now, that boy is 53 years old, and he is no longer ashamed when he remembers when his parents sang while gathering dry grass. Now, seen from the perspective of a countryman who has been blowing the bagpipes for 43 years, and who has trained hundreds of drummers and bagpipers in Asturias, is when one perceives the calm feeling of a job well done, of having kept one’s word.
We don’t make noise, we dignify what we do. People spend many hours learning to play the bagpipes or the drum.
But making a living playing the bagpipe was not easy and it is not easy now either, because during these four decades Feito has had to do much more than music, he had to value traditional Asturian culture and ensure that it is respected from the place where he lives. corresponded, the one that Fariñas missed so much sitting on the dry grass. “We don’t make noise, we dignify what we do,” he explains in reference to when they are hired and still, from time to time, they are told that “you start whenever you want, walk around the town and that’s it.” No. “We are a band, people spend many hours learning to play the bagpipes or the drum. A lot of effort. I train people at the music schools in Navia and Castropol and a band takes a lot of work and dedication,” he highlights.
Luis Feito has that feeling of elevating traditional Asturian music to where it should never have descended, and he won’t let it go. It is the stubbornness of the cowboy who takes life forward from anywhere, the intact illusion of that boy who made his neighbor feel sorry for him when she found out he wanted to be a bagpiper. “He told my mother that well… That it was better for me to play the bagpipes than to take drugs,” he remembers.
They were dark decades, in which playing the Asturian bagpipes was not fashionable, and where only the efforts of a few like him managed to make society change its perception. Now classes are taught at the conservatory, but Luis Feito was self-taught. “My grandmother Oliva bought me my first bagpipe when I was ten years old, and the bagpipe is named after her. I signed up for classes in Asturias and then I took a course in Geneva organized by Asturias Exterior, it was an initiative of the Principality, I think… Then I also received classes in Mallorca. From there I began to teach classes myself, in Tineo, Soto de la Barca… I spent more on travel than what they paid me and for the first time I had to ask for money at home,” he remembers.
And so, making his classes a kind of beehive, where word of mouth encouraged people to sign up, the band was formed, which was born in 1996. And the piper began to be able to make a living from his music. “The people who really enjoy it are in a band, now there are forty of us and it is the reward for effort, dedication, perseverance,” he explains.
Luis Feito continues touring Western Asturias with his bagpipe, giving private classes, in municipal schools, group classes, to four-year-old children, to their mothers, to retirees, to anyone who wants to play the bagpipe or the drum. A few days ago in Almuña (Valdés) he received the “Riesta de Oro”, a recognition for his work in defense of Asturian culture and which makes him especially excited because in the end those at home have seen the importance of keeping the bagpipes playing.
The bale of dry grass from where Fariñas sat playing his sad bagpipe has the same riser that Feito has climbed to play with joy. Thank you, teacher.
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