Description
In festivals, where time and space are experienced in ways that exceed everyday temporal and geographical boundaries, the border is not simply a two-dimensional dividing line cordoning off locals from the rest of the world. Through their aesthetic and performative modes, festivals straddle the normative borders that frame everyday life to produce a festival borderland, where new modes of being, thinking, and doing can emerge. In the case of the Falles Festival of València, Spain, such a borderland comes into being through the interweaving of three musical threads. The first depends on Valencian adaptations of familiar instrument types—the dolçaina, a double-reed soprano aerophone, and tabalet, a double-membrane cylindrical drum—which, given their centrality to traditional Valencian music, inscribe a regional soundmark onto official festival acts. Following the legacy of Spanish military bands, the second thread features wind bands that accompany both formal parades and raucous street concerts. Once the sun sets, a third musical style takes over as pounding EDM beats reverberate from the casals (Falles headquarters) that populate the city streets. The musical repertoires that mark the Falles Festival index distinct bordered histories in and through performance. But the juxtaposition and frequent recombination of these musical threads in the festival borderland also complicate the borders that frame these musics, as I explore in this paper. I argue that the blurring of musical borders during Falles serves to “relocalize” València, sounding out new conceptions of what counts as Valencian and extending the timespaces to which València’s borders correspond. If music cannot alter the geopolitical territories that circumscribe the Falles Festival, it nevertheless recalibrates the place-based associations that the music of Falles calls up and, in so doing, reimagines València’s national and transnational connections.
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