Song in the Basque and Asturian cider house

A bertsolari improvises sung verse in Basque, on the spot, to a melody chosen from a large stock of known tunes, within a fixed metrical scheme and rhyme pattern. A subject is set — by an opponent, by a host, by a jury — and the verses are composed while standing, with no written text and no rehearsal. The skill being displayed is simultaneous composition and performance under a strict formal constraint.

This has a direct consequence for anyone looking for cider songs. The verses are made for a moment and are gone unless somebody wrote them down or, later, recorded them. There is no traditional body of Basque cider songs in the way there is a body of English wassail songs, because the tradition does not work by preserving texts.

What exists instead is a documented practice with a documented social setting. Bertsolaritza is performed at fairs, in squares, at meals, in taverns and in cider houses, it has been organised into formal championships since the twentieth century, and it is one of the most visible institutions of Basque-language culture. Its association with the cider house is a matter of where people gathered.

The sagardotegi provided the three things an improvised form needs: an audience, an occasion and a subject. During the cider season, buyers, neighbours and eventually paying visitors gathered around the barrels, ate at long tables and stayed for hours, which is exactly the setting in which a competitive verbal art is performed.

The connection should not be sentimentalised in either direction. Improvised verse can be affectionate and it can be cutting; it was used to praise, to mock, to settle scores and to comment on local affairs, and a person who was the subject of it did not necessarily enjoy the experience. It is a competitive form performed in a room where people know each other.

Nor should the cider house be treated as the origin of the form. Bertsolaritza belongs to Basque-language culture generally and would exist without cider; the cider house is one venue among several, and it is the one most visible to outsiders because it is where a visitor is most likely to encounter it.

The tonada asturiana, also called the asturianada, is a solo song sung without accompaniment, in a high and forceful voice, with long melismatic ornamentation over a slow melodic line. It is a demanding form technically, and it is judged as such: competitive contests for singers have been held in Asturias since the early twentieth century.

Its association with the chigre, the cider tavern, and with the espicha, the tapping of a vat and the gathering around it, is well established as a matter of social practice. A song of this kind requires a room to fall silent for it, which is a particular kind of occasion, and the cider houses provided one.

The subject matter is Asturian life broadly — emigration, mining, the sea, love, the region itself — rather than cider specifically. Here as in the Basque case, the drink is the setting rather than the theme, and a search for songs about cider will find far less than a search for singing where cider is drunk.

Both traditions share a feature worth stating plainly, because it distinguishes them from performance as a general audience understands it. Being called upon to sing, in a room of people who know you, is an obligation within a group rather than an offer made to an audience. Refusal is possible and is noticed.

The structure of cider service reinforces this. Where drink is poured in small measures in turn — an Asturian culín passed around a group, a Basque table taking turns at the barrel — the occasion is already organised around taking one’s turn, and singing fits into the same pattern of rotation and obligation.

That is the honest description of what the association amounts to. It is not that cider produces song. It is that both traditions belong to occasions that are structured around a group taking turns, and the cider house is one of the few remaining institutions in which such occasions still routinely occur.