Eduardo Falú interpreta La Vidalita en vivo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVcgml0u6-4
Vidalita - Arranged by Diana Sáez:
Wikipedia article in Spanish:
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidalita
From "Latin American music, past and present" written by Eleanor Hague, published in 1934:
The Argentine Republic is the habitat of a numerous family of songs and dances that have their roots in the life of the Pampas. The Vidala and the Vidalita, or little Vidala, grew up among the Gauchos, though some authorities would trace them to more remote origins, and they spread over into Bolivia and Peru. They are more popular in Northern Argentina than Southern. The name, in any case, means life, coming from the Spanish word, "vida". That is, the song is a little fragment out of Life. Each Vidalita is made up of endless verses, and one characteristic of the type is that the word Vidalita itself is repeated after the first and third line of every stanza. The rhythm of the Vidalita is usually either 2/4 or 4/4, and of the Vidala a three part beat. Joaquin V. Gonzalez says that the Vidalita belongs especially to the season of the year when the yellow fruit of the algarrobo tree is ripening, for then the people on the ranches get out their guitars and drums, and the girls their gayest costumes and ornaments, and every one makes merry.
Unknown source:
The combined influence of the tritonic and pentatonic systems led to the adoption of the hexatonic range. This can be heard in the Vidala (triple time) and in the vidalita (duple or triple time; see Baguala), carnival songs sung in parallel 3rds, or in unison, with caja accompaniment. There is further evidence of Andean influence in the division of Spanish quatrains by the insertion of local verses (or short refrains called estribillos). Some vidalas also include motes (pentasyllabic quatrains or sextets), which further condition the music structure. When both the caja and the guitar (the most widely played national instrument) are played together as accompaniment, the harmony of the vidala is centred on a major key and its relative minor, on which the song invariably ends. The vidala has specific characteristics in Santiago del Estero; within the Quecha-speaking area, song texts may be in Quechua or bilingual with Spanish.
...
Unlike other vidalitas, the vidalita chayera or Carnival vidalita, sung in many provinces, is lively and is sung in unison in mixed procession accompanied by cajas and guitars.
From "Facundo: civilization and barbarism" written by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento:
The vidalita, a popular song with a chorus, accompanied by a guitar and tambour, to whose refrain the multitude joins in as the numberand noise of the voices grows. This type of song seems to me an inheritance from the indigenous people, because I have heard it at an Indian festival in Copiapó, celebrating Candlemas; being a religious songit must be very old, and the Chilean Indians could not have adopted it from the Argentine Spaniards. The vidalita is the popular meter used to sing about current events and for battle songs: the gaucho composes the verses he sings and popularizes them through the assemblies that his singing demands.
From "The Latin American Art Song: Sounds of the Imagined Nations" by Patricia Caicedo:
From a thesis "Toward A Pedagogical Guide To Argentine Art Song" by Matthew B. Pauls:
One particularly interesting type of song written by Argentine composers is known as the vidalita. It is a melancholic song that incorporates the folk-genre of the same nameand uses love poems as its subject matter. An intriguing aspect of art song renditions of the vidalitais the fact that many composers not only used the rhythmic motive that characterizes this folk-song
they often used the same melody. Choosing from a variety of texts, composers devised their own arrangements of supporting musical material, and melded this with the traditional melody. Some composers did not stray far from the original folk-song.
Posts
