The musical odyssey of Abraham Cupeiro: from the Paleolithic to modernity by way of Hollywood | Culture | EUROtoday

Abraham Cupeiro arrives at his home on the outskirts of Lugo simply after dusk, takes a big suitcase out of his automobile and empties it in his examine. His spouse, María, helps him unload. Inside the suitcase there are horns, large conch shells, flutes fabricated from every kind of supplies, items of metallic that, when assembled, type a trumpet virtually two meters lengthy. “You don’t know what it’s like to travel with this. And today I didn’t have too many instruments…”, says Cupeiro (Sarria, 44 years outdated) wrapped within the mist of the Lugo evening.

Multi-instrumentalist, composer, self-taught luthier, resurrector of historic harmonies, Cupeiro is the most recent nice musical phenomenon that has traveled around the globe, from India to Tasmania by way of Hollywood, along with his live shows that recuperate the magical aura of music from millennia in the past. . In the brief shot he’s an genuine man, hooked up to his land, who prefers to “walk rather than travel” and who says he nonetheless feels nervous earlier than every efficiency. “If I wasn’t tense, everything would be lost,” he assumes.

Two years in the past he left the town middle and since then he has lived within the countryside, between two small homes positioned at each ends of a property suffering from molehills. “I don’t want to kill the moles,” he excuses himself. One of the homes is house: open-plan, cozy, with glass partitions and three canine by the fireside. The different is the studio and the workshop, the place “where we can compose and play without anyone complaining. The nearest neighbor is 400 meters away!” To be sincere, they’d rightly complain: among the devices that populate each nook of the studio sound… loud. “The Breton bombard makes a bagpipe sound like a kitten next to it,” laughs Cupeiro as he hugs the Roman cornu for the photographer that he constructed with the unique measurements (“half a meter longer than the ones you can buy are, in which a lot of notes are lost”). The goal is for it to sound the same as those worn by Emperor Augustus’ legionaries when they walked through that same city two millennia ago.

Cupeiro’s story sums up his talent. The son of parents “who had nothing,” he began, like so many Galician kids, within the city band. But his precocity gave him away: on the age of 11 he was already making preparations for brass bands. He studied music, though he could not fairly discover his place, till two moments modified his life. One, when he heard Romanian dances by Béla Bartók, who gave him a multifaceted imaginative and prescient of what music could possibly be. And the opposite, when he constructed his first instrument, a pure trumpet that was “the key to opening a door to the past.” With that trumpet made along with his arms he examined himself towards his opposition (taking part in a bit by Handel) and obtained his place on the Conservatory. He gave lessons, sure, however he was nonetheless not comfy; I wanted to maneuver, develop. “I was sad, I saw that life was passing me by.”

He asked to work part-time. He started building more. To compose more. To investigate ancient music. He created Roman cornus, imposing carnyx, Greek aulos, flutes, trumpets, carved horns, pierced conch shells… he made everything he put to his lips sound good, from a pierced reed to a bird feather. It became known. In 2016 he had his first recording for an album with the Royal Philharmonic of Galicia. He garnered 20 minutes of applause, and the rest is history: hundreds of concerts in more than 50 countries (this year alone he will give 120), three albums and an increasingly viral success. Your latest milestone? One that can be heard in theaters around the world.

“When Harry Gregson-Williams called me to participate in the soundtrack of Gladiator II I told him I couldn’t go to Los Angeles. Had the band waiting at Abbey Road [en Londres] to record two songs from my latest album,” he says, shrugging his shoulders, matter-of-factly. There was no problem: the composer settled in Lugo and together they recorded the instruments that were once played in ancient Rome. “Harry showed me messages: ‘RD likes this instrument’, ‘RD prefers something more serious.’” RD was, of course, Ridley Scott.

The cinema continues to name him, by the best way. He simply recorded a video for the movie Maryduring which Anthony Hopkins performs Herod. Have you taken a liking to soundtracks? “I like it, but it’s only part of my job. The truth is that, when I compose, I think in images, I create my own movies in my head,” says Cupeiro in his studio, with the copper head of a monstrous being between his arms that acts because the cornyx’s mouth. “In the future I would like to make my own film,” he confesses. Everything will come. For now, he’s additionally centered on writing scripts and monologues. “I like to mix music and humor. Beethoven, Mozart, Händel… they had direct contact with the public, they were fun and popular.” This is what he does in his solo live shows, during which he takes a mystical journey by way of the historical past of music, from prehistoric caves to jazz. “Classical music is in the wrong hands,” complains Cupeiro, very combative towards the elitism that so typically surrounds the style. “It is programmed badly, and always the same. “Musicians should take the reins and bring it closer to the people, because if they can reach the public, they will be fascinated.”

Cupeiro walks through his studio. Place, reposition, lift a giant conch shell, move a trombone. “The oldest known instrument is a bone flute from 62,000 years ago,” he delights in explaining. And he repeats the determine along with his Galician accent. “The oldest instruments were kept in the deepest parts of the caves, where sunlight did not reach.” As in the event that they had been magical objects, as if a mystical communion was achieved by way of them. “There still is,” Cupeiro asserts. “Music still has that function. Punk, rock… in the end we are tribes. And music is what articulates us.”

“I have doubts about social networks,” he confesses, in the midst of a debate about their advantages and disadvantages. “They have helped me a lot, they have given me direct contact with the public and with many musicians with whom I have contacted through them. But of course I also spend hours watching an endless list of short videos,” he laments. Although he has found a vaccine for that: he sleeps in the cabin, but leaves his cell phone in his study. “It’s Lugo. It’s cold here. No matter how much I want to look at it, I’m not going to cross the farm at night,” he laughs, and puts away the mouth-shaped head of the iconic cornyx.

Last Saturday the 23rd, Cupeiro played that instrument that he forged with his own hands before the match between Celta and Barça in Balaídos, in front of 25,000 people. And his message about the continuity of music through time came true: the roar that greeted him was the same one that greeted the gladiators in the Roman Colosseum 2,000 years ago.