What music do you hear? We ask students impatiently. Most reggaetone and trap, a few rock or punk.
Do you hear music in Basque? Very few. Do you look at the letters? Not too much. The regulated training sessions are offered within the “Writers in Educational Centers” program of the Basque Writers Association to the 3rd and 4th students of the ESO and Bachillerato. Because we wanted to demonstrate an assumption, a suspicion, an intuition that we had been talking about for years among us, that the transmission of Basque culture was producing a gap in both regulated and non-regulated education, in the family or domestic sphere. Asked about the sessions we've offered to the students over these six years, we've confirmed that it's really close to being so. We do not have
"What's the role of the song? What has been the value of the song so far and what is it today? What has changed? What do we sing for?
We have not conducted qualitative or quantitative surveys, we have not analyzed the centers. To the students, in all the sessions we have been able to see that they do not listen to music in Basque. What we share with them is a song that comes out of the interaction between writers and musicians. The goal is simple: to make our contribution to the transmission gap from what we love, from what we live, from what we know. We could look for more strings to sessions, one of them to sew the story. We propose a new way of knowing the history of Euskal Herria through the song that emerged from the interaction between writers and musicians. The historian or journalist works with objective, demonstrable data. He can't lie, he can't invent it. The creator doesn't have that rule. The creator can combine reflections and sensations without showing any archival documents. It can express what a historical fact has affected you emotionally, for example, in a poem, for example, in a series of verses. This allows us to broaden the questions about the function of the song. For example, what's the function of the song? What has been the value of the song so far and what is it today? What has changed? What do we sing for? What do we sing for in public? Why do we sing together? To what extent does it do to us what we sing, to what extent do we build what we are, our identity, what we sing? To what extent do they influence our status as Euskaldunes? Evidently, 50 minutes are not enough for the students to internalize so many words, so many melodies, so many abstract concepts and in most cases inculcated. 50 minutes are not enough to understand the symbolic, affective and political dimension of the song arising from the interaction between writers and musicians. Throughout the course, permanently, we want to convey the passion for strategically writing in Basque, for singing in Basque, for creating in Basque. And we know how to do that.