Music in the Mountains CD 2008

Wapapura is proud to announce the release of the CD we made in collaboration with the Music in the Mountains festival. It will be a compilation of music we recorded during the summer of 2008 at different events of the festival that takes place in the Alpujarra mountains of southern Spain.

The music you can hear is just three examples of the type of musical diversity that makes up this festival, and a little taster as to what you can find on the full length CD.

To purchase a CD please contact Cat at the following website www.alexandermusicschool.com.

Music in the Mountains is a festival created by Cat Jary, the director of the Alexander Music School in Ferreirola. In 2008 it completed its 5th year. Its objective is to bring top level musicians from around the world to perform along local villagers around La Taha, in the Alpujarra Mountains. These mountains are found just south of Granada on the southern side of the Sierra Nevada.
When Cat came to the Alpujarras some years ago she visited a threshing circle on a mountain path outside of the village of Ferreirola and envisioned a concert on that spot. Well, now as the 5th year of this festival has been completed you could say that she has realized her dream. But even more than this, the concerts not only take place on threshing circles, but in the plazas, churches and other important sites of these picturesque white Spanish mountain villages.

Music in the Mountains has also grown to create an impact beyond just presenting amazing music to the people of the area. They have started an environmental project to help regain the ancient farming techniques of the area that have been lost over the last generation. The loss of these techniques and practices has brought on dangerous erosion to a very mountainous area.
By bringing together some of the elders of the area with volunteers, they are recuperating the almost forgotten techniques of dry stone walling and acequia maintenance. The dry stone walls, along with the ancient waterway system (the acequias) is what makes farming possible in this landscape. Without the maintenance of both, the land begins to erode creating very dangerous circumstances, not to mention the inability of the locals to farm their own land and therefore becoming totally dependent on food brought from distant locations.

The benefits from the sales and downloads of the CD will go to support this project. To learn much more about this project and the area it is taking place in please visit this link, Alpujarra R.3. This will be our first example of how the music we record is going to directly benefit the earth we live on.

We at Wapapura were very fortunate to have met Cat Jary through some wonderful serendipity. Her project of presenting music in natural and cultural surroundings of the Alpujarra fits perfectly with our goal to record music in exactly these types of surroundings.

So far almost all of our recordings have been with the help of Cat and all those that help her to organize the Music in the Mountains festival. We are extremely grateful to them for all the support they have given us to get to where we are today.

We are also extremely grateful to all the artists that participated in the concerts that led to these recordings.  We hope to show that the beauty of their music can go to keeping our world a beautiful place in which to live.