Trás-Os-Montes Folk Music

Portugal · 1700s

Dancing Happy Sentimental Chill Sad

Your digging level for this genre

0/8

🏆

Description

Trás-os-Montes folk music is the traditional music of Portugal’s northeastern uplands, especially the Terra de Miranda plateau on the Spanish border. It is marked by vigorous dance tunes for bagpipe-and-drum ensembles, seasonal ritual songs, and distinctive stick-dance repertoires.

Core sounds include the gaita-de-foles mirandesa (Mirandese bagpipe), bombos (bass drums), caixas (side drums), and the pandeiro/pandeira quadrado (square frame drum) often played by women. Singing can be solo or in small groups, in Portuguese or Mirandese (Mirandês), and frequently uses strophic, call-and-response forms with memorable refrains.

The idiom accompanies community life—romarias (pilgrimages), Carnival (Entrudo) with the Caretos of Podence, winter caroling (Janeiras), and Lenten laments—blending lively circle and line dances (chulas in 2/4, viras in 3/4) with modal melodies, bagpipe drones, percussive footwork, and the striking stick patterns of the pauliteiros (Mirandese stick-dance troupes).

History

How to make a track in this genre

Top albums

Senhor Galandum

Galandum Galundaina

Com a lanceta na mão

Marion Cousin & Eloïse Decazes

Modas i anzonas

Galandum Galundaina

Trás-os-Montes: Chants du blé et cornemuses de berger

Main artists

Top tracks

Locked

Share your favorite track to unlock other users’ top tracks

Influenced by

Traditional Folk Music

Traditional folk music refers to orally transmitted songs, tunes, dances, and performance practices that arise within communities and are maintained across generations. It typically features simple, memorable melodies; strophic lyrics that narrate local history, work, love, or ritual; and functional roles such as accompanying dance, marking seasonal cycles, or supporting communal labor. Authorship is usually collective or anonymous, and variants proliferate as pieces are adapted to local language, instruments, and custom. While every culture has its own folk traditions, the modern concept of “folk music” was shaped in late-18th–19th-century Europe, when scholars and collectors began to document ‘the people’s’ song as distinct from courtly or commercial music.

Portuguese Music

Portuguese music is the broad musical tradition of Portugal, spanning medieval courtly song, liturgical polyphony, regional folk styles, urban song (most famously fado), and a modern landscape of pop, rock, jazz, hip hop, and experimental scenes. At its core is the aesthetic of saudade—a bittersweet sense of longing—that shapes the melodic phrasing and lyrical themes of many Portuguese styles. Hallmark timbres include the bright, shimmering guitarra portuguesa (12‑string Portuguese guitar), classical/folk guitars (viola), cavaquinho, accordion, adufe frame drum, and regional bagpipes (gaita transmontana). Portuguese music also reflects centuries of exchange across the Lusophone world, especially with Brazil, Cape Verde, and other former colonies, enriching local idioms with rhythmic and harmonic colors from Africa and the Americas.

Iberian Music

Iberian music is an umbrella term for the intertwined musical traditions of Spain and Portugal, shaped over centuries by Mediterranean, North African, and European currents. It spans sacred chant and courtly song, rural dance traditions, fado and flamenco, art music inspired by folk idioms, and contemporary fusions. At its core are distinctive rhythmic cycles (such as flamenco compás), modal colors (notably the Phrygian cadence and Hijaz-like inflections), and poetic themes ranging from duende’s raw intensity to fado’s saudade. Guitars (Spanish and Portuguese), clapping (palmas), cajón, castanets, and regional instruments (gaita galega, bandurria, Portuguese guitarra) are central timbral markers. As a cultural matrix rather than a single style, Iberian music both preserves local identities—Andalusian, Galician, Catalan, Alentejano—and continually reinvents itself in dialogue with classical composition, jazz, rock, and electronic music.

Celtic

Celtic is a broad, pan-regional umbrella for the traditional and tradition-inspired music of the Celtic nations—primarily Ireland and Scotland, but also Brittany (France), Wales, Galicia (Spain), the Isle of Man, and Cornwall. It is characterized by modal melodies (often Dorian and Mixolydian), lilting dance rhythms (reels in 4/4, jigs in 6/8, slip jigs in 9/8, hornpipes with dotted swing), and extensive ornamentation (cuts, rolls, crans, grace notes). Typical instruments include fiddle, wooden flute, tin whistle, uilleann pipes or Great Highland bagpipes, button accordion/concertina, bodhrán, Celtic harp, bouzouki (adopted into Irish music), guitar, and occasionally piano. Vocal traditions range from unaccompanied sean-nós singing to narrative ballads in English, Irish (Gaeilge), and Scottish Gaelic, as well as Breton and Welsh. Modern "Celtic" often denotes both heritage styles and contemporary hybrids that blend folk with pop, rock, and ambient/new age aesthetics while retaining core melodic modes, dance forms, and timbral signatures.

Church Music

Church music refers to music created for Christian worship and liturgical use, ranging from ancient chant to modern congregational songs and large choral–instrumental works. It encompasses unaccompanied vocal traditions (such as chant and Renaissance polyphony), congregational hymnody and chorales, organ repertoire, Anglican anthems, Lutheran cantatas, Catholic Mass settings, and contemporary praise and worship styles. The music’s primary aims are to carry sacred texts clearly, support ritual actions, cultivate reverence, and enable the gathered assembly to participate in prayer. Typical performance forces include soloists, choirs (children, adult, or mixed SATB), organ, and occasionally chamber or orchestral ensembles, with languages historically in Latin and later in various vernaculars. Stylistically it has evolved through modal melodies, imitative counterpoint, tonal harmony, and contemporary idioms, while remaining text- and context-driven.

Medieval

Medieval music refers to the diverse sacred and secular musical practices of Europe between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the dawn of the Renaissance. It spans more than eight centuries, from early monophonic chant to the first notated polyphony. Core features include the use of church modes rather than major/minor, extensive reliance on vocal music (Latin sacred chant as well as vernacular song), and the progressive development from unmeasured chant to rhythmic modal notation and, later, mensural notation. Texture evolves from monophony (plainchant, troubadour songs) to organum, conductus, and the motet, culminating in complex isorhythmic works by the late 13th–14th centuries. Secular traditions—troubadours and trouvères in France, Minnesänger in German lands, and the Iberian Cantigas—coexisted with and influenced sacred practice. Instruments such as the vielle, harp, psaltery, recorder, shawm, hurdy-gurdy, and portative organ often doubled or accompanied voices, though much music remained purely vocal.

Folk

Folk is a song-centered acoustic tradition rooted in community storytelling, everyday life, and social history. It emphasizes clear melodies, simple harmonies, and lyrics that foreground narrative, protest, and personal testimony. As a modern recorded genre, folk coalesced in the early-to-mid 20th century in the United States out of older ballad, work song, and rural dance traditions. It typically features acoustic instruments (guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, harmonica), strophic song forms, and participatory singing (choruses, call-and-response).

Celtic Folk Music

Celtic folk music is the umbrella for traditional song and dance-tune practices from the Celtic-speaking regions, especially Ireland and Scotland, and also Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man. It features modal melodies (often Dorian and Mixolydian), distinctive ornamentation, driving dance rhythms, and a strong oral/aural transmission tradition. Typical instruments include fiddle, flute, tin whistle, uilleann pipes or Great Highland bagpipes, Celtic harp, bodhrán, button accordion/concertina, and later accompaniment by guitar and bouzouki (often in modal tunings like DADGAD). Common tune types are reels (quick 4/4), jigs (6/8), slip jigs (9/8), hornpipes (dotted 4/4), polkas (2/4), strathspeys (with the “Scotch snap”), marches, and slow airs. Songs may be in English, Irish, or Scots Gaelic (and in Brittany, Breton), covering themes from love and emigration to work, history, and myth. As a modern genre category, Celtic folk music cohered during the mid-20th-century folk revival, which foregrounded regional traditions on stages and recordings while retaining the social, participatory essence of sessions, ceilidhs, and fest-noz gatherings.

Has influenced

Portuguese Folk Music

Portuguese folk music is the umbrella term for Portugal’s regional traditional musics and dances, encompassing vocal and instrumental practices tied to social life, work, and ritual. It includes lively circle and couple dances such as the Vira and Chula of Minho, the Corridinho of the Algarve, the Fandango of Ribatejo, the Bailinho of Madeira, and the Chamarrita of the Azores, alongside slower strophic songs (modas) and the powerful choral Cante Alentejano from the south. Typical instruments include the gaita-de-fole (bagpipes), adufe (square frame drum), concertina and diatonic accordion, cavaquinho and regional violas (viola braguesa, toeira, amarantina), rabeca chuleira (fiddle), bombo (bass drum), and ferrinhos (triangle). Vocals often employ call-and-response, heterophony, and close parallel harmonies in Portuguese and, in some regions, Mirandese. The style is communal and dance-oriented, performed at romarias (religious festivals), village gatherings, and seasonal celebrations. Melodies are diatonic and modal (often mixolydian or dorian), with simple harmonic supports when harmonized, and strong rhythmic patterns suited to participatory dancing.

Celtic Rock

Celtic rock blends the energy and instrumentation of rock with the melodic modes, dance rhythms, and timbres of Celtic traditions from Ireland, Scotland, and Brittany. Electric guitars, bass, and drum kit sit alongside fiddles, tin whistles, uilleann pipes, bouzouki, and bagpipes, creating anthemic songs and tune sets that feel both ancient and modern. Emerging in the early 1970s, the style offered a contemporary vehicle for Celtic languages and storytelling, while keeping jigs, reels, and airs alive on amplified stages. Over time it grew into a festival-ready sound that influenced punk, metal, and various pop crossovers, and became a musical emblem of Celtic identity at home and in the diaspora.

Folk Metal

Folk metal blends the power and riff-driven intensity of heavy metal with melodies, instruments, scales, and storytelling traditions from regional folk music. Typical arrangements combine distorted guitars, bass, and drums with fiddles, flutes, whistles, bagpipes, accordions, hurdy-gurdies, bouzoukis, and other traditional instruments. Bands often draw on myth, history, and local folklore for lyrical themes, ranging from epic sagas and battle hymns to drinking songs and pastoral ballads. The style spans a spectrum from aggressive and blackened approaches to upbeat, danceable, and festive moods, making it one of metal’s most diverse and regionally distinctive subgenres.

Worldbeat

Worldbeat is a pop-oriented fusion that blends contemporary Western production (pop, rock, dance, and electronic) with rhythms, instruments, scales, and vocal styles drawn from diverse musical traditions around the world. It typically features layered percussion, polyrhythms, call-and-response vocals, and multilingual or code-switching lyrics, while maintaining accessible song forms and hook-driven choruses. Arrangements often juxtapose drum kits, bass guitar, and synths with instruments such as kora, mbira, oud, sitar, djembe, balafon, or charango. As a retail and radio category in the 1980s–1990s, worldbeat served both as a creative space for cross-cultural collaboration and a marketing umbrella, attracting praise for bridge-building and criticism for occasional exoticism or unequal credit-sharing.

World Fusion

World fusion is a broad, exploratory approach that blends musical traditions from different cultures with contemporary forms such as jazz, rock, ambient, and electronic music. Rather than being tied to a single folk lineage, it privileges hybrid instrumentation, modal and rhythmic vocabularies from around the globe, and collaborative performance practices. Compared with the more pop-oriented worldbeat, world fusion tends to be more improvisational, texture-driven, and studio- or ensemble-focused. It commonly juxtaposes instruments like oud, kora, sitar, tabla, duduk, and frame drums with electric guitar, synthesizers, and jazz rhythm sections, often emphasizing modal harmony, drones, polyrhythms, and odd meters.

Neofolklore

Neofolklore is a contemporary Latin American fusion style that blends traditional folk instruments, rhythms, and melodies with modern electronic production. It typically combines Andean flutes (quena, zampoña), charango, bombo legüero, and marimba with downtempo beats, sub‑bass, and atmospheric textures, resulting in music that feels both rooted in place and forward‑looking. Rather than recreating folk music verbatim, artists recontextualize it through sampling, sound design, and minimal, groove‑oriented arrangements, often emphasizing hypnotic polyrhythms and spacious, nature‑evoking ambience. The style is distinct from neofolk in Europe and from 1960s Chilean “neofolklore”; in current usage it refers to a 21st‑century, electronics‑inflected approach to Latin American folk traditions.

Cimbalom

Cimbalom is a performance-centered genre built around the Hungarian concert cimbalom, a large chromatic hammered dulcimer played with lightweight beaters and controlled with a damper pedal. Its shimmering attacks, rolling tremolos, and bell-like arpeggios make it a signature sound of Central and Eastern Europe. While related dulcimers existed for centuries, the modern concert cimbalom was standardized in Budapest in the 1870s. The instrument then became central to urban Romani ("Gypsy") orchestras and Romanian taraf ensembles, and later entered classical, jazz, and film music. In this genre context, "cimbalom" denotes repertoire and ensembles where the instrument is the expressive lead voice.

Challenges

Digger Battle

Let's see who can find the best track in this genre