Category: Cat-Compositons Festive Music

Music has always accompanied the Feasts of “Moros y Cristianos” since its inception. It is documented in Alcoy (Alicante-Spain) the use of tamboriles and atabales, fife, dulzainas or castanets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and of drums and trumpets – music of “retreta” – in the eighteenth century.

The music is one of the aspects that also stand out in this party, especially the famous Spanish pasodoble Paquito the Chocolatero written by Gustavo Pascual Falcó, composer of Cocentaina (Alicante), as well as the answerano Manuel Ferrando González who composed in 1864 the first passodoble for theFeasts of “Moros y Cristianos” called El Moro Guerrero.

It will be in the nineteenth century when bands join the Fiestas, starting in 1817, the year in which “Fila Llana” of Alcoy hired the Band of National Militiamen, the only band that existed in the city, germ of the “Corporación Musical Primitiva”.

In a few years, the rest of the bands were also accompanied by their respective band, contracted in Alcoy or in the nearby towns, favored by a time of expansion and flourishing of the civil bands of music. The festivities themselves motivated an adequate music, a rhythm of their own to accompany the parades, from the pasodoble, a musical variety within the march form. The marches are musical works that fall within the compositions defined by the movement or by the rhythm. The marches regulate the passage of a certain number of people. The pasodobles are light marches, adopted as a regulation step of the infantry, with a special characteristic that makes the troop can carry the ordinary passage of parade.

The music for the Feasts of “Moros y Cristianos” has also developed other genres such as procession marches,  hymns of feasts, hymns to the patron saint , ballets, incidental music, etc.