Rounds, sayings and tongue twisters

The fact is that for many years I had wanted to put proverbs and tongue twisters to music....
The idea of the texts became natural, humorous and in part a synthesis of the culture of popular poetry.
Somehow everything I remembered from what I had read a long time ago came to my mind at this moment. I remember reading a very important book by Carolina Poncet entitled El romance en Cuba, which contained children's stories and some had the melodic line to sing it, in that case it was like an individual song, a soloist's song, a singer's song, a storyteller's song....
In the texts of the cycle there is also an indirect and uneducated encounter, of course, of the African griot, who is the historian and narrator of the tribe, and in some way records the oral tradition. So when I began to write them, it was like evoking that distant, inexplicable, extraordinary relationship between the sung proverb or the anecdote or the history of the tribe, as the Western troubadours did in the early Middle Ages and before as well, all that became my basis, it was me personifying that cantor....
Later I found that many of the sayings I had used were compiled in the Latin American Refranero popular and repeated in the Mexican Refranero, and of course, they must have been taken from the Hispanic popular tradition, I suppose that many of those sayings have their origin in the Spanish refranero.
 
Leo Brouwer (2018)