Ancient Melodies in Ancient Places

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Morning on the Camino Primitivo near Tineo, Spain, on April 23, 2025. Photo by Elisabeth Ellison.

Ancient Melodies in Ancient Places

by Elisabeth Ellison | Houston, TX

I’m a classical musician and perform a lot of medieval music, much of which is Spanish. Many songs mention places along the Camino, pilgrims, or pilgrimage. I’ve studied and presented this music long-term, earned a graduate certificate in medieval music, and recorded an album about pilgrimage, but only on my native side of the Atlantic. I still wanted more context and brought a violin-sized medieval bowed rebec to carry on the Camino Primitivo. One of my purposes for the pilgrimage was to experience the music of its early centuries in the original places. 

I had been in Paris for a couple of weeks prior to starting the route, studying toward a performance certificate in double bass with the renowned soloist and pedagogue François Rabbath. He gave me an assignment that was already on my mind: to have something ready to play at all times, and to be able to play for listeners as a gift. As the lifetime study of music inherently involves a functional degree of self-critique, I wasn’t in the habit of thinking of my performing as a gift or offering. To find this state of mind would be my prayer and walking meditation.

I arrived in Oviedo on Holy Saturday via overnight bus on about 2 hours of sleep, overloaded and undertrained, headed west, and immediately met my first Primitivo lesson: whichever road you require, it will be uphill. Temperatures dropped; rain began. I battled my way up an endless slick, gravelly treadmill, with the destination village appearing as a mirage just over the next crest, yet always just as distant. My second Camino lesson was delivered on the heels of the first: Stop struggling. It took me several walking days to retrain my habits. The new ways of marshaling energy proliferated into music-making as well as hill-climbing.

When I found chapels unoccupied, I played the ancient melodies in the ancient places, listening for the footsteps of devotion that brought countless thousands there, spanning 1200 years. Fellow pilgrims inquired about the instrument I was carrying and asked to hear it. In Santiago, I was invited to play in a service at St. Felix Anglican church.

The Camino provided the grace of transformative lessons that continue to shape me as a musician and pilgrim, now compelled to bring the experience back to my native side of the Atlantic and participate in developing Camino routes within the United States. 

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Selfie of the musician with her medieval rebec inside the Colegiata de Santa María la Mayor in Salas, Spain, on April 21, 2025. Photo by Elisabeth Ellison.
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