Joan Manuel Serrat has won Princess of Asturias of the Arts 2024a prize that is also a recognition of popular music as one of the highest artistic forms. If for more than four decades this category of the Princess of Asturias has highlighted above all architects, filmmakers, sculptors and opera and classical musicians, this year it grants the same significance and cultural resonance to the songs that accompany us in the bar, in the car or on the radio, where Serrat has been unbeatable for more than half a century.
“In Serrat’s work, with deep Mediterranean roots, The art of poetry and music combines at the service of toleranceshared values, the richness of the diversity of languages and cultures, as well as a necessary desire for freedom,” states the minutes of the jury that awarded the prize, which also highlights his role as “defender of dialogue in the face of tension”.
Serrat’s artistic career “transcends music and becomes a civic referenceadding to the lyrics of their songs the strength of the collective anthem with universal will,” adds the jury.
“You don’t know how much joy and emotion I receive the news of the award,” said Joan Manuel Serrat, in statements shared by the Princess of Asturias Foundation. “I can’t find a better way than a distinction as prestigious as this to say goodbye to a long and satisfying professional career. like mine,” added the musician.
Serrat’s music as a meeting place
Serrat’s songs have been the lingua franca of several generations of Spaniards, a common space, a collective playground and at the same time an intimate refuge. People have made them their own because they are songs about people, and so their phrases from around the house and their melodies to hum run through the bloodstream of the country like platelets. They are molecules that have dissipated through the air and water and have infiltrated this earth forever.
The celebration of the life of Joan Manuel Serrat is not low culture just as it was not low culture Paco de Lucía in 2004, Bob Dylan in 2007 and Carmen Linares in 2022, the other three popular music winners out of a total of 52 in the Arts category of the Princess of Asturias, which are endowed with 50,000 euros. Joan Manuel, Juan to his friends, today is applauded as one of the most important and influential Spanish creators of our culture.
Serrat said goodbye to music before music said goodbye to him, if that was possible, during a long tour that ended in December 2022; in Barcelona, of course. “I would be here singing until I dropped the ball, but you’re not in the mood to give shows either,” he apologized in those concerts, making light of the issue, which has been one of his specialties.
With that last concert, on a Christmas night, ended a six-decade adventure during which the singer-songwriter turned everyday life into poetrypoetry in music and music in everyday life, a virtuous circle that had its best moments during the 70s and 80s, when Serrat composed and sang from artistic plenitude, mature, sensitive and ambitious.
The forging of this rebel, a kind and blunt rebel, was the nova cançó from the 60s, that song by a militant author that soon became too small for him while he graduated as an agricultural expert, which is no small detail because this man from Barcelona has also been a country man. The Franco regime censored his music after the rejection of Eurovision by refuse to sing The, the, the in Spanish, but the fire that would become his music was already running out of control. The spark jumped in 1969 with the album Dedicated to Antonio Machado, poetwith arrangements by Ricard Miralles, the architect of its sound, a fabulous success, and the flame expanded definitively and immortally in 1972 with Mediterraneana record tattooed on the skin of our country.
Their songs form a harmonious set of nostalgia and good wishesof endearing characters and of pain and rage, of melancholy and defeat, and of some victory, but small. For millions of listeners here and in Latin America, where he has been intensely admired, Serrat has been a rebel against injustice and a moral model.
In his music he has fanatically claimed popular music, and that is an aesthetic but above all ethical decision: in his albums, Serrat has tried to be open to all listeners, he has disdained cultural elitism and just as he has sung about the people has done for the people. If there was ever sophistication or stylization, it was always with a certain air of fun or casual frivolity, because Serrat has always been an intense creator who has preferred to appear light. A lot of vibrato, yes, but also a lot of irony.
At 80 years old and when he can no longer prove himself, The Princess of Asturias rewards him in time and with justicewhich is the best thing that can happen to a memorable author.
Princess of Asturias Awards
The Arts is the first of the eight Princess of Asturias Awardswhich will reach their forty-fourth edition in 2024 and will be announced, in this order, over the next few weeks: Communication and Humanities, Sports, Social Sciences, Letters, International Cooperation, Scientific and Technical Research and Concord.
He delivery act of the Princess of Asturias Awards will be held in Oviedo in the month of October, in a ceremony presided over by the Kings.
He jury The Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts has been chaired by Miguel Zugaza Miranda and made up of Claude Bussac, Josep Maria Flotats, Sergio Gutiérrez, Maribel López, Joan Matabosch, Isabel Muñoz, María Pagés, Helena Pimenta, Martha Thorne, Rosa Torres-Pardo , Carlos Urroz, Sandra Rotondo and EL MUNDO journalist Antonio Lucas.
