OSPA performs and promotes traditional and contemporary Basque music and dance such as jauzi dances (leaping or jumping), fandangos, arins of Iparralde (of the northern Basque country), the jotas and porruas of Hegoalde (of the southern Basque country) and the mixed musical heritage of the Basque diaspora, which has a presence in parts of the Mountain West.

From Campbell County Rockpile Museum in Gillette, WY:

“We were approached by David Romtvedt from Buffalo last year during our sheep herders festival about hosting the Basque band from Buffalo,” said Robert Henning, Director of the Rockpile Museum. “OSPA is a five-piece band, and they play Basque community music and Basque dance music, and they’ve also got a new set of songs based on [19th century] Basque poet Joxe Mari Iparragirre’s writings The Tree of Gernika.”

The band was created by Romtvedt, who serves as a professor emeritus of creative writing at the University of Wyoming and was Wyoming’s poet laureate from 2003-2011. Ospa is a Basque word either meaning ‘celebration’ or ‘scram,’ depending on its usage. Other regular members include Romtvedt’s wife Margo Brown on percussion and vocals, Caitlin Belem on vocals, violin and alto sax, Kevin Carr on violin, viola, alboka, and pandero, Daniel Steinberg on piano, in addition to Romtvedt on vocals, flugelhorn, trikitixa and three row diatonic accordion.

“He [Romtvedt] likes to teach about Basque culture through the songs, through the poems, through the dance,” Henning said. “That’s what attracted us to hosting them is that we want to help teach residents and visitors to Gillette about the culture of this region.”

Basque immigrants first came to parts of Wyoming in the early 20th century. They were actively involved in sheep herding and invested in their own ranching operations. Some ranches in northeast Wyoming are owned by the descendants of these immigrants today, Henning said.

Basque community dance music and the songs and poems of the nineteenth century Basque troubadour Joxe Mari Iparragirre.

While Iparragirre—singer, songwriter, poet, cultural activist, and roustabout—is one of the most prominent nineteenth century Basque figures, his complete work had never appeared in English until 2021 when the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada published Gernikako arbola—The Tree of Gernika.  This book of translations by David Romtvedt and Xabier Irujo included the thirty-nine poems and songs that scholars are certain were written by Iparragirre, including the title song “The Tree of Gernika” which has long served as the unofficial national anthem of the Basque Country and of the global Basque diaspora.

As a print book, the Tree of Gernika included the text of the songs but not the accompanying music.  Having been drawn to Iparragirre’s life and work as a result of serving as the co-translator of the poems and songs, OSPA member David Romtvedt began performing some of the music with its Basque lyrics while also reading the translations for English speaking audiences.  That led to the idea of enlisting the other Ospa musicians to perform Iparragirre’s songs along with Basque music of Wyoming and the West—primarily the dance music historically associated with celebratory events.

These dance tunes that are known in almost identical forms throughout the Basque world whether in Wyoming, Nevada, Argentina, or Europe have been largely instrumental.  Their emphasis was on bringing people together through group dancing that emphasized the continuity of Basque life through the past five centuries.  Iparragirre’s songs, on the other hand, were meant for listening not dancing, and spoke to the experience of the Basques during the Carlist Wars between 1834 and 1876, a time of ongoing civil war on the Iberian Peninsula.  These were the years when Basque autonomy came under increasing fire from the French and Spanish states and when Basque political independence was coming to an end.

Iparragirre wrote about the long history of Basque autonomy, about great military and cultural heroes of the past, about the importance of the Basque language, and of those writers and scholars who defended the language and its culture.  So Iparragirre was something of a political figure.  Indeed, his song “The Tree of Gernika” was considered so dangerous by the Spanish state that he was exiled and spent eighteen years in Argentina and Uruguay before returning home. This followed earlier exile in France and England along with a period of two years when he was a member of a traveling theater troupe performing in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland.

When Iparragirre finally returned home, he wrote one of his most famous songs, “Back to the Land I Love” that opens with him standing on a hill above what is now the Spanish French border looking out across the southern Basque provinces—Gipuzkoa, Nafarroa, Araba, and Bizkaia—and saying:

Over there the beloved mountains,
the rolling fields
and sparkling white farmhouses,
the streams and springs.

Here, Iparragirre expresses love of place.  And indeed, many of what are thought of as his most political poems are driven as much by a straightforward love of place as by any ideology or national sentiment.  Indeed, when Iparragirre ran away from home at fourteen and enlisted in the Carlist Armies, he said years later that he did so only for love of the Basque Country and his fellow Basques not for any political reason.

Maybe it was love in all its varieties that drove Iparragirre.  He loved sport and wrote about famous players of Basque handball—pilota.  He loved language and wrote about the linguists and historians working to keep Basque alive.  Above all, and for better and worse, he loved romance and wrote about his many infatuations.  He knew he was often silly but couldn’t resist.  In “About You, Manuela,” he wrote:

It’s hopeless, this
love.  Why’d you
pick my heart
to rule.  Better
to have said,
‘Buzz off, truth
is I never liked
men with beards.’

And in “A Sharp Thorn,” explaining love, he wrote:

You want to know
how bad it is?  Ask me.
I’m the test case
for loving too much.

Poor Joxe Mari.  His was a wild musical journey through many aspects of nineteenth century Basque life.

The book The Tree of Gernika. Gernikako Arbola: Complete Poems by Joxe Mari Iparragirre and translated by David Romtvedt can be purchased on Amazon.