León Felipe was a Spanish poet born in 1884 in Tábara, Zamora, who spent much of his life in exile in Mexico after the Spanish Civil War. His work returned repeatedly to justice, collective memory and the weight of history, and “Revolución” is among his best-known poems. It rejects the cycle of political change that changes nothing: the same wars, the same tyrants, the same chains, always with a different date. “¿Quién lee diez siglos en la Historia y no la cierra / al ver las mismas cosas siempre con distinta fecha?” — who reads ten centuries of history and does not close the book, seeing the same things always with a different date? The poem ends with a line about collective action: “no importa llegar solo ni pronto, sino con todos y a tiempo” — it does not matter to arrive alone or early, but with everyone and on time.
Evoéh Q-art set it to music on Músicas Semilla, their fifth album since 2012, and performed it live on 8 July 2025 at the Bosanski Kulturni Centar KS in Sarajevo during the Baščaršijske Noći festival, the city’s oldest summer festival, running since 1964. A Spanish exile’s poem, sung in a city that knows something about what history repeats. The quartet on stage is Ariana Barrabés on voice and shaker, Jesús Olivares on guitar, Nabil Naïr on piano and Jose Borjas on double bass.
Evoéh Q-art is a Barcelona-based project led by Barrabés and Olivares, who work with Iberian and Mediterranean root music, especially Sephardic song and other oral traditions, across Spanish, Ladino, Catalan, Galician, Occitan and Arabic. Músicas Semilla is their fifth album since 2012, and the record frames that repertoire through the group’s own idea of rooted music as something carried across languages, places and histories.
The live video was filmed and edited by Lorenzo Melegari and Erika Mordazzi.
Listen to “Revolución” and get your copy of Músicas Semilla via THIS LINK