The history of Europe is shaped in part by the tension between the sun and the wind. People have followed the sun from east to west. They approached the western limits of the land, where the wind blew in their faces, from west to east.

The western edge of Europe shares a rugged lifestyle, a demanding beauty, a complex music.

There are few cities on the western seaboard. Vigo crawls for miles, tucked alongside a broad and secure ria. Oporto and Lisboa hide themselves in gorges, protected from the sea and its storms.

But the music persists, from the Hebrides to Donegal, from the outpost of Connemara to the Aran islands and then to Kerry and West Cork, where the land diminishes to low, elegant islands and small inland seas the Fastnet Rock. The ends of the earth.

Cornwall has its own identity, too, its own history and its own Land's End. And a short ferry crossing away, these days, from Plymouth to Roscoff, is the old Bretagne, more music, a different set of drones echoing that west wind, with the gulls' cry of the bagpipes. Finisterre.

Between Brittany and the north coast of Spain are the flat, marshy lands of Aquitaine; then, the Basque lands and the coastal principality of Asturias with its fierce traditions and its own bagpipes. Finally, for now, the north-west province of Galicia with its language and its crisp white wines, its bagpipes and tambourines, its pilgrims and its seafood. Fisterra. The end of the known world. The field of stars at the end of the Milky Way.

The music is not archaic. It has not died. You hear it all the time. In village halls and pubs, in the street and in the squares. It's played on the radio and it's played all night when friends gather on high days and holidays. It is a music for today.

It is a music built on drones, the drones of the bagpipes, the drone of the hurdy-gurdy, the zanfona, the drones of the wind through Chillida's sculpture on the headland in Gijón, the Elogio del Horizonte .

Listen to the music and make it your own.