Flamenco, un arte español, un arte gitano

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With this history, it perhaps was inevitable that the gypsy communities of southern Spain, of Andalucia, should have become the custodians of a musical art form as rich, deep, and vigorous as flamenco.

Flamenco was driven by some of the same social forces that created American Blues music; those of cultural oppression. The lyrics (letra)of flamenco songs are full of sadness, violence and of death. The earliest flamenco is believed to be the cante hondo; the unaccompanied voice of a male singer telling stories of sadness and oppression. The dance and the guitar came later. The poet and writer Will Kirkland claims that “what is now recognized as flamenco, or Gypsy-Andaluz song, seems to have arisen only in the late 1700s ” (4) Nevertheless, an account published in those same years described what is recognizably a flamenco juerga or party, in a taverna on the road between Cadiz and Sevilla. “Tio Gregorio pulled apart the veils and described the name and worth of each gypsy girl, provided the rhythm with palmas while she danced ... I can only say that, with the strident tones of the guitar, the shrieks of the gypsy girls, and the arguments among the gypsy men over who would play the guitar for the polo ...I didn’t close my eyes all night.”(5) The performance being described included female dancers and male guitar players, but no cante hondo, so Kirkland’s dates may be off by a hundred years or so. It is also likely that there were then two streams of flamenco, one of which was the serious business of cante hondo, and the other was the dance and music of the fiesta, and the cante chico. This separation persists until this day, and a serious cantaor may not be willing to sing cante chico for a dancer.

The flamenco repertoire is constantly changing, but a recent standard encyclopedia of music(6) lists sixty five different named forms. Other sources would give a larger total. The forms or palos (palo = stick, used here to mean rhythm, from the stick used to beat time, but also meaning suit, as in suit of cards) can be classified in several different ways, but are often classified by presumed origin. Thus there are those palos which are said to be based on indigenous Andalucian or Iberian tradition (alegrias, garrotin), there are those which are believed to have come from the gypsy culture of Andalucia (solea, petenera), there are those which are seen to be based on Moorish forms (zambra) and there are those which are believed to be based on musical forms developed in the Spanish new world and taken and modified by the gypsies of Andalucia (guajira, colombiana). Most of the forms have roots in more than one of these cultural sources.

The different palos can also be described by the rhythmic form, which often relates to the origins of the particular palo. Thus there is a family of palos which derives from one of the earliest flamenco forms; the siguiriya. It is a family which includes the soleares, the alegrías, and the bulerías, all having a rhythmic signature of twelve beats. There is another family which derives from the tango, which has a rhythmic structure based on four beats.

The great majority of the palos are today danced as solo performance dances, and indeed those that are couple or round dances (sevillanas, rondeñas) are usually considered to fall outside the flamenco canon. The other difference between the true flamenco dance forms and those which belong more to the regional folk tradition is that true flamenco does not have a standard choreography and is often to a degree improvised by the dancer. This difference is somewhat blurred in those performances which are performed in a theater or are put together for a film or video performance; these performances are often tightly choreographed, but still the choreography is generally the creation of the dancer, or is created by a choreographer for that performance. There are no classical choreographies in flamenco as there are for instance in ballet where the eighty year old choreography of Njinsky still is performed.

These differences between flamenco and ballet are at this time becoming less clear as many flamenco companies now describe themselves as the Ballet of so-and-so, and dance in long, choreographed pieces that involve ten or a dozen dancers and illustrate some story from literature or legend. These changes are much deprecated by the aficionados of flamenco puro, where the performance is carried by a handful of artists (a cuadro) each performing solo pieces in turn on a stage bare except for a line of chairs. After seeing one of these flamenco ballet performances at the Festival de Jerez, a great flamenca remarked sadly: “ Fue interesante, pero, no fue flamenco.”

Indeed, the strength of flamenco rests in this continued existence of the flamenco puro base, performing in a style which has changed little in the last two hundred years. Flamenco culture, Gypsy culture, is surprisingly conservative.

Flamenco is not, of course, solely a dance art, indeed the dance historically was not the central art form. First came the cante, the singing. At first this was always performed a palo seco - without instrumental accompaniment. Then the guitar came to be used to accompany the cantaor, and then finally the bailaor or bailaora became a central figure. (The words cantaor and bailaor are the Spanish words cantador and bailador modified by dropping the d; a gitano and Andaluz dialect practice.) Each component of flamenco: cante, toque (playing an instrument) and baile has its own specific style and tradition. When all three are presented in a performance it is the cantaor who leads, followed by the bailaor. The guitarrista accompanies first the cantaor and then the dancer. There may be other performers; percussionistas marking the rhythm (compas) with palmas (clapping) with pitos (snapping fingers), or by playing on a cajon (a wooden box slapped with the hands). It should be pointed out that the dancer's feet are also an important percussion instrument and the sound of the dancer’s feet, called soniquete and often amplified, is an important part of the musical presentation.

Flamenco, like the blues, has not always been eagerly accepted by the more conservative elements of society, perhaps because of its lyrics which often speak of violence and incarceration. During the Franco dictatorship (1936-1973) many flamenco artists thought that it would be wise to perform abroad, which contributed greatly to the awareness of the art in other countries. (Although the fascist government of Spain in these years was extremely repressive towards those it saw as politically threatening, it was somewhat less repressive towards racial minorities, and the gitanos of Spain mostly survived, while eighty five percent of the gypsies of the rest of Europe ended up in Nazi extermination camps.) In modern Spain, flamenco is now generally supported by the government and the ruling elite, as a boon to the tourist industry. This acceptance is viewed warily by some aficionados, who believe that the acceptance of blues and jazz by the mainstream culture may have contributed to their end as creative art forms.

© John L. Harris, January 2004

Notes: (1)Cristof Jung, Cante Flamenco, in Flamenco, ed. Claus Schreiner, Amadeus Press, 1991. (2)El Secundii, 1231, cited in liner notes of CD, The Splendor of Al Andalus, MA Recordings. Encino California, 1994 (3) Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World, Brown and Company, 2002, p 123. (4) Will Kirkland, Gypsy Cante: Deep Song of the Caves, City Lights Books, 1999 (5) José Cadalso, Cartas Marruecas, Plaza and James, 1984. Original published ca. 1784. Translation jlh. (6) The New Grove Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians, Macmillan, 1980.

Illustrations: Ruins of Madinat al-Zahra, outside Córdoba, dancer Sanae Ishii, Alcazar, Jerez de la Frontera, Guitarrista uncertain, ca 1870.