El flamenco It's an art. We all agree on that. Made from melody, the harmony provided by the guitar, beat, rhythm, and the musical form that orders the parts of a whole, made with the parameters that make up all kinds of music. Each of these parameters has been crafted with the threads of the thousand cultures that came to Andalusia providing the necessary raw material. They are, therefore, the roots of the flamenco As varied as the many people who inhabited that blessed land, touched by the divine, chosen, promised. A cultural conglomeration unique in the world due to its strategic geographical location, at the vertex between Eurasia, Africa, and America after 1493, which became a crossroads of humanity. Causality, the law by which effects are produced. From those causes, these results.
El flamenco It is the precise and precious result of the most eloquent and fascinating cultural fusion in the world. And I'm not exaggerating. As a Galician, I'm not suspected of chauvinism. That's what I believe, and I've been convinced of it for many years. It was born from the most exquisite alchemy that could have occurred anywhere. Meanwhile, In his cradle, there is discussion about the percentage of the different contributions, both of gypsy, of gachó, of African, of Moor, of Castilian, of oriental, so much, so much, so much and so much. Forgetting that music, like matter, is neither created nor destroyed, it only transforms, and in this continuous process of transformation our admired musical genre evolves incessantly, adapting to the coming and going of time, and setbacks. The systole and diastole that mark the pace of the evolution of flamenco It has lived, and continues to live, like a pendulum swinging from one side to the other, through times where tastes are inscrutable. One moment a certain way of singing, playing, and dancing becomes popular, and after a short period of time, fans fall head over heels for another, sometimes aesthetically at odds with the previous one. Then there are the conservatives, those who have formed an idea since childhood of how this works and can't be shaken, steadfast in the face of any hint of change.
"The flamenco It is the precise and precious result of the most eloquent and fascinating cultural fusion in the world. And I'm not exaggerating. As a Galician, I'm not suspected of chauvinism. That's what I believe, and I've been convinced of it for many years. It was born from the most exquisite alchemy that could have occurred anywhere.
In this end-of-summer article I want to describe the history of the genre, taking risks, as I always do, in order to glimpse how it could have been adorned. flamenco to show off to the world, managing, all by himself, more alone than ever I would say, day in and day out, to leave even the most experienced singers speechless with his solitudes and joys, seguidillas and fandangos, tangos and tonadas.
As much as we want to go back in time, being as it is a music and dance of a resounding romantic character, forged in the 19th century, we will not be able to go back very far, it is not possible to do archaeology of what jondo With a minimum of rigor, although some have tried, we cannot go back to the mythical Tartessian culture, nor to the Turdetani, nor even to the Romanization of Hispania, although there we can stop at the essential idiomatic contribution of Latin, the main source of the Romance languages, among them Spanish or Castilian, not in vain the flamenco It is sung, for now, mostly in this language. Another essential milestone is marked by the Christian religion. The primitive Byzantine-Visigothic liturgy noted by Manuel de Falla In his writing of 1922 on the occasion of the Granada Competition, determining the importance of Byzantine chant in the configuration of some aspects of the cante jondo, attributing to Byzantium the eastern germ of cante, even before the arrival of the Arabs in Al Andalus.
The Muslim past of the south of the peninsula served as a model many centuries later to shape the oriental aroma that the Andalusian gypsy community adapted to cante jondoThe way of playing the lute also probably evolved towards the barber's style of strumming and plucking the guitar, with four, five and, already in the 19th century, six strings, the sonanta that reached the people probably in the years of the first polos, cañas and rondeñas, in the twenties and thirties of the eighteen hundreds.
The black population will, of course, forever mark Andalusian music. First directly from Africa, as Muslim slaves, and then via America. There are studies that have amply demonstrated this. The importance of the Afro-Andalusian heritage has been essential and constant for centuries, what has been called the Afro-Andalusian Caribbean, and I, while I'm at it, prefer to call it Afro-Indo-Eurasian Caribbean (let's not forget the Manila-Mexico-Cadiz route).
"They are the roots of the flamenco As varied as the many people who inhabited Andalusia, that blessed land, touched by the divine, chosen, promised. A cultural conglomeration unique in the world due to its strategic geographical location, at the junction between Eurasia, Africa, and America.
As I say, essential, those who follow me know it, it is the beginning of the Modern Age marked by the discoveries of Columbus. As he said Stephan Zweig, "in ten years more was discovered than in a thousand." The music generated by this new era would definitively drive the musical events that gave rise, among many other musics, to flamenco. I think that the flamenco It is a genre of back and forth and that Without the essential American contribution, from and to Cadiz and Seville, it would not be even remotely what we know it today.. Zarabandas, chaconas, folías and pasacalles, dozens of dance basses and their corresponding ostinatos (strings of chords) that knew how to follow, almost to the letter, the styles flamencos.
No less important was The Age of Enlightenment, the reaction to foreign culture, mainly French and Italian, paved the way for them to begin to crystallize at the beginning of the 19th century, like a cry of indigenism, an exclamation of Iberian identity, opposed to the fashions of wigs and ruffles. Thus it was sung: "A flinch and a click of heels are worth more than all the pirouettes in the minuet."
They are there Gypsies as the main protagonistsThey knew better than anyone how to summarize three thousand years of history in their melodies. The barber guitar provided harmony, air, and rhythm. Bolero dance, after becoming Frenchified, became more dynamic so as not to clash with the new music. The seguidillas of zarzuela already speak for themselves. The Can-Can process:
God threw it into a pot,
as it is said,
lots of rosemary flowers,
salt and pepper,
then chilli,
and left that place
the string of lines.
A pure flamenco
he grabbed the pot,
and of flock
the bolero was born.
See if it's true,
Since then I have remained
the salt contract.
