The idea that flamenco is on the brink of extinction is as old as the art form itself. Moreover, this prophecy of imminent doom has been publicly espoused by many prominent Spanish cultural figures throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Antonio Machado y Álvarez, Federico García Lorca, Manuel de Falla, Ricardo Molina, Fernando Quiñones, and José Manuel Caballero Bonald. However, these great minds share something else in common: they´ve all been categorically wrong. This is the central argument of Alegato contra la pureza, a controversial and influential essay by José Luis Ortiz Nuevo that we at ExpoFlamenco invite readers to revisit as we prepare to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary at the 9th Cabildo Flamenco Festival in Archidona, Málaga, on July 3rd and 4th.
The book’s central premise is that flamenco, like all art forms, is in a constant state of evolution. Consequently, notions of purity, so often revered by writers, artists and aficionados, only obscure the remarkable intercultural metamorphosis that gave birth to the art form in the mid-nineteenth century and has continued to fuel its development ever since.
What if some magical button had been pressed in 1871 to halt that process of constant evolution? What if we had heeded the words of a 24-year-old Antonio Machado y Alvarez, who publicly proclaimed that «pure gitano singing» would perish in the cafés cantantes? As Ortiz Nuevo reminds us, had that come to pass, flamenco as we know it would be little more than a vague memory of something that was never allowed to become what it is today.
The same could be said had the flamenco world taken an equally youthful Federico García Lorca at his word when, in 1922, he prophesied the apocalypse of flamenco. This time, the enemy was no longer the café cantante, but rather the new performance venues associated with the era of Opera Flamenca. Let us not forget that Ramón Montoya´s rondeña, Pepe Marchena´s colombiana, the modern conception of the buleria forged by La Niña de los Peines, and a host of other innovations and variants in the flamenco repertoire all emerged after 1922. Had Lorca´s warning been heeded, none of them would exist. What a tragedy that would have been.
Fortunately, neither Machado y Alvarez´s ideas or Lorca´s ideas exerted much influence on the society of their time. Unfortunately, they were revived in 1963 by the distinguished poet Ricardo Molina and the canonical flamenco singer Antonio Mairena in their influential book Mundo y formas del cante flamenco. Published by the prestigious Revista de Occidente, awarded a prize for flamenco research by the Cátedra de Flamencología de Jerez, and embraced by a growing community of aficionados, the book quickly attained an almost sacred status. «It was the gospel», Ortiz Nuevo remarked in a recent interview.
"José Luis Ortiz Nuevo's book 'Plea Against Purity' argues that the flamencoArt, like all the arts, is in a constant state of evolution. Consequently, notions of purity, so often revered by writers, artists, and enthusiasts, only obscure the extraordinary intercultural metamorphosis that gave rise to art in the second half of the 19th century and that has continued to fuel its development to this day.
And so, as if proclaiming «Let there be light», Mairena and Molina introduced the notion of the «hermetic period»: a supposed blissful era before 1860, when pure flamenco remained a closely guarded gitano secret, preserved in an Edenic state until commercial interests corrupted its innocence. Yet, according to this narrative, that lost purity was somehow rescued a century later by a professional writer and a professional singer.
The theory is elegant, and it has proven remarkably durable. However, as Ortiz Nuevo demonstrates in Alegato contra la pureza, the hermetic period rests more on myth than on evidence. Indeed, scholars such as Steingress in Sociology del cante flamenco, and Mitchell in Flamenco deep song, have likewise challenged its historical foundations.
If so many prominent intellectuals and artists have been categorically wrong about flamenco’s imminent demise, what reason do we have to believe that today’s purists are any more accurate? This is the question that the first edition of Alegato contra la pureza challenged flamenco aficionados and scholars to ask themselves in 1996.
The timing was significant. That same year witnessed the release of Enrique Morente’s Omega and Carmen Linares’s Antología. La mujer en el cante. It was also the year in which the guitarist Niño Josele, the dancer Israel Galván, and the singer Fernando Terremoto (hijo) won first prizes in the young artists competition at the 1996 Bienal de Flamenco de Sevilla. Yet, as Ortiz Nuevo notes, it was also the year in which a manifesto published in the newspaper ABC once again proclaimed that pure flamenco was on the verge of extinction.
«Is there any artistic discipline that has not changed with the times?»
This question lies at the heart of both Alegato contra la pureza and the performances that will be featured at the 9th Cabildo Flamenco Festival in Archidona, Málaga. Yet another contribution of el Poeta, José Luis Ortiz Nuevo, to an art form that he has consistently defended as unorthodox, modern, perpetually evolving, and naturally resistant to the molds imposed upon it by those who claim to be saving it.
