Product Description
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This landmark historical text delivers the goods promised in its
title. It does not address flamenco dance whatsoever, focusing
instead on flamenco song forms with a special chapter devoted to
the role of the guitar.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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WHO INVENTED FLAMENCO?
Nobody ever sat down in a bar one evening in Andalucia and said:
"Right, we want to create a new style of music, and we re going
to call it flamenco." It simply evolved naturally from the
continuous evolution which is popular music and entertainment.
Perhaps the closest we can get to defining who is fundamentally
responsible for flamenco music and dance as we know it today, is
to say that it was invented in Andalucia, by Andalucians.
Together, both Andalucians Gypsies and non-Gypsies gradually
created a distinct style of song and dance, out of traditional
folk music and verses already in existence. But just as not every
American plays jazz every day, neither does every Andalucian
sing, dance or play Flamenco. Nor do they listen to it
continually, nor many of them recognise the forms.
Everybody associates flamenco with the Gypsies of Spain. Only the
Spanish Gypsies, but not all of them, sing and dance flamenco.
But non-Gypsies in Andalucia and elsewhere- whom the Gypsies call
payos or sometimes gachós - also perform flamenco in the same
way. However, since Gypsies have been settled in Spain since the
1400s and flamenco only developed in the late 1700s, it can t be
attributed to them alone. Gypsies in other parts of Europe share
the same origins as the Andaluz Gitano, how come none of them
play flamenco? If it were a purely Gypsy invention, surely they
would also be performing it. We can t say the Moors of Spain
invented it either, since the almost 800 years of their rule have
left no mention of flamenco. As no solid evidence about who
invented flamenco was available, just about anybody could create
a persuasive theory and become an authority. As the Spanish
saying goes: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King.
Gypsies have no reasonable explanation for the emergence of
flamenco (on the rare occasion when they re asked) other than to
say that they learned the cantes from their ancestors. Since
their history is as confused and obscure to them as it is to the
rest of us, the origins of Gypsy Flamenco remain a mystery.
WHAT A PAIN
To point a finger at one particular ethnic group and cl they
invented flamenco, has led to a great confusion. It s best to
remember that when flamenco was first written about, it was not
the tidy defined selection of styles we recognise today. It was
an emerging art: in development, it wasn t born fully formed!
Because of all the words about suffering in el cante flamenco
people have tried to attribute it to each different ethnic group
that has suffered throughout Spain s history: Spanish Gypsies,
Spanish-Arabs, and Sefardic Jews. Pena- suffering in Spanish- is
a recurring theme, an ancestral pain who s cause nobody has been
able to explain convincingly. All kinds of colourful theories
have been published trying to explain it. It s traditionally
thought that Gypsies invented flamenco, since this pena is their
history and experience. It s only in recent times that the full
extent of the persecution of Gypsies has been fully
investigated.1 The Andalucian Gypsy originated in the Punjab area
of Northern India and present-day Pakistan, so their pena was
sometimes said to be because of their exile from their ancestral
home, hundreds of years ago. Those who tried to explain the
origins of flamenco as Arabic, attributed the recurring theme of
pena to the expulsion of the Moors from Granada. The musicologist
Christian Poché2 describes Arabic-Andaluz music- a particular
style of music which developed in the Arab ruled regions of
Spain- as one long ode to absence; the lament of the home
Moor living in Al-Andalus - mainland Spain, far from his
homeland. Today that homeland would be the areas of Algeria,
Tunisia and Morocco. Those who trace flamenco s origins back to
the Sefardic Jews suppose the pena comes from their forced
conversion to Christianity, and their expulsion from Spain under
the Catholic monarchs. But besides the vast gaps in time between
all these historic events and the emergence of flamenco in the
1780s, all these explanations assume that the indigenous
Andalucians, for some unknown reason, adopted these people s pain
and suffering as their own, since the indigenous Andaluz also
performs flamenco.
- Childrens game.
- Ideal Product.
- Mechanism.