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Will classic flamenco recording acquire the status of great art?
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3459
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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 RE: Will classic flamenco recording ... (in reply to cavedave)
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What do you guys think and which Flamenco artist will make it into the future?
Good question, CaveDave. If you mean which flamenco guitarists will achieve the flamenco equivalent of the status of Schubert, i.e., who in the flamenco pantheon will be considered "genius" years from now, even a century hence, in my opinion the list will be small indeed. Four will survive: Ramon Montoya, Nino Ricardo, Sabicas, and Paco de Lucia. They are the current "Big Four," and they will continue that role. All the others we like--Vicente Amigo, Manolo de Huelva, Melchor de Marchena, Diego de Gastor, and a dozen others--will survive, but only as footnotes.
Cheers,
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Feb. 14 2011 19:06:41
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Ron.M
Posts: 7051
Joined: Jul. 7 2003
From: Scotland
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RE: Will classic flamenco recording ... (in reply to Harry)
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quote:
There has always been a division between high art and entertainment
That's an interesting post, Harry...
There was a programme on Radio 4 this weekend about "The Old Grey Whistle Test"...a late night programme on the telly that started in 1971 and featured new and interesting bands..
All they had was some floorspace, a couple of lights and a couple of cameras.
The bands just brought their own gear, plugged in and played.
There was no time limit or script or anything...sometimes it just used to fade out in the middle of a song because they had reached the end of the programme's allocated time.
But over the years they showed first time UK appearances of some of the legendary bands of the 70's who were not mainstream pop...eg...Bob Marley..Velvet Underground..Lynyrd Skynyrd..Captain Beefheart..etc
As time moved on, the BBC noticed that it was getting pretty popular, so new producers were brought in who decided to give the programme a "makeover" including a new flashy studio set with good lighting and a "Top Ten" chart countdown review, "To make the programme appeal to a broader and newer audience".
The result.... a total failure.
The younger audience they'd hoped to attract didn't happen as they were all too busy watching MTV...while the dedicated audience they had acquired, lost faith in the programme's direction, presentation and featuring of top ten pop band's videos, so just switched off.
So the plug was finally pulled in the 80's, since nobody watched it anymore.
Yet the programme could have still been going to this day with today's generation, with it's orginal format of a staff of a presenter, a couple of cameramen, an electrician and a cleaning lady, showing interesting bands who nobody has heard of...all done on a shoestring.
Apparently, the BBC are now talking about making Radio 4 more appealing to younger audiences...
So it seems to me that any successful niche entertainment now has to broaden it's scope to include everything.
Maybe Foroflamenco should start some Bossa Nova, Jazz, Rock and Pop Forums to attract more members?
Jeez...
cheers,
Ron
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Date Feb. 14 2011 20:22:51
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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RE: Will classic flamenco recording ... (in reply to cavedave)
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quote:
Will classic flamenco recording acquire the status of great art?
I would think: "Yes", in the long run.
We are living in a period of detouched / descrete specialisation. Common knowledge disperse of informative ressource.
Should menkind survive the destructive outcome of status quo, the survival will be exclusively enabled through a coming trend towards integral thinking and understanding.
So, if there is a future it will have to be a much more rational and reasonable one.
If you will, a neo-classicistic area of re-discovering relevance of ways towards objectivity. A reform in philosophy, didactics; and upturn of logical capabilities.
In sight of the arts this will include tidying up with arbitrary heritage of Cold War US policies of intentional delute on artistic proficiency ( as an reaction to SU "Realistic Art"), that has led to works of incabality pecuniary ranking over works of retracable skill.
( Just days ago, I saw another example of an internationally acknowledged expert of modern art raving before a drawing. Estimating that it ought to be a Jason Pollock or Picasso, worth half a million USD; until the reporter told her that the picture was actually made by a chimpanzee. hehehe  )
In my opinion art shouldn´t be a separate subject to beginn with. Like with American native cultures who do not have a special term for arts on the one hand, with everyone being naturally routined with making art work since childhood on the other hand.
If however art was to be a separate speciality as with western cultures, criteria inherently and logically ought to be correspondingly retracable in the same time.
Consequently, works of art must fulfill the two aspects of proficiency ( demanding craft ) and idea ( expression, effect, originality ) in retracable ways for the educated observer ( and his hopefully given overview on crafts demand and preceding inventions and works ).
In sight of music ( in my mind the most touching art of all ) with just seven notes and only so many ways of varying them ( under premisse of rhythm and harmony ), potential creation of actually original yet muscial new production appears to be a correspondingly tough challenge to the contemporary composer.
Creating something musically conclusive / pulling yet vastly original in the same time could be the most demanding task with contemporary arts.
Now ever more scarce white spots on the map of music only emphasize the dorado of past centurys sixth and seventh decade, which in terms of creativity was not preceded by any comparable period, nor will ever be repeatable; unfortunately.
The unique productions of those unmatched decades were not only based on the circumstance that most, from writers over players up to recording engineers had undergone more of intensive muscial ( and in sight of AEs: technical ) education, but for the great white plains of music still virgin and ready to be conquered back then.
In a future that can only be of advanced sophistication ( if at all ), original and musical productions, whether historical pieces or an ever smaller number of contemporary ones, should be increasingly appreciated by public.
People will likely embrace the old recordings of artists you mentioned above, and musicians like Grisha, gifted with the technical proficiency to perform works of Sabicas & co. will probaly be highly rewarded by audience.
Their performances will be captured by then perfected digital recording and post-work means, superceding todays best DSD and played back through mind-blowing gear of immediacy and spatiality.
- Just as our fine wooden guitars of now might become the "Stradivaris" in a future of carbon fibre specimens.
Ruphus
PS:
I found Ron´s telling about "The Old Grey Whistle Test" very interesting and comprehensive.
( Last weekend, on German TV there was a retrospective of an old TV program called "disco". Crazy to see what muscial quality there used to be yet with the rather simplicistic category of disco music.)
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Date Feb. 15 2011 12:52:32
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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RE: Will classic flamenco recording ... (in reply to cavedave)
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To say it with the words of a brother in crime, named Bravin Neff:
quote:
"Am I the only one that tires of this "everything is subjective" watered-down-pop-culture-pseudo-philosophy ****?"
Taste has all to do with empirics and knowledge. And art is just as liable to objective criteria as any other specialisation.
The more educated the observer be on demands of a craft and on foregone works of a genre the more he will be able to pinpoint taken efforts and invention behind workpieces.
Which is not to say that there wouldn´t still exist matters of individual taste yet among educated stands, but that beforehand insight is providing competence of judging.
The problem with the zeitgeist and its silly trend of "everything is subjective" being that envogue brainwashed don´t know what it does to civilisation whenever related criteria of subjects are being baselessly watered down to nonesense of arbitrariness.
They do not fathom what it means when e.g. clumsy "painters" occupy market shares of actually gifted artists who consequently can hardly pay the rent for humid basement studios.
They don´t understand the loss of culture in place when a Paco Pena or J.J. Cale will hardly fill a schools atrium, while thelikes of Lady Gaga filling stadiums in a blink.
They don´t get what dismiss, trash hype and ignorance in the end means to cultural level and same to humanity.
They don´t understand that the "watered-down-pop-culture-pseudo-philosophy" that they consider to be trait of oh so generous "tolerance" and "philanthropy" in fact is being the exact opposite of the latter; detrimental to cognition and in the end considerably contributing to general injustice among people.
Instead of trendy parroting zeitgeist, how about autonomous thinking?
If you want to know whether or which flamenco to be special enough for being called "art" or not, take an approach to at least basic guitar playing yourself, so that you will obtain an idea of what might equal demanding playing and what might not. Next check out flamenco discography chronologically as thoroughly as you can, so that you will discover what refined phrasing and originality is.
After all that you will find certain works to be outstanding in terms of creation; those will very likely be worth naming art indeed.
It really isn´t much more complicated than that, although way more demanding than just deluting the term of art to contradictive undefinition in dependent mind.
Should you however still fancy that metiers couldn´t be subjected to objective criteria, maybe don´t research about specialists before an eventual future surgery.
After all proficiency must depend on the eye of the beholder and can´t be circled in anyway. Right?
Just as anyone could chisel the Pieta, isn´t it.
Jeez ... 
Ruphus
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Date Feb. 16 2011 12:30:47
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3459
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Will classic flamenco recording ... (in reply to mark74)
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quote:
I also think that much of the pop-flamenco coming out is some of the best popular music in the world right now
This line is a total non-sequitor, if you consider the original question. CaveDave originally asked if anyone thought that classic recordings of flamenco might achieve the status of great art, and he used the example of Schubert. That "much of pop-flamenco coming out is some of the best popular music in the world right now" is not only simply an opinion open to debate, it says nothing about whether or not such music will be appreciated a century from now, the way Schubert's compositions are appreciated today.
Frankly, I think "pop flamenco" is about as impressive as "bubblegum music" was in the 70s and early 80s. Perhaps people will be listening to it and appreciating it in the next century as 'great art," but I, for one, doubt it.
Cheers,
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Feb. 17 2011 1:26:47
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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RE: Will classic flamenco recording ... (in reply to XXX)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Deniz
If I were a bad minded guy I could accordingly to that logic say if there is a market for brainwashed people (claiming marketing strategies as reason for peoples tastes and buying decisions is implying nothing else), why there shouldnt be a market for the elitist people, who want to consume certain things ("great art") because they want to express their status or "knowledge" of music by that?
I dont know, people who are more into pop are definitely easier to get along with than people of other music styles who think they are on a mission to convince everybody of the beauty and superiority of their beloved art. If you present flamenco with this attitude to other people for sure you will p*ss off alot of people.
Make no mistake. I can imagine why there arent any productive (if i may say so) answers to my post. What i write here is blasphemous for anybody who thinks his tastes are reasoned by some high(er) force or logic. Some logic that could constitute "great art", if applied properly.
If you stick to superficial questions of prestige, there is no way for you to approach an actual core of the matter.
Your assumption that there were to be no levels from incapability to proficiency, no such thing as trivial and demanding products, in the end renders whatever kind of development into none-existance. Including human evolution.
Species came about through specialisation. Seals for instance specialized on diving, so that they could hunt fish; sharks and bears specialized on sniffing out food from miles away, and hominids as easy prey of mighty carnivors found a way towards intellectual expansion.
Brain work as means of survival over 7 mio years, resulted in human being.
By reputing that whatever intellectual tendency, namely triviality was to be just fine, you are advocating inhuman conditions. Supporting given insanity of needless and exploited cluelessness, cruelty and destruction.
While things like primitiveness and monotony in music seem not to exist for you, upbringing with complex, versatile and harmonic music products have everything to do with intellectual development of a person.
And the latter mustn´t be elitist, but humanly adequate in the first place.
For what is catching fish for the seal, is differenciation capabilities for homo sapiens.
The watered-down-pop-culture-pseudo-philosophy makes you pal with the above mentioned expert of "modern art", only that demonstrating nonesense of arbitraryness as in her embarrasing case before the TV-camera was easier to do in the realm of painting than it would be in the one of music.
For, after all it is clear that you would be in a position to hear it when a chimpanzee went into a recording studio.
-
If let aside what you so far must be deeming to be PC / apparently human friendly, in place of such considering causalities, maybe at a time you will discover existance and relevance of cultural level as determination of human being.
And if wanting to know where exactly at the end of the "everything is subjective area" of BS, human being is at today, take notice that in the meantime we are self-evidently and dazed living at the brink to Nirvana, with envogue other-wordliness not only effecting ourselves, but a planet; likely edelweiss within the next billions of galaxies.
Overpopulated menkind living on undertax of trivial level means not only inadequate but lethal status.
Ruphus
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Date Feb. 17 2011 12:24:24
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