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RE: Academic Articles About Flamenco
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Brendan
Posts: 353
Joined: Oct. 30 2010
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 RE: Academic Articles About Flamenco (in reply to Kevin)
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After a tumultuous week, it's a joy to find that the Foro is unchanged, as are the individuals composing it.
For the record, I do not think that this MA thesis is very good. Her claim to insider status is the least of the problems, and it would still be in trouble if it were purged of every trace of post-modernism. If you are in doubt, flip forward to her discussion of flamenco guitar. I'd rather not say more than that, because thousands of people write terrible MA theses every year, and most of them do not get shredded on Google-searchable forums. If you want to take up the cudgels, go after a professor.
I hereby retract my claim to have read almost all the academic books on flamenco in English. I haven't read Washabaugh's latest, and there are a few others that I've missed. The recent titles are at eye-watering prices, so I'm not in a hurry to make up the ground.
I'm glad that Kevin has chipped in, both for his useful list and his good sense on the question of method. He is doing this for real, and I cheerfully defer to his expertise. I have my own thoughts about Foucault, Derrida, postmodernism in general and the strange careers of these names in English-speaking academia, the short version of which is: if you're content to roll Derrida and Foucault into a single item, you're really talking about the English-language academic phenomenon rather than French philosophy.
Is anyone else reading Michelle Heffner Hayes? I rather like her stuff but I'd like to talk about it with someone who is less keen, for the rigour.
And a forward-looking thought: there seems to be some appetite for scholarly discussion over a text. Rather than haphazardly lighting on a weak MA thesis, how about we pick something stronger and structure things a bit?
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https://sites.google.com/site/obscureflamencology/
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Date Jun. 30 2016 11:04:07
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Academic Articles About Flamenco (in reply to Piwin)
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quote:
However, the rejection of objective fact coupled with the lack of quantifiable evidence pulled it out of the realm of science altogether. This is what I meant by Chomsky keeping Linguistics out of that rabbit-hole. Though he was not the only one, nor the first, his rigorous use of formal logic and attempts to achieve reproducible results strongly contrasted with a lot of the linguistic pontificating of the time. He understood that there should be no exception to the scientific process no matter what the subject-matter is.
This is what was so great about the "Sokal Hoax." Sokal's masterful piece, published in the journal "Social Text," exposed so many so-called post-modernists as the intellectual frauds and charlatans they were. Sokal used their own jargon-laden language and reviewed various current topics in physics and mathematics (of which the post-modernists in academia understood nothing), and, tongue in cheek, drew various cultural, philosophical, and political morals that he felt would appeal to fashionable academic commentators who question the claims of science to objectivity.
The post-modernists fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Apparently the editors of the journal did not even feel the need to question Sokal before publishing his piece. When Sokal exposed his work as a hoax, the outrage was not really over his lack of proper academic engagement; it was over the fact that everyone fell for it, revealing their own lack of academic rigor and shallow pursuit of the latest academic trend.
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 Jun. 30 2016 11:21:45
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: Academic Articles About Flamenco (in reply to Brendan)
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@Brendan. I do hope it was clear I was only picking on one small aspect, a detail really, of her thesis. And that detail is by no means an important factor in judging the quality of an MA thesis. My intent was not to go after anyone, just to bring up a larger issue of what constitutes a credential and how it is sometimes assumed that one thing is a credential when closer scrutiny suggests otherwise. But you're right that this is a "Google-searchable" discussion, and I hope none of this was construed as me going after the author of this thesis. And I'll add, just to be clear, that I have no academic expertise in her field and can't even claim to be a scholar, since those days are behind me now. So all of this should be taken as the point of view of an outsider.
As for having a more structured discussion on a stronger text, I'd be happy to participate if you're willing to take on the questions and opinions of an outsider to the field. What do you suggest?
@BarkellWH
This is just an aside as I'm going far off topic but bringing up Sokal made me think of the group of activists called The Yes Men, which has been active since 2003. They go after what they see as the excesses of corporations, government organizations or international organizations. Their modus operandi is to set up a fake website with a similar address to that of the real organization they're targeting (say WTO.com instead of WTO.org or something of the like). They then impersonate representatives of said organization and, when invited to deliver a speech in another venue, they use reductio ab adsurdum to reveal ideological issues. It is particularly effective as quite often the people they are pulling the hoax on buy it. They are in fact quite good actors. In the first video I saw of them, they were impersonating WTO representatives before an audience of about a hundred people. They talked the talk extremely well and slowly, over the course of the speech, they raised the level of absurdity and by the end of it, I think they had suggested re-establishing slavery in third world countries or something similarly abhorrent... You would think people would have left in outrage, but the impersonated WTO reps received rather nourished applause and some participants had bought the whole thing and came up to them to enquire further about it. I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions they draw from these pranks, but they do reveal some profound issues. Their impersonation of a Dow rep. on the BBC declaring that Dow was taking full responsibility for the Bhopal disaster was also quite effective. Those who bought it were quickly reminded that it would be almost unthinkable to hear a large corporation say "we're going to do the right thing, even if it costs us". It was a vivid reminder that money can trump moral responsibility in the higher rungs of some large corporations. Their approach has the added benefit of being rather funny.
_____________________________
"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
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Date Jun. 30 2016 12:34:47
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Academic Articles About Flamenco (in reply to Brendan)
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More or less in line with this thread, I would like to recommend the writings--essays, reviews, and books--of the art and cultural critic Robert Hughes. Now deceased, his writings hold up very well today. With a razor-sharp wit Hughes wrote about--and often skewered--everything from trends in art (going back to the Armory Show in New York) and Andy Warhol's entourage (which he entitled "High Trash" in "The Shock of the New") to the latest trends in academia.
Adam Gopnik, a "New Yorker" staff writer, compiled selected writings of Robert Hughes in a book published in 2015 entitled "The Spectacle of Skill." You can find most of Hughes' best writings in this volume. It takes its title from Hughes' brutally honest description of his world view and approach which I have quoted below.
"I am completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it is an expert gardener at work, or a good carpenter chopping dovetails. I don't think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one.
"Consequently, most of the human race doesn't matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate."
And he does indeed, in a manner that makes for delightful reading.
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 Jun. 30 2016 14:41:20
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Brendan
Posts: 353
Joined: Oct. 30 2010
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RE: Academic Articles About Flamenco (in reply to Morante)
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quote:
Lorca did not know a lot about flamenco. What he knew came from De Falla
Thanks Morente. On the musical side, you are right, I think. Lorca leans on De Falla in his lecture on Cante Jondo, right down to the reference to Byzantine liturgical chant. But this paper that Kiko_Roca kindly posted is on a narrower question. Namely, how did it happen that, (quoting the abstract) "while using the ancient poetic form of the 'romance', the medieval world's vehicle for telling stories in poetry, Lorca focuses on startling imagery rather than the story line"? The answer that the author, Frieda H. Blackwell, gives is all to do with modern art and deconstruction.
It strikes me that it makes more sense to ask Lorca what he was up to than to ask Derrida. In the lecture on Cante Jondo, once you get past the silly stuff about music derived from De Falla, he discusses cante letras in some detail and praises precisely the features that F.H. Blackwell sees in the Romancero. And as a señorito, he heard a lot of cante, even if he didn't understand it deeply. So it seems to me more plausible that in his poetry he was trying to do a posh literate version of what he heard in cante. He writes, "It is wondrous and strange how the anonymous popular poet can condense all the highest emotional moments in human life into a three- or four-line stanza. There are songs where the lyrical tremor reaches a point inaccessible to any but a few poets:
Cerco tiene la luna;
mi amor ha muerto."
His poems seem to me like an educated poet's attempt to achieve something like this.
On surrealism: a quick dekho at Google scholar tells me that an association between surrealism and Andalucia goes back to the 30s, but this idea seems off to me. I have the impression that the surrealists knew that those old dreams are only in your head, whereas I don't think this is true of cante. But again, I stand to be corrected.
_____________________________
https://sites.google.com/site/obscureflamencology/
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Date Jul. 9 2016 14:25:03
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granjuanillo
Posts: 32
Joined: Nov. 3 2009
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RE: Academic Articles About Flamenco (in reply to Brendan)
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Over a year ago there was a conference on Fandangos, held in NYC organized by Meira Goldberg and Antoni Piza - this treated all kinds of fandangos - flamenco, Mexican, classical, etc. Some of the talks were humanistic, but there were also musicological studies. Peter Manuel, noted musicologist, was there and gave a great talk - I notice that he shows up in your search, with a paper on the history of flamenco harmony. Guillermo Castro Buendia - a Spanish musicologist and guitarist was also there - he has a large volume out and has published analyses of cantes del Levante, in a journal dedicated to those (Revisita de Investigacion sobre Flamenco La Madruga').
I know that post-modern humanities gets some flack, but I am reluctant to criticize disciplines that I don't work in. Nevertheless, I've always felt that flamenco studies suffer from a lack of documented data and analysis, but it looks like this may be changing.
The papers from the conference were published in
http://www.centrodedocumentacionmusicaldeandalucia.es/opencms/documentacion/revistas/revistas-mos/musica-oral-del-sur-n12.html
I have a paper there on fandangos personales.
http://www.centrodedocumentacionmusicaldeandalucia.es/opencms/documentacion/revistas/articulos-mos/cante-libre-is-not-free-contrasting-approaches-to-fandangos-personales.html
There will be a follow-up conference this April on Malguenas and Zapateados at UC Riverside. Walter Clarke, who gave a great talk on Malaguena de Leucona at the last one will be co-hosting.
Speaking of Malaguena de Leucona, has anyone seen the children's book by Keith Richards talking about how his grandfather taught him guitar and told him if he could play Malaguena, he could play anything?
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Date Dec. 23 2016 21:51:44
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