RE: After SEVERAL MONTHS of study....

Costs are rising and times are tough.
Please consider a donation to keep this
place going.

Welcome to one of the most active flamenco sites on the Internet. Guests can read most posts but if you want to participate click here to register.

This site is dedicated to the memory of Paco de Lucía, Ron Mitchell, Guy Williams, Linda Elvira, Philip John Lee, Craig Eros, Ben Woods, David Serva and Tom Blackshear who went ahead of us.

We receive 12,200 visitors a month from 200 countries and 1.7 million page impressions a year. To advertise on this site please contact us.

You are logged in as Guest

Users viewing this topic: none

Printable Version

All Forums >>Discussions >>General >>

Page: << < 1 [2]

Message

<< Newer Topic Older Topic >>

Richard Jernigan

Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA

RE: After SEVERAL MONTHS of study.... (in reply to kitarist)

People who know me would be quick to inform you I do not lack self confidence. But when it came to flamenco I was spared the embarrassment of broadcasting from the summit of Mount Stupid. Starting to learn in my early 20s there were always people around who knew more about the arte, and who were much better guitar players. Like most Americans attracted to flamenco guitar I skipped over any tracks on an LP which contained cante. I found it a little more tolerable in live performance, but just a little.

These days I play guitar mainly for my own amusement and seldom listen to any flamenco recordings except cante.

The young woman in the blog seems to me like a competent musician who set out to learn something about flamenco, a genre about which she admits complete ignorance at first. She doesn’t seem to intend to teach as an expert, but only to recount her experience so far. She readily admits she still has a lot to learn, maybe even more important material than she has yet encountered.

What’s the point? I’m not sure.

One possibility is that professionally trained musicians are taught that you haven’t mastered something until you perform it. She is a long way from mastering flamenco. I doubt that is even her objective. Maybe this is sort of an in-progress recital of her inquiry.

Another possibility is to encourage other “classically” trained musicians to explore different genres. I was inclined to do so as a teenager, despite moderate disapproval from my classical teachers. Following that inclination has greatly enriched my musical experience, especially a 65-year love affair with flamenco.

RNJ

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Jun. 25 2019 17:00:39

kitarist

Posts: 1715
Joined: Dec. 4 2012

RE: After SEVERAL MONTHS of study.... (in reply to Richard Jernigan)

quote:

ORIGINAL: Richard Jernigan
[...]

What’s the point? I’m not sure.

One possibility is that professionally trained musicians are taught that you haven’t mastered something until you perform it. She is a long way from mastering flamenco. I doubt that is even her objective. Maybe this is sort of an in-progress recital of her inquiry.

Another possibility is to encourage other “classically” trained musicians to explore different genres. I was inclined to do so as a teenager, despite moderate disapproval from my classical teachers. Following that inclination has greatly enriched my musical experience, especially a 65-year love affair with flamenco.

RNJ

Another possibility is the most boring one - that it is just a "building my brand" exercise - producing new content (regardless of what that is) to continue building up social media presence.

Hopefully her main driver was to provide encouragement to other classical musicians, though.

_____________________________

Konstantin

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Jun. 25 2019 19:53:50

El Burdo

Posts: 632
Joined: Sep. 8 2011

[Deleted]

Post has been moved to the Recycle Bin at Dec. 22 2022 20:02:41

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Jun. 25 2019 19:59:32

Mark2

Posts: 1868
Joined: Jul. 12 2004
From: San Francisco

RE: After SEVERAL MONTHS of study.... (in reply to El Burdo)

I feel that way about guitarists who do nothing but two handed tapping, in the style of Stanley Jordan. Why don't they just play the piano? It's a novelty to play the guitar that way, but I think if the same music was played on piano, it would be unremarkable at best.

quote:

ORIGINAL: El Burdo

I haven't yet bothered with non guitar instrumentation but can't help but feel that a piano doing a great job at producing a credible flamenco sound would be better off being a guitar. If not, then I doubt I could refer to the music as 'flamenco'.

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Jun. 25 2019 21:00:28

El Burdo

Posts: 632
Joined: Sep. 8 2011

[Deleted]

Post has been moved to the Recycle Bin at Dec. 22 2022 15:50:44

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Jun. 25 2019 21:54:11

szvarga

Posts: 58
Joined: Mar. 11 2019

RE: After SEVERAL MONTHS of study.... (in reply to Mark2)

quote:

I feel that way about guitarists who do nothing but two handed tapping, in the style of Stanley Jordan. Why don't they just play the piano? It's a novelty to play the guitar that way, but I think if the same music was played on piano, it would be unremarkable at best.

Good point. I feel strongly, the proper way to play guitar is play it with flamenco techniques.
As I see, acoustic players tries to sound right (or both) hand(s) of a piano player. Electric players tries to simulate violin, or other strings. Others tries to use as a percussion.

But, a guitar is not an instrument of independent polyphony like a piano, nor a melody instrument close abilities to human singing, and not a drum set. And still a little both of them. I feel it is its speciality.
And only the flamenco way allows to play in its own special way, where it can be a mix of little bit of polyphonic, a little bit of melodic, and a little bit of rhythmic.

And the reverse is equally true: if you try to play flamenco on piano, you will loose the melodic and the rhythmic characteristics. On strings, loose the polyphony with rhythmics, and on percussions, all the melodic and the polyphonic side lost.

The moment was a revelation for me, when I realized, the guitar and the flamenco are one blood, one body, one soul.

And if I want to play the guitar, I have to play it on the flamenco way. And forget everything else.

Sz

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Jun. 26 2019 17:14:26

Brendan

Posts: 353
Joined: Oct. 30 2010

RE: After SEVERAL MONTHS of study.... (in reply to El Burdo)

She is clear that she doesn’t take herself to have mastered the art, and the face she pulls at the end of the improvised noodle is quite telling. She is hopping about looking for ingredients from here and there to add to her musical larder. We may suspect that gathering the superficial features of many genres is going to end with her making herring and banana tacos on a bed of feta salad marinaded in Thai fish sauce, but that is her problem. For me, none of her noodles sound like the source material, it all sounds like the music on corporate training videos, but as always there are no cops to call.

Richard is right, of course, there is no short-cut round the job of learning the language properly. Yo-yo Ma made a bluegrass record called Goat Rodeo, but he didn’t compose any of the music. He left that to native speakers, though he could easily have made superficially bluegrassy noises.

Still though, there are a few general pointers that she could have understood. For e.g., flamenco melodies mostly go on journeys away from and back to the root note, and they move by small steps, rarely using any interval bigger than a major third. You quite often get the same little journey repeated and then a similar journey with a bit of extra interest that takes twice as long. Also, flamencos like semi-tone intervals in chords. While jazz voicings tend to smooth out dissonances, flamenco chords play them up, e.g. x-4-7-3-5-0 compared with say x-0-5-6-5-6. Her melodic ideas have large leaps and her chords don’t have the tight little clusters of notes that create the flamenco flavour.

So my question was, are there more pointers like these which, while they do not substitute for a proper education, might have helped? Some of the ideas about her piano sound, for e.g.. it lacks the attack and fast fade that give flamenco its rhythmic snap. On the other hand, Chano Dominguez.

Misspelling people’s names is very bad. Also, the digestion metaphor doesn’t say anything good about the product so I would have advised against it.

_____________________________

https://sites.google.com/site/obscureflamencology/

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Jun. 27 2019 11:40:12

Ricardo

Posts: 14797
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC

RE: After SEVERAL MONTHS of study.... (in reply to Guest)

quote:

What was wrong about what was said about the 12-beat compás and the Phrygian mode? Don’t flamenco guitar methods also cover these? Not trying to be argumentative - I genuinely want to understand what was factually wrong as I’m not an advanced player.

I have never advocated any of the popular flamenco “method” books for the same reasons, again instead have spent countless hours dispelling the misconceptions they proliferate to the masses. Regarding 12’s, my thoughts are too numerous to dig up but here is a recent discussion with dance class examples that get to the heart of the issues:

http://www.foroflamenco.com/tm.asp?m=317280&p=1&tmode=1&smode=1

As far as Phrygian MODE explanations and confusions, my posts in this thread seem to cover my thoughts on it:

http://www.foroflamenco.com/tm.asp?m=243506&appid=&p=&mpage=1&key=

At least the girl presenting her learning journey did not add to the ever going debates about guitar technique, picado, nails, modern vs old school, etc, etc. She wants to scrape the surface to simply spice up her own compositions....I get it all too well. Why not focus on other similar music that has already traveled that path....the best of which being the Guitar Trio???

_____________________________

CD's and transcriptions available here:
www.ricardomarlow.com

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Jun. 27 2019 19:32:11