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Estimated (estimados) comrades, There has been much fruitful (for me) explanation of metrical nuances in bulerías and soleares in this forum, e.g., noting that in bulerías there can be plenty of 6-beat half-compases, but in soleá the 12-beat compás should be maintained, though there can be rubato, and the cambio placement etc can vary. My current question is, what about alegrías? Since alegrías and soleá have similar compases, my assumption would be that in alegrias as in soleá, the 12 beat compás should be maintained, but then what about this vid, where at 0:22 La Perla de Cádiz (in Rito) starts the “tiri-tiri” business at beat 5 (and I understand that ppl place it differently) and somewhere along the line six beats get lost/added. Is this commonplace/”permissible”, in a way different from soleá?
Posts: 15725
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: half-compás in alegrías? (in reply to Steelhead)
quote:
Is this commonplace/”permissible”, in a way different from soleá?
Used to be more common. There was a Duquende example as well. This example is half compas, and she is doing it deliberately. Cepero keeps 12 beats so relative to him she remains at all times (just her intro) crossed, but the harmonies still work because they change on either 3 or 9 as normal, just reversed in this example. And the crossed feeling is only a result of standardization imposed by the baile. If you can handle solea of moneo etc this little thing in Alegrias is no problem it’s the same type of thing but much easier. Cepero does a half compas picado himself soon after (starts on 7 but count that as “one” for a full compas). Cool beans.
RE: half-compás in alegrías? (in reply to Ricardo)
Interesting. Faustino Nuñez, in his flamencopolis site, says starting the tiritiri on 5-6 is a Cádiz thing, and he has a little vid where he demonstrates with guitar, but maintaining the 12-beat compás. Is it up to the guitarist whether to do that or make it a half-compás?
Posts: 15725
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: half-compás in alegrías? (in reply to Steelhead)
quote:
Interesting. Faustino Nuñez, in his flamencopolis site, says starting the tiritiri on 5-6 is a Cádiz thing, and he has a little vid where he demonstrates with guitar, but maintaining the 12-beat compás. Is it up to the guitarist whether to do that or make it a half-compás?
All alegrias/Cantiñas are a “cadiz thing”. I was just listening to an Alcala anthology of bootleg performances and the old guy sang something pretty outside compas wise in Alegrias (see video below). So the compas crossing cante thing is like the old school’s “advanced jazz” and it’s across the board all styles and regions. Some aficionados realize singer A does weird things and never notice that other singers they know and love always did the same or similar things.
As far as what the guitar should do, well it’s whatever you can get away with depending on the company you are in. Montoya did half compas solea, borrull too, but niño ricardo and Melchor rarely if ever did. Morao cut every bulerias in half but never solea. Cepero seems to adhere to those same standards. In modern times only Antonio carrion i have noticed cutting compas in solea and I’m not so sure how deliberate it was.
People that listen to flamenco are at various stages of understanding and focus. Person A might hear it and not notice anything weird happened, person B will notice and insist it is “wrong and out of compas”, person C notices and thinks “the singer can’t sing in compas the guitarist had to change to make him look good”, person D noticed and thinks “the guitarist should have kept 12’s though the melody was crossed, this was not good”, person E will notice and think “half compas, beautiful, nicely done!” Etc. In the end you just have to understand what’s going on and make your own decisions when accompanying.
A detail about it...tiri ti tran.. tran tran ..... the timing starts between 10-11 or between 4-5 which is equivalent. The rhythm is the same as the colatilla. &11&12 (1)&(2)&(3))...(4)&5&6 (7)&(8)&(9)... etc. when people talk about tiri tiri tran... their timing concept is already off cuz there is only one “ri” going on!😂
RE: half-compás in alegrías? (in reply to Ricardo)
quote:
People that listen to flamenco are at various stages of understanding and focus. Person A might hear it and not notice anything weird happened, person B will notice and insist it is “wrong and out of compas”, person C notices and thinks “the singer can’t sing in compas the guitarist had to change to make him look good”, person D noticed and thinks “the guitarist should have kept 12’s though the melody was crossed, this was not good”, person E will notice and think “half compas, beautiful, nicely done!” Etc. In the end you just have to understand what’s going on and make your own decisions when accompanying.
I'm probably the person E. Paco Cepero's accompanying style is growing on me. In the video above he's not that metronomic but this makes him sound like more a human than a machine.
quote:
Cepero does a half compas picado himself soon after (starts on 7 but count that as “one” for a full compas). Cool beans.
A half compas picado? Do you think the short phrase at 0:40-0:42 is a half compas picado? To me that long picado run at 0:42-0:46 is a full 12 beat compas.
RE: half-compás in alegrías? (in reply to devilhand)
quote:
Do you think the short phrase at 0:40-0:42 is a half compas picado? To me that long picado run at 0:42-0:46 is a full 12 beat compas.
Is there supposed to be a contradiction implied by these two statements? Because there is none: two different time periods, two different lengths - one half, the other full compas long. Great insight that the second run goes over a full compas and thus is not the half-compass picado run which happened before that.
Posts: 15725
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: half-compás in alegrías? (in reply to devilhand)
quote:
quote:
Cepero does a half compas picado himself soon after (starts on 7 but count that as “one” for a full compas). Cool beans.
A half compas picado? Do you think the short phrase at 0:40-0:42 is a half compas picado? To me that long picado run at 0:42-0:46 is a full 12 beat compas.
So then we have person F who thinks he is person E but actually is stuck as A or sometimes B but doesn’t want to be.😂
RE: half-compás in alegrías? (in reply to Ricardo)
quote:
Person A might hear it and not notice anything weird happened, person B will notice and insist it is “wrong and out of compas”, person C notices and thinks “the singer can’t sing in compas the guitarist had to change to make him look good”, person D noticed and thinks “the guitarist should have kept 12’s though the melody was crossed, this was not good”, person E will notice and think “half compas, beautiful, nicely done!” Etc.
maybe person A comes after person E....?
when something like that happens I tend to think "oh, something happened, probably half-compas" and then listen to it over and over again to figure out what happened and if that was it. Catching it on the fly is something else.
quote:
Cepero keeps 12 beats so relative to him she remains at all times (just her intro) crossed, but the harmonies still work because they change on either 3 or 9 as normal, just reversed in this example.
Posts: 15725
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: half-compás in alegrías? (in reply to mark indigo)
quote:
maybe person A comes after person E....?
Depends where you are from. In Germany person B is actually person B flat and person H is actually person B natural.
To cut in half or keep 12’s, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous aficionados, Or to take up guitars against a Sea of puristas, And by opposing end them: to rematar, to corte; No more on the 10; and by corte, to say we corte in 6’s, and the thousand natural shocks That the Compas is heir to? .....
RE: half-compás in alegrías? (in reply to Ricardo)
quote:
Depends where you are from. In Germany person B is actually person B flat and person H is actually person B natural.
Not only in Germany, but also in other countries Serbia, Denmark, Norway, Sweden Hungary etc.
quote:
person B is actually person B flat and person H is actually person B natural.
If it's not the note itself but its pronunciation then what about do re mi fa ...? In some countries like Spain, Italy, Latvia, France, Romania, Bulgaria, Portugal, Greece and Russia person E would be person mi.
RE: half-compás in alegrías? (in reply to devilhand)
quote:
quote:
Depends where you are from. In Germany person B is actually person B flat and person H is actually person B natural.
Not only in Germany, but also in other countries Serbia, Denmark, Norway, Sweden Hungary etc.
quote:
person B is actually person B flat and person H is actually person B natural.
If it's not the note itself but its pronunciation then what about do re mi fa ...? In some countries like Spain, Italy, Latvia, France, Romania, Bulgaria, Portugal, Greece and Russia person E would be person mi.
when there's a one of these you don't have to take it seriously or literally... it means it's a joke...
RE: half-compás in alegrías? (in reply to Ricardo)
quote:
To cut in half or keep 12’s, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous aficionados, Or to take up guitars against a Sea of puristas, And by opposing end them: to rematar, to corte; No more on the 10; and by corte, to say we corte in 6’s, and the thousand natural shocks That the Compas is heir to? .....
RE: half-compás in alegrías? (in reply to Steelhead)
I don't know if this thread started out as the sublime, but it has certainly gone to the ridiculous. But I think we need to mention another person -- person H -- to Ricardo's excellent list (of listeners), i.e, the singer (maybe even La Perla) who is like, "We did a half-compás there? I don't know, I didn't notice, whatever, I just sing."
Posts: 15725
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: half-compás in alegrías? (in reply to Steelhead)
quote:
ORIGINAL: Steelhead
I don't know if this thread started out as the sublime, but it has certainly gone to the ridiculous. But I think we need to mention another person -- person H -- to Ricardo's excellent list (of listeners), i.e, the singer (maybe even La Perla) who is like, "We did a half-compás there? I don't know, I didn't notice, whatever, I just sing."
Yes sorry, it was a serious topic that went astray. My opinion about this phenomenon is that the singers were always “free” to let the melody lie in the compas however they want, knowing that the “ballpark” is one line of verse is approx 1 compas long. But what they were actually doing, before the boxed in baile orthodox structures where violently imposed, was sing OFF of accents. So they spring off the accented beat into the contra...so they might hear a 12 or 10 or 3 or 6 etc and not worry about which one it was because they know the guitar is there holding it down and it doesn’t matter. The good example was Mairena in rito y geografia with morao, where he sang Joaquin de Paula style 1 and repeated it such that one time it was off the 12 accent (“normal”) and the other was off the 8 accent (“crossed”), the same lyric and melody.
1:53 is off the 8, 2:12 is off the 12.
If you have an orthodox Baile understanding of compas, the repeat at 2:12 lies “correctly” in the compas, where as the first one feels like he’s in outer space. If this was a one off example most would say it was a “mistake” on his part. But after examining many singers that do similar things I concluded this was “normal” however, we could chart the amount of times the melody aligns to various other places. Starting on 1 is most common, on 7 second most common, on 11 3rd most common, on 3 or 9 4th most common, etc...
I would argue that starting on 1 or 7 is done quite deliberately, where as the others are simply read off of one of the other accents, meaning they hear a 3, 8 or 10, but feel it like it was 12 or 6 with not much care about it.
Here watch this at 4:25...the singer is singing perfectly fine but the guy in the white shirt doing nudillos (knuckles on the table) has an orthodox square box concept of solea such that he is adjusting tempo and cutting the compas all over the place as if to impose or “force fit” the guy’s singing into the box. Melchor would never play like that and at 5:51 looks over at the baby like “WTF is this compas mess?” Lol
RE: half-compás in alegrías? (in reply to Ricardo)
quote:
they hear a 3, 8 or 10, but feel it like it was 12 or 6 with not much care about it.
who's counting? the best flamenco i know in my locality (happens to be a dancer) doesn't count, and I'm sure would just feel 12 or 6 or whatever the guitar accompanying the cante went with.
i often feel like sticking up for the baile a bit* in these discussions, because not all* bailore/as are so into this box thing. I sat in on some classes with Juana Amaya in Sevilla and at one point a student asked what beat something happened on. Juana stopped the class and gave everyone a talk on how flamenco is not classical where everything is set in stone, and not maths where everything is counted out, the compas is a base for improvisation, and you have to feel your way in it. She also said one time she was hiring a singer, and the singer asked "do you want me to sing cuadrao" and she told him "if you sing cuadrao i don't want to work with you."
*only a bit, because i take your point about baile and boxed in cante generally, just often feel i want to point out there are exceptions, as I'm sure you're aware, but others might not be.
RE: half-compás in alegrías? (in reply to Steelhead)
quote:
I think we need to mention another person -- person H -- to Ricardo's excellent list (of listeners), i.e, the singer (maybe even La Perla) who is like, "We did a half-compás there? I don't know, I didn't notice, whatever, I just sing."
that's what i was trying to suggest with my little joke about "maybe person A comes after person E....?" i.e. the original list of letters were like progressive levels of knowledge/experience, and that the first one that didn't notice anything amiss (A) is higher than the one that noticed and thought it was nicely done (E)
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