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Miguel de Maria -> my four weeks at the Cristina Heeren Fundacion (Jul. 31 2003 15:23:08)
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Tomorrow is the last day of class, although class might be an exaggeration. I know in our Intro to Flamenco class, we´re planning on all going for cafe and churros, our last lecture was today. In our guitar classes, the teacher have been coming later and later, with longer and longer breaks, and more and more socialization.
Today we were all hanging out in the patio, when there was this CRACK!, and stuff flew everywhere. I thought it was a Spanish terrorist, but we found out that someone on the third floor had inadvertently dropped a lighter, which exploded on contact with the ground. To no one´s surprise, it was one of the guitarists in the Basico section.
I wanted to write a few words here in case anyone was interested in the Fundacion, coming here for an intensive summer course or even for the normal course, which lasts a year.
It is organized into dancers, singers, and guitarists, each having three levels--basico, intermedio, and avanzado. In the morning, at 9 am, there is the class called Introduction to Flamenco, which deals with the history of flamenco and listening and identifying the various forms of cante. If you don´t speak much Spanish, they also offer a Spanish course at this time. Then at 11, there is the compas and tecnica class, taught alternately by Tino van der Smaan and Miguel Angel Cortes. At 1 there is the accompanying the cante course, taught by Eduardo Rebollar. During the year there are other teachers as well, but as I understand it the basic format is the same.
The Fundacion itself is located in Barrio Santa Cruz, the historic Jewish District, home of the Cathedral and many other historic sites. There is a small entranceway to the street, a metal wire door which must be buzzed to open, which opens into a pretty patio. Surrounding the patio are offices and classrooms, and up some stairs are other classrooms. The guitar classes are given in medium-sized rooms which could comfortably hold about ten students arranged around a teacher. Some are air conditioned, some not.
The teachers are for the most part professional musicians. Miguel Angel Cortes plays at festivals, played in New York when Tomatito came, has CDs, and has been on TV. The same for Eduardo Rebollar, who accompanies Chocolate, and Nino de Pura and Manolo Franco, who have considerable notoriety of their own. This has, of course, good points and bad points. The good is that you know that their abilities are tested, that they are superior musicians and performers. The bad is taht they are not really professional teachers. Their abilities to understand a particular student´s needs or learning style vary. Some of them are willing to take time with a particular person, others are a bit more impatient. For example, Miguel Cortes loves to take it pretty briskly, and if you don´t get it, you will have to check out your recording.
Everyone records, by the way. Lots of people use normal cassette recorders, and the guys from Paco Penas school all use mini discs, which have good sound and memory but are a bit rare (and maybe expensive).
The curriculum for guitarists consists of falsetas, compas variations, and exercises. I´ve learned, I don´t know, maybe 15 falsetas here? How many of them can I play right now? Uh, maybe three. The rest I will have to study at home. There is not time to get much at all up to speed, unless you do this really quickly. I have exercises for picado, arpeggio, left hand, thumb, and alzapua. These flamencos do things a bit differently, at least from me. A lot of their exercises have some sort of melody, and some sort of ending. It seems to me that this way might encourage the development of other things than just purely working on a detached formula, which is my way of practicing. I´m not sure which I prefer, but it is certainly nicer to listen to a well-played melodic etude than a mindless combination of open string sounds, which you might hear if you came to my house!
Due to my being in the intermedio rather than avanzado level, and due to certain ohter people in my group having a bit less faculty with the gutiar, we did little work with the accompaniment of cante. During this month we worked with a Cd for fandangos de lucena, adn worked a bit with a singer for tangos. The advanced guys got a lot more work with the singer, a great voice named Paco Taranto. They did fandangos, tangos, solea, and cana. I learned very little about accompanying cante in this course.
I learned nothing about accompanying the baile. We did nothing with the dancers.
There was only one Spaniard in all of the guitar courses. Most of the students were from northern europe, holland (seems to be a hotbed for flamenco), germany, belgium, denmark, and a bunch from the states. In the baile, there were lots of spaniards, and in the cante, all but one (a Japanese lady!).
A lot of the students here were more advanced than me, and I got along realy well with most of them. One or two are quite accomplished, for example one played the Concierto de Aranjuez in concert! I learned a lot from my interection with these people, from discussions about practice methods, exchanging philosophies and ideas, exercises and such. I also learned a lot from seeing shows. I´ve seen maybe 25 here, been to three festivals, tons of shows at other places, a few penas. This was a vital part of my stay here.
I would have liked a lot more personal attention, but the teachers here had little to say about my technique, maybe because for the most part it funcions fairly well. Some of the guys got a lot of feedback, and if your technique is strange they will certainly try to change it.
I´ve learned a lot here, but am kind of fatigued and can´t say for sure that I´m any better! Probably after six months, when I have mastered the falsetas I like and the exercises taht make sense to me, and the many shows I have seen have sunk in, I will consider it to have been a marvelous experience! Well, I´ve enjoyed much of it, but I think the cameraderie, the interaction between guitarists and exchanging ideas, adn teh festivals adn shows have been the best part. And another very good thing is to be exposed, in a personal situation, with professional guitarists, whose word seems to carry a bit more weight than some others.
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