X -> Son of Modern vs Traditional (conclusion) (Oct. 18 2010 3:33:26)
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OK, let me start "Part 2" by describing past modern-vs-traditional debates. As a convenient f'rinstance, let's consider Concha Jareño's baile, which I got to see last Friday (she stole the show BTW). Usually the argument would be that her baile is modern because it incorporates ideas from hiphop (popping and locking), from kung-fu floor-fighting (extended arm work supine on stage), from Thai/Cambodian royal dance, plus she only does short intervals of taconeo (perhaps 30 seconds total in a four-minute routine). It's also modern in the way the tocaor is part of the choreography, walking around on stage while she dances, often with his back to her, a movable prop whom Conchita uses once to hide from the audience. All very capital-"M" modern. Now someone else jumps in, arguing that what looks like popping and locking are actually very traditional poses found in ancient Egyptian papyri and Hindu temple statues, memories which Conchita surely channeled from the long Gypsy trek out of India; and that lying-on-the-floor thing? That comes from belly dance, part of traditional flamenco's Arab roots; as for minimal taconeo, traditional flamenco as danced in families is just like that-- no one wears Begoña-Cerveras to a house party. And what's so modern about ambulatory tocaores? Look at traditional jaranas or village processions or the tango in "Blood Wedding." And when ever did a dancer not interact with her guitarist? What Conchita does is just the same interaction, ramped up. Her baile is traditional all the way. And so it goes, on and on and on... with no conclusion. So I'm trying to start with something we could all agree on. In "Part 1" I tried to show that over its long march from distant beginnings to modern day, flamenco exhibits a distinct movement from MODAL to CHORDAL, from HORIZONTAL to VERTICAL, from MONOPHONY to POLYPHONY. Now, are all those capitalized words the criteria by which we distinguish modern flamenco from traditional? Not quite, but they do hold a clue. Let me present a thought experiment, a flamenco dance which everyone, I think, will agree is unquestionably modern: Flamenco folklore has a traditional taboo against dancing the petenera. Yet we see for example Maria Pages doing exactly that in Saura's "Flamenco." Does that make her dance modern? I don't know, but consider the following scenario: Say in the middle of her dance she collapses on the floor. Uniformed paramedics rush up the aisle and cart her away in a gurney. The theater manager comes onstage and asks the audience to remain calm, the show will go on. The next day her obit appears in the papers. Everyone talks about the taboo and clucks their tongue. Days later at her funeral, Menese and Rodriguez, who were doing the petenera with Pages, agree to perform it in her honor. When they reach the point where she'd collapsed, she rises from her coffin and finishes the dance. The whole thing had been scripted from the beginning. Now, I'm confident no one here will seriously argue that that performance would be traditional flamenco. It's not only modern, but POSTmodern. (Side issue: is it flamenco or performance art? The bona fides of Menese and Rodriguez make a strong case that it's still flamenco.) So what exactly makes it modern? IT'S THE FACT THAT IT WAS CONCEIVED IN THE CONTEXT OF AESTHETIC THEORY. To someone unfamiliar with theory, the whole thing might be just a stupid joke. To one who does, it speaks of freedom and daring, of the power and gullibility of mass media, of a host of other things difficult to verbalize. Exactly what the art of flamenco is supposed to do. Now go back to the capitalized words above. They're all taken from music theory. So I propose the following modern/traditional criterion: A FLAMENCO PIECE IS MODERN IF ITS CREATION IS INFORMED OR GUIDED BY A KNOWLEDGE OF MODERN THEORY. When I for example say to myself, "let me do a tritone substitution in this traditional farruca-tangos de malaga cadence," then the altered cadence is MODERN because I arrive at it from theory. Similarly, when Jake Mossman sat down and said, "I'm now going to compose a bulerias falseta using the symmetric whole-tone scale," the resulting falseta is MODERN because Jake used scale-theoretic concepts to create it. But now for the kicker: it's not beyond the realm of possibility that an unlettered ten-year-old unfamiliar with theory could come up, based on what he hears on the radio every day, with the exact same tritone substitution, or compose Jake's exact same falseta. In that case the same altered cadence and the same falseta would be TRADITIONAL! The piece could be BOTH modern and traditional, depending on its provenance! WTF??? This is like the surprise I once got from a Russian girlfriend when I asked her opinion of writer Viktor Pelevin. She dismissed his stories as no good, because "to write great literature, one must have suffered." In essence she was saying that a work of art didn't stand on its own; you had to know something about its creator in order to tell whether it was good or bad. (I didn't argue with her because I didn't want to pay the "withholding tax," which she was prone to impose.) But I've painted myself into the same corner: A flamenco piece doesn't stand on its own, we have to know about the way it was created in order to decide whether it's modern or traditional. See what I mean about permanent crystallization of confusion? Or does the question even matter? There's no help here, none, for those who were hoping that an answer to the modern-vs-traditional question would point the way how to compose modern flamenco. There, my two cents. Your two-cent donations actively solicited.
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