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estebanana -> RE: Why orchestra? (Sep. 18 2012 4:19:51)
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I kind of like the Del Monte concerto, it's not as boring as those insipid Rodrigo concertos written for Segovia.
I think flamenco guitar works with orchestra, but so far no one has really orchestrated one with modern enough orchestration ideas for my taste. There are so many interesting places it could go, but most composers, guitarists have stayed very conservative or conventional with the orchestration. The flamenco and to an extent the classical guitar, although not so much today, and orchestra blend always seems to get trapped in a folk music idiom. It's like the guitar plays a solo and the orchestration supports it. Older concertos like Rodrigos concerto are set up this way for the most part, because hey you're supposed to feature the solo instrument in a concerto. However I feel like most of it is this supporting accompaniment that drags it down.
A flamenco guitar could accompany solo instruments in the orchestra the way it accompanies singers and the orchestration could be more far out harmonically and texturally. I hear these orchestra flamenco guitar things and they often sound really cloyingly tonal in the respect that they try to be folky. Even when Kodaly and Bartok were collecting folk music material to document it and study it, they later used it as thematic material for their own works. One of the things that Bartok did with this primary source material was to transform it, not reproduce it. I feel like flamenco guitar orchestra projects by and large have not even caught up to Bartok yet, thus to my ear accustomed to hearing complex twentieth century orchestration they sound old fashioned.
I hear things to be much darker and less tonal, more about the sounds of flamenco becoming part of a chamber orchestra, but not verbatim palos spelled out as guitar solo with orchestral backing. I think there would be a narrow audience for music like this so people are not trying to do it.
There are the types of groups not that are playing flamenco with older Sephardic music or Arabic forms and blending them together. It resembles a form of baroque continuo playing, which is cool. the format is like solo, support, solo, support, trade to the other genre repeat. It's like form of jazz in that is is open for improvisation. But it still not modern it is harmonic structures or symphonic ideas.
So yeah I'm into orchestra and flamenco guitar, but waiting for the Charles Ives or Iannis Xenakis of flamenco guitar to appear and take it to a new place besides the harmonic artificial sweeteners we mostly get. The players are good, the orchestras are good, but the composers are boxed into these boring old symphonic structures for various reasons, like worried about freaking out the audience of flamencos; who by and large are very narrow musically if you deconstruct flamenco. As long as traditional cante' is not harmed in any way, right, it's fair to reconstruct flamenco into a dark brooding monster like an Egon Wellesz symphony or Schnittke cello sonata. And in the end maybe cante' should be assailed and dismembered and Bartokized.
So yes I find flamenco guitar and orchestra annoying, but for reasons that don't l have anything to do with the orchestral contamination of flamenco. In my view it's not contaminated enough to make it interesting to listen to as modern music.
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