|
estebanana -> RE: Rumbas y los demás cosas. (Jan. 14 2013 21:46:23)
|
I don't know as much about flamenco as Anders, but I know where he's coming from. When I got into flamenco 20 years ago the people I knew who were good aficionados in their 50's who had spent 20 years in Spain were saying it was just about over. Then as people passed away one by one they became circumspect about flamenco. Ten years ago I remember older ones complaining that buleria cuple of pop songs are not really very flamenco.....
I'm not old enough to have heard some of the great people sing, so in sense there is a hollowness to flamenco for me in that I feel my experience is incomplete because the things that are held as bench marks of importance are all in the past. A past I will not be able to even look back and say at least I heard it then. Just about everything in flamenco that is moving for me is recorded music, of Fernanda, Mairena, Borrico...the list goes on, right? Of course there is still flamenco, but I missed the Belle Epoch.
It's strange in a way to be interested in something that largely exists in recorded form, in something that you can't go back to. Or in something that if you chase it around Spain you might never see. Odd that I've seen/heard some of the remants of the cante in California in kitchens and living rooms when artists come here, living rooms that if I were in Spain I would not get invited into. It's so real and yet so out of context. Then to top it off knowing that cante is really the basis for flamenco and knowing that the guitar is more or less aside note, I mean really. The guitar is great and all, but I hardly ever listen to recordings of solo guitar, maybe once every six months.
To me flamenco has mainly become about student dancers learning enough stuff to do buleria in a student show. Sad I know to think that way, but the majority of everything I see is marketed towards that. Teaching something that really is fading away. Student dancers are almost always interested in cante as far is it serves their needs, it's just something to dance to. Seldom to you hear them talking about Cante' outside the context of foot work or which letra will you dance to?, seldom. To say that is a turn off is an understatement. People call me on the phone as ask me why I don't go to see friends dance or why I'm so unsupportive. Because I can't delude myself into feeling or thinking that it is actually real. Unless flamenco is a spirit or state of being and not actual fleshed out cante'.
I've seen enough dance students to last a lifetime and if I were to have watched that many scratching unseasoned student vioinists, pianists or trombonists at that level with out any meaty substantive classical music to back it up I would give up on classical music altogether. Take my meaning?
But I do have a few friends who are the core of the scene here this area, professionals who are vetted who do good flamenco and I love them, and I support them. But I understand Anders, as you get older you get discontent about things. MAybe because we both make guitars and see the unsavory things in flamenco it is difficult to justify learning to make flamenco guitars which have not much to do with cante', knowing that you love to hear solea sung with only knuckles hitting a wood table top. Or that you spend 15 years getting good at something and then feel like the situation is hollow in some way. Hollow in the sense that most of the guitar making talk is guitar-o-centric and full of crap. See when you make a flamenco guitar you don't think about how other guitars sound or why Conde's do this or that, or which species of wood is better, it's all nonsense, trade talk. What you really deep down think about is how will this guitar sound with a good flamenco singers voice? Then it dawns on you that flamenco in the sense that it was sung, which shaped the way the guitar developed, could be gone. Then you think am I making guitars for what? Will it ever be played by a guitarist with real singer? Maybe, but probably not in almost all cases.
So if you are Anders what keeps you going?
In a way you have to practice self delusion to keep you going, you have to tell yourself a small lie. Most days telling yourself a small lie is bearable, other days it is a great inconvenience or burden to getting on in the practical matters of the world.
So cut him some slack, cut your self some slack. Some of us are more hard wired to resist deluding ourselves about how we make a living. Some people can tell themselves the lie to go to work and when they get off they shift gears out of work mode, artists/creatives usually walk around 24 hours a day in self critical work mode. It's a hazardous job, like all jobs.
[:D]
|
|
|
|
