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BarkellWH -> RE: reminder of how difficult flamenco is (Jun. 16 2014 22:02:52)
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quote:
I see this and I am reminded (although I reminded it of it every day), how flamenco is difficult, and how the professional players are so good.
Yes, the flamenco guitar is incredibly difficult to master. There are members of the Foro (Ricardo and Grisha come to mind) who have mastered it. My flamenco guitar maetro and good friend, Paco de Malaga, who has spent a lifetime playing flamenco, has nothing but praise for Ricardo's playing. Others on the Foro are no doubt very accomplished as well.
For my part, I have loved flamenco since I was 17 (transpose those digits and you have my current age: 71), at a time when I didn't even understand it. I just knew I loved the sound of flamenco guitar. After university, a stint in the U.S. Air Force, and a career in the U.S. Foreign Service, I decided to learn flamenco, not only to play the guitar, but to learn the history of flamenco, the key figures in that history, and most of all the key element of cante, something I had no knowledge of at the age of 17 and for many years thereafter. It was only after I met and became a student of Paco that I really began learning how to play and so much more.
Regardless of the difficulty, I have very much enjoyed learning flamenco sufficiently to reach my current level of play. To me, the difficulty is not frustrating because I play not as a vocation but as an avocation. I have many interests, and flamenco is just one of them. It is enough for me to incrementally play a little better each time I learn something new. but I know I will never be an accomplished flamenco guitarist. To me, it is enough to at least understand the art form and be able to play it at a certain amateurish level. I entertain myself and occasionally some friends over a glass of jerez.
Just now, I am on a U.S. State Department consulting gig at the American Embassy in Majuro, capital of the Marshall Islands in the West-Central Pacific. The Embassy has put me up in a house on pilings, with a deck that is over the edge of the coral atoll lagoon. The most pleasant part of the day is when I return from the Embassy about 5:30 PM each day, sit out on the deck over the lagoon as the sun sinks on the far side of the coral atoll, drink a couple glasses of jerez, and play a little flamenco on the guitar. It likely is not a perfect rendition of a solea', but it is satisfying and makes me think how blessedly good life can be.
Bill
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