Richard Jernigan -> RE: Flamenco virgin ... what to learn first? (Sep. 9 2017 14:49:07)
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ORIGINAL: estebanana The oft repeated maxim that cante turns people off and therefore guitar first is also strange to me. If you go on you tube and do a search on Norwegian Black Metal you get hits on videos and concert excerpts of singing that is so harsh it makes Manuel Agujetas sound like Enrico Caruso. And people enter into that music via the vocals, as they did with Janis Joplin, and Rush's screamer Geddy Lee. .. This is pretty long, but I have thought about this stuff off and on for a while, so I have come up with a few ideas: I have a good friend who, at an unusually early age, became a leading member of the gamelan of Bangli in Bali. He is a very accomplished musician, and is curious about other cultures. He has perfect pitch. But perfect pitch in Bali works a little differently than it does in the West. Not only are the scales different--the frequency ratios of the notes differ from those in the West and there are several different scales--but different orchestras may be tuned to fairly different basic pitches. There's no A=440Hz in Bali. So Nyoman can instantly name the notes played by an instrument in the Bangli gamelan, but he pauses a little before naming a pitch played by some other orchestras. After I first played classical and flamenco guitar for him, he asked me to play scales. I also played some simple chord progressions--several times. When asked, he sang an approximation to a C-major scale, but he was pretty far off on some notes, unlike his very precise pitch in Balinese scales. After Nyoman got familiar with the Western diatonic scale, and--I thought--some harmony, I played him an early Haydn symphony over some good headphones. He said he didn't understand it at all. I analyzed the sonata form of the first movement for him, demonstrating on the guitar: First theme in the tonic, second theme in the subdominant, modulations in the development, recapitulation with both themes in the tonic, and a brief coda. Nyoman had no trouble identifying the themes. But he professed himself baffled by the changes in key, and the witty modulations of the development. Balinese gamelan music is quite complex and sophisticated in melody, counterpoint, harmony and rhythm. A typical piece can be as long as an early Haydn symphony. But Balinese music doesn't modulate. The predominant instruments of the orchestra are melodic percussion pieces fixed in pitch and scale. "Music, Language and the Brain" is a book by Aniruddh Patel, which surveys the state of science at the intersection of the fields in the title. I'm away from home at the moment so I can't quote the book, but I think it's safe to say that scientific investigation supports what I'm about to write. Starting in childhood, people absorb the musical culture (or cultures) of their environment. This includes scales, rhythm, harmony--the whole bit. Scales in particular vary greatly between different musical cultures. I know a few very good young rock and pop drummers, but I can reliably baffle them with a few cuts from a Mongo Santamaria CD. Coming finally a little closer to the point: People's experience of music is conditioned strongly by their subconscious cultural expectations. Something that doesn't conform to their conditioning can be baffling, or even annoying. Very few singers in any tradition really nail the pitch. For example, Terremoto (padre) hits the notes pretty accurately. Chocolate is consistent but not as "accurate" as Terremoto. Few cantaores are as "accurate" as these two. I put "accurate" in quotes, because someone used to cante doesn't even notice most minor inaccuracies in pitch. Their brain subconsciously knows what to expect, and if the cantaor is close enough, the brain just classifies the note as the right one. But the novice to cante faces at least a couple of problems. He doesn't know what to expect melodically or harmonically. And cante is to some extent microtonal. Subtle alterations of pitch are part of the genre, and part of the individual cantaor's propio sello. To introduce people to cante sometimes I like to play them Mairena's recording of the siguiriyas "Los Siete Dolores." Mairena's pitch is sometimes pretty accurate, much of the time not very. In this piece he sings a standard quejío very accurately, then adds a second one for good measure. At the end of the second quejío the guitarist Melchor de Marchena can be heard chuckling in admiration and muttering "ole" as Mairena slides up from almost a quarter tone below to nail dead-on the pitch of the last note. The novice to cante doesn't know what to subconsciously "expect" so he doesn't hear it the way an aficionado does. His brain works overtime trying to make sense of it. This can actually be physically uncomfortable. But with persistence a person can learn a new musical culture. For Westerners inculcated with the diatonic scale, flamenco guitar harmony is just a mildly exotic variant of what they are already used to. "Nuevo flamenco" guitar harmony is actually old hat to to the Westerner versed in early 20th century classical music, mid-century jazz or bossa nova. But cante is something different enough in pitch and harmonic structure to take most Westerners some time to get used to. I think that's why you hear so many people say they were attracted to flamenco first by the guitar, and that they only later came to understand that cante is the basis of the music. I didn't go to Spain when I was 19 to learn about flamenco. But I was fortunate enough to come across the encyclopedic cantaor Rafael Romero "El Gallina" and his masterful accompanists Perico el del Lunar (padre e hijo), and got hooked on cante. The guitar accompaniment clicked with my Western musical training, and helped me to begin making sense of the cante. RNJ
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