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Piwin -> RE: transposing falsetas to different palos (Oct. 18 2017 6:16:55)
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There is no limit but at a certain point you'd have to move away from the idea of transposing (which is technically just shifting music to a lower or higher pitch) and think almost in terms of composition.
One way of thinking about composing is to view it as just re-arranging pre-existing components. That bit you heard from that musician you liked, that beat you learned from a friend. How about that melody in C major you like but arrange it with the "minor" element? etc. etc. "Transposing" falsetas from one palo to another is just a very simplified version of this.
But it's flamenco, so you're not just trying to freely create something new, you're operating under certain constraints. You want it to sound like that palo. And to make it sound like that palo, there's no easy answer really.
This might be a flawed analogy but anyways, for what it's worth:
Imagine you have a newspaper clipping and you want to transpose it into a poetic form (more or less the compas). That's the "easy" part. At least, it's easy to know what the rules are. Say you want to turn it into a sonnet. You know the rhyme scheme, you know to use iambic pentameter for starters and you know you need a volta if you want it to be any good. So then you take the newspaper clipping, and you use all the tools you have in your linguistic toolkit to make it fit into the structure of a sonnet. You paraphrase, sum up, find synonyms, etc. etc.
Now imagine you want to transpose your newspaper clipping into a poetic genre (more or less the palo). Now that's the hard part. How do you turn a newspaper clipping into epic poetry? into an elegy or a fable? Here the rules are less clear and you have to rely much more on intuition. If you want to turn it into an elegy, you have to start by figuring out what defines an elegy. If you want to write an elegy in the form of a sonnet, getting the sonnet part down is easy. It's getting the elegy part down that is really difficult.
And so when "transposing" a falseta. Switch a falseta from a 4 beat tangos to a 12 beat alegrias. OK, I'll work on the rythm to make the phrasing fit with the strong beats in alegrias. I'll switch modes, etc. I'll look for synonyms for certain parts, etc. But then you've only transposed into the form, not into the genre. What you've got may fit into the alegrias compas, but it sure doesn't feel like alegrias. So how do you transform it into the genre? You start out by asking yourself what characteristics define the genre you're aiming for. What defines an alegrias? What are the tropes, what are the common techniques, and more importantly what is the underlying feeling it is meant to convey? And then you use every single tool in your musical toolkit to switch it over to that. Chances are the end result will sound very little like the falseta you started out with.
PS: this exercise is also very dependent on what you're trying to transform and how close/distant it is to what you want to make of it. Switching from seguiriya to alegrias is probably overall harder than say tangos to bulerias. For the same reason that it's easier to write that elegy in the form of a sonnet if your news clipping reads "mother of 4 dies in car crash" than if it reads "Brad and Jennifer's lavish wedding". In some cases, the original content might be so distant from the target that it may not even be worth even trying to transform it, other than a sheer technical exercice. There is no limit per se, just aesthetics.
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