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Inglés -> RE: Solo flamenco guitar - a new trend in classical guitar playing (May 28 2020 14:47:29)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: mark indigo
I don't like the splitting up of flamenco into different compartments with these different labels... it can be very divisive, and I don't think it reflects reality. The closer I focus in the harder it becomes to draw any sort of definitive line between them anyway, more of a spectrum.
Then there is the sense that the term "traditional" carries a sort of weight to it, an authority, and an implication that it has always been a certain way from time immemorial, when that also is not so simple or clear cut.
The bulerías and tangos that Paco Peña recorded in the mid-seventies have triplet (3 notes per beat) alzapua in the bulerias and 4 note per beat (semi-quavers/16ths) alzapua in the tangos. AFAIK these are both innovations of Paco de Lucía from the early seventies (if anyone has earlier examples and/or from other guitarists please post). So what's going on? Is Paco de Lucía really "traditional" or Paco Peña really "modern"? Or should we dispense with the labels altogether in favour of a more nuanced approach?
Paco Peña, and to some extent Sabicas, are special cases in a way because both established solo careers outside Spain, so does that put them outside the "tradition"? And both are known as soloists which is not the "traditional" role of the flamenco guitar...
I think also the more you get into the cante the less important it is to make these distinctions between styles of guitar - I have great recordings of both Sabicas and Rafael Riqueni accomanying Enrique Morente, and they are both great. I think Anders said on here that singers don't care whether you play in a style of modern or older style as long as you accompany the cante properly.
Another example - looking at really old pictures of guitarists many of them held the guitar with the waist on their left leg, not the "traditional" way with the lower bout on the right leg, so what was happening there? Was there a different way to hold the guitar BEFORE what we know as the "traditional" way? Or were there different ways to hold the guitar before the lower bout on the right leg became THE way? And when did that happen, around 1920? If so that way of holding the guitar lasted until about 1970, so that's 50 years, and guitarists have been holding the guitar with the waist on the right leg with the leg crossed (Paco de Lucía) or on a footstool (Manolo Sanlucar) since then, which is another 50 years, so that should be long enough for the Paco de Lucía way to be "traditional".... to me the whole idea of "traditional" is kinda absurd....
There are loads more examples I could pull out - Pepe Habichuela said he was "too modern for the traditionalists and too traditional for the modernists" - Moraíto was regarded as the archetypal traditional accompanist but he said he was from the "school of Paco de Lucía" - and on and on....
We all have tastes and personal preferences, each to their own, "el libro de sabores es blanco" - I'm not knocking anyone's taste or preferences, only the pigeonholing and labelling, and the way those tastes and preferences seem to get turned into rigid categories and rules and divisions and partisanship, and I think flamenco is bigger and more messy, nuanced, complex, beautiful and AMAZING than any of them.
I agree with most of what you say here, as it applies to all music indeed all artforms. I would point out one thing though, in defence of applying labels - to someone like me who is trying to understand flamenco better from a base of close to zero (and with no formal learning process), it is useful to simplify. As long as I understand that it is a simplification, and I shouldn't take it too seriously, it is nonetheless giving me a broad-brush explanation which helps me understand what I am hearing a little better. baby steps, basically.
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