Miguel de Maria -> RE: REQ: Ottmar Liebert Tab (Mar. 10 2006 14:21:34)
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You know, this Puro thing never really changes, does it? To me, it's just a sort of generation gap. One camp wants to hold on to tradition, wants to to draw lines and the other camp sees flamenco as an evolving thing and is the one who is DOING things. It's kind of like the instant text thing, where you have all these young kids who do most of their communicating by thumb on their cell phones. They write ungodly constructions like I LUV ME SM ME! and expect to be taken seriously by people who know how to, or at least try, to write in coherent sentences. By the thing is that in 20 years this probably WILL be how people communicate. It will probably infiltrate the spoken word and we will start compacting our speech. "Tht ws fny LOL!" Disgusting, isn't it! And we will all agree that there is "proper English"--the way we were taught, and there's this barbaric offshoot--the way they talk. And it won't be over until we're dead and everyone is talking like that. To me this flamenco puro thing is the same thing. We have people who grew up on a certain taste, and to them that IS flamenco, although nothing stays the same. Any evolution is anathema to them, no matter how inspired or unavoidable. Remember that they hated Paco and Camaron at one time, many still do I'm sure. It's just a generation gap--although age is only one part of what decides which side of the puro fence you sit. Again, I dislike the word because it is elitist, exclusionary, and ultimately insulting. But then, so is calling how we speak "proper English" to the future keepers of the flame. I definitely can defer to Kate about how people in Granada feel about flamenco. But the reality is there is nothing truly pure about an art form which is a synthesis of many different cultures, many different arts, many different peoples. Like all art, it has evolved over time and has not stopped. But we want to take a snapshot of a certain time period and we want to call THAT pure. In 50 years, what is now called pure will be forgotten and what is now "impure" will be hotly defended as orthodoxy and purity.
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