Piwin -> RE: What's up with this newfangled culture of "interpreting" others intrepretations? (Dec. 7 2020 16:22:56)
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1) http://www.foroflamenco.com/tm.asp?m=124692&p=1&tmode=1&smode=1 2) no. But theory vs. practice... You can talk about concepts you read in a book about swimming all you like, but if you don't know how to swim in practice, you may very well be unable to understand what the practitioners are actually saying. I'm confronted with that all the time here when I read the luthier section. The theoretical knowledge is there, more or less, but I've got zilch in terms of practice, and sometimes what they're saying flies over my head because of that. 3) -Nobody's doing that. - intellectual concepts vs. emotional sensitivity is a useless dichotomy here IMHO. - telepathy doesn't exist. ^^ 4) It's a tool among others. Re: the comparison with language acquisition, there's not really any consensus on the best approach for adult language learners. Personally, I'm of the mind that the "intellectual" approach passing via grammar rules, etc. is an extremely useful accelerant, at least for learners who can assimilate those concepts. If you want to do without that and learn as a young child would, then you have to at least put yourself in the same situation a young child would be: full immersion all the time. In the 70s, linguist Stephen Krashen laid out what he called the "monitor model", in which, among other things, he prioritised language input over output in the early stages of language acquisition. The model itself is "just" a hypothesis, and most likely an untestable one. But the interesting bit for this discussion is this: over the last decade or so, there's been a small revival of Krashen's model among self-taught learners. These are people who consciously decide to leave language textbooks aside, and instead take in a very heavy diet of language input, basically attempting to recreate the same process through which a child would learn. They leave aside trying to actually speak the language for several years before even attempting to speak. Quite the gambit! But why not? Some time ago I had an email exchange with a practitioner of that approach. In our exchange, he told me that the difficulty he had with a grammar approach is that it offers you a set of rules, and it assumes that if you just apply those rules correctly, whatever sentence you create will work. He went on to say that this simply didn't work, because in reality there is usually only one or two ways that natives of the language would actually use to express that idea. So in his opinion, grammar-based learners run the risk of producing sentences that are grammatically correct but that just sound weird to native speakers. They don't sound creative. They sound awkward, coming more from a place of ignorance than from a place of creativity. My first reaction was to push back, probably because it paints a rather dreary picture of what language is, and grants very little place to creativity. After further reflection however, I ended up more or less agreeing with him. There is still plenty of room for creativity, but the creativity that will "fit" and be recognised as more than just awkward speech by a foreigner is the kind that comes AFTER you have fully integrated and are able to reproduce the normal way of saying things. If we keep this parallel with flamenco guitar, then the idea is that if you don't first reach a near "native" level in how you play, that is to say if you are unable to replicate the very precise ways in which X or Y things are usually done, then the creative expressions you throw out there may just sound awkward to a native ear. What you think of as creativity, they may just perceive as ignorance. @rasqeo Keeping in mind the above, the reason I point these things out is not because I think I'm some sort of gatekeeper on what is the right way to do flamenco; it's because I think it's better for people to recognise their preconceptions for what they are, so that if and when they decide to confront themselves with a flamenco community, it goes well for them. That's all. Otherwise you'll be that guy who's written a bunch of stuff, maybe even received some praise for it, only to be told it absolutely sucks and isn't even remotely flamenco the first time he plays it in front of a knowing audience. That's first-hand experience. But if you want to go ahead and repeat my mistakes, feel like you've wasted hour upon hour composing things that only worked in your head, be my guest. If people don't care about that and just want to do their own thing disconnected from any flamenco community, then that's different, and also fine. You can all hang out and play what you think of as flamenco and wax poetic about dragons and soul-quakes or whatever the f*ck else you want. You'll get no judgment from me on that. But if you do want to confront it all to a flamenco community, then I think it's best to know ahead of time what you're up against. Not sure what the point about Grisha, Samuelito and Luciano is, since all three of them have put in a lot of work to play note-for-note renditions of set pieces.
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