tf10music -> RE: The best article about flamenco (Apr. 15 2021 1:37:55)
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All the worthwhile flamencología I have read has been in Spanish. Yes, this has largely been true in my experience as well (though I'd caution and say that there is also plenty of stuff with a blatant agenda written in Spanish, too). There are three truly good books on flamenco in English, in my opinion. The first is William Washabaugh's "Flamenco: Passion, Politics, and Popular Culture," which has been immensely influential even in Spain, Timothy Mitchell's "Flamenco Deep Song," which, despite its terrible title, is a rigorous historical study that delivers an insightful analysis of the relation between señoritismo and flamenco's social practice (the class-based discrepancies between güasa and gracia, for example) among other things, and most recently, K. Meira Goldberg's "Sonidos Negros: On the Blackness of Flamenco," which was only published in 2019 and represents a new, cultural studies-oriented approach to flamencology. Apart from those, there's that book by Bernard Leblon, which is informative, even if it's overly simplistic. On the Spanish-language side, there's so much more to offer. If you want a more detailed version of the kind of anecdotal info you're getting from the article that was originally posted, you can read someone like Fernando Quiñones or Ángel Álvarez Caballero, and if you want something more critical, there's people like Cruces Roldán, Mandly, Steingress (though I don't really like his work), and even José Martínez Hernández's 2018 book "Poética del cante jondo," which analyzes the aesthetic structure of cante from both a philosophical and a social standpoint. There are also focused studies of lone palos, which can be quite good, if tedious at times. There's a good one out there that zooms in specifically on the 'mysteries' of the alboreá and the petenera, and it does a good job of gathering all the available anecdotes about those forms into one place. But also the books can only ever tell you so much. I think it's important to recognize that the search for the 'best' article or book on flamenco always arrives at a dead end, because at the end of the day the truth exceeds what can be represented in that register. As someone who does produce scholarship on flamenco, that's a limit that I always have to keep my eye on. Usually, the truest things that I am able to say about flamenco in any register must be pushing up against the point at which explanatory language teeters on the edge of failure (and this isn't only true of flamenco, for what it's worth).
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