Miguel de Maria -> RE: Flamenco and aire (May 7 2004 23:59:57)
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I think it's pretty inevitable... I mean, the guitar is a hobby for most of us, a profession for a few, over there, it seems that the guitar is just a jukebox kind of, an essential part of the party. It's more about the party than about the guitar. I think most people over here are guitarists first, who get into flamenco, and from the outside looking in, try to understand and duplicate this feeling and way. I just finished reading the rather substantial Carmen Amaya biography by Paco Sevilla... these people learn what flamenco is at a very early age and spend the next fifty years performing and jamming. I think what it feels like to be them is qualitatively much different than how it feels to us. For example, Sabicas claimed that he and Carmen Amaya never rehearsed. What seems unimaginably complex and choreographed, to an outsider, is to them just a jam. These guys know flamenco, guitar, baile, cante, so well that they can learn things very fast and quickly integrate them into pre-set structures. I have been feeling a little taste of this lately, I have been studying a book by Manuel Granados that has a lot of typical falsetas for an assortment of styles. What would have taken me days to learn now just takes hours... I note how the falseta interacts with the compas, how the chords go, what the melodic motif is..and bam, new falseta. This may seem elementary to some, but it represents a lot of progress made for me. The more structures, patterns, beats, melodies, and idiomatic devices you learn, the easier it is to integrate. I imagine that I will get better at learning falsetas after awhile until most of them can be roughly mastered in a few minutes, and then choreographies/pieces will soon follow, as most of them can probably be learned as a type of variant on X, etc. It's a fun, optimistic feeling--soon the hard work will be over and I'll be able to have fun and not rehearse like the greats! Well, we'll see if I get to that point or not. The great advantage that the Spanish flamencos have over us foreigners is that incredible amount of exposure...to the point that the rhythms, melodies, palmas, cantes, are somewhat a part of their lives and certainly a part of their community memory and vocabulary. Certainly by long study and lots of carefl listening, added to hard analysis, we can learn this to a certain extent. As Simon said, flamenco is hard even without guitar. Now add that most of us are struggling guitarists, how hard this arte is to execute, then! A lot of flamenco guitar uses devices which most of us have not yet mastered, fast arpeggios, golpes, picados, rasgeuedos...and of course if we don't have those down it will be hard to nail them in the rhythmic way so essential to Spanish music. But I think that if we pare things down, as Ron has attempted to do, we can get there, and if we work hard enough at our guitar playing we can incorporate the virtuosic things as well. Sabicas claimed he had the guitar in his hands whenever he could...someone who already was a virtuoso by the age of 18 or whatnot still couldn't get the bug out of his system. It's hard to compete with that, living and breathing guitar. My friend Miguel Rodriguez (I posted his website earlier) is somewhat the same...he already could play when he was a kid and, being a pro musician and not having much of a social life, he still plays hours and hours a day!
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