Adam -> RE: Vicentes POETA (Nov. 26 2008 13:57:25)
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Oh man, what an album! It's one of my absolute favorites (and I love all of Vicente's music, but to compare Poeta to, say, Ciudad or Vivencias is just unfair). I remember the first time I heard it, it was in the background while I was doing work, and I was just blown away...I went to dinner a changed man [:D]. I've thought a lot about this whole flamenco/classical fusion thing, so before my rant, here's full disclosure: I'm a complete sucker for a lush orchestration. Kind of my thing. So there. That explains why every time I listen to "Poeta en el Mar" or "Poeta en el Viento" on that album, I'm completely blown away - that piece really isn't flamenco in any meaningful way, what makes it great is the heavy element of Romantic orchestral music, with a bit of Vicente thrown in for fun. This kind of gets down to just why the classical/flamenco fusion is so damn tricky - classical music and flamenco music are by and large extremely divergent ways of approaching music. Gustavo Montesano's "Flamenco Fantasy", where he does classical standards "aflamencao", is an awesome album but very very little of it is truly flamenco. Classical music, for the most part, is about achieving music (achieving beauty, emotional transcendence, whatever music is about - I think classical and flamenco actually aim at the same thing, whatever it is) through planned structure and rigidity. By setting the terms of the music beforehand, it allows for the music to be taken to a damn near transcendent level, whether through the use of an enormous orchestra to just pull the music up (like a Mahler symphony) or through extremely intricate harmonization (like a Bach fugue). Flamenco achieves music (despite its structural rigidity) through unadulterated outburst of raw emotion, through fluidity and spontaneity, through improvisation. Of course, at the same time it necessarily loses some of the grandeur that one gets in classical music by requiring fewer people, and less music planned out in advance. So getting these two things together seems extremely difficult. They want to get to the same place but they have extremely different means for achieving it. I've been thinking over the classical/flamenco "fusion" I have, and the only example that strikes me as achieving this balance well (and even this one gives me some pause) is my other favorite song from "Poeta", the guajira at the end. I'm still not sure exactly how (or even if) it goes about achieving the balance, but I think it has something to do with the way the orchestra plays its role, sometimes acting like a good larger-than-life classical orchestra, but very often using its prescripted grandeur to sound flamenco, to sound as if it is light and free right along with Vicente's guitar. If anyone else has any other recommendations for good flamenco with orchestration, I'd love to hear!
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