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RE: What IS the purpose of a flamenca negra?
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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 RE: What IS the purpose of a flamenc... (in reply to aarongreen)
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quote:
Your premise does not take into account that the majority of his audience, at that time, most likely could not care less what guitar he played. He was creating an audience out of the general music appreciating crowd. The guitar centric audience for the most part came later.
If the authorship of the guitar was unimportant why did you use it as one of the three facts you presented, specifically to support the idea that Segovia used the Ramirez until 1937? If the program note stated the instrument was a Ramirez and not say a Ford Model T wagon, then who made the guitar was of great importance to someone.
A fact is a piece of information and it is open to interpretation in a certain context. The idea I'm putting forth is that there are facts or evidence and as time moves on and more narratives are brought to light, the facts can stay the same but the meanings change. These histories are not locked into one narrative which supports the facts in one way.
The evidence that is known in this narrative around Segovia and Santos does not refute what I or others have speculated about Segovia's psychological state or what you can imagine were his conscious or unconscious motivations. When someone says Segovia simply wanted to get the best guitar he could get end of story I can't accept that. Humans are to complex for that and there are always subconscious, political and social motivations behind major life choices. When I hear end of story no more discussion that is when I want to push the esoteric subtexts to see if they have other information, many good historians do this.
And honestly my speculation on Segovia's state of mind is purely constructed to support my bias in favor of Santos. As I constructed it, it opened up other thoughts about how Segovia worked as a musician and how his personal history was guided and calculated by himself. He helped create his own mythology and his own brand of mystique. With that in mind I conjectured here is a man who wants to make a mark on the music world, very little of what he does is not calculated, so what are some social conditions that could shape his choices?
It's really just a game, but the game is aimed at recognizing that other personal narratives existed. The "official" version, in quotes means that it was supplied by a team of people who worked with one set of evidence and the narrative of the main subject. If we at some point obtain a narrative plus more evidence from the other main subject of the story then the story could change.
One of the investigative strategies that the social critic and essayist Foucault used was to look for small anomalies in the narrative as an entry point to compare it with the most generally accepted version. His reasoning was that the most general "official" versions are compromised by human biases. The operation is not to create an alternate version of history that dovetails perfectly with the official version, but to use all means including social conditions, geography, the psychology of the subject and his own biases, etc. to question the canonized version of a history. This is not meant replace the history, it's meant as a diagnostic tool to question the history. It can be used as a crow bar to constantly pry the lid off of histories that want to be sealed down and unquestioned. And it keeps them open and sometimes new information comes to change the canon.
If you have a strong bias run with it, it's what keeps art and music interesting. A balanced rational view makes balanced art and balanced art that is rational is boring.
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Date May 25 2010 11:00:33
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Ricardo
Posts: 14806
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
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RE: What IS the purpose of a flamenc... (in reply to estebanana)
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quote:
I think there are some people alive today who had relatives who knew Santos. They could make a personal narrative connection through family stories. Whether I'm on the mark or not the story will be different from that side which knew Santos intimately.
according to Ramirez III (not me!), Santos refused to train any apprentice his "secrets" of guitar building, and whenever the clean up boy got old enough to understand anything about building guitars, he let him go. That sounds pretty snobby to me. Segovia, Santos, many flamencos, and even Ramirez III seem to all be quite proud of themselves. And that is OK imo, part of the whole thing. Like M. de Huelva not ever recording any of his best falsetas cuz he did not want to give his best stuff away.
A friend told me a gitano guitarist in madrid turned his back while playing to my friend, and later tried to slam my friend's hand in the door because he was picking up on some falsetas in the dance class.  Ramirez admitted to not talking to segovia for years cuz in a program note, it listed FLETA as the guitar builder instead of the Ramirez he was using. So the stories about Santos and Segovia etc etc probably watered down anyway. I think it was a bunch of egos butting heads.
About hauser, have you played any? Compared to Ramirez or Santos, maybe not fair to say they are a "copy" or a remake of the orginal idea of M. Ramirez. They have a different sound. I think Segovia might have used the better guitar cuz it sounded good, and he did not switch to fleta or ramirez until he felt they had done enough work to make a guitar better.
Regarding some thoughts about Negras NOT being classicals. I was one that stated that earlier with a few exceptions, MOST of the negras I played were LIKE classicals to me. Of course I agree that they should NOT be that way, the idea of a flamenco negra is to be "flamenco" sounding of course.
Ricardo
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Date May 25 2010 14:21:11
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: What IS the purpose of a flamenc... (in reply to Ricardo)
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I think Segovia mellowed in his dotage and I'm sure he like lots of old bastards loved cats and disliked people. Ravel had seventeen cats and was often quite the misanthrope.
I saw Segovia in Los Angeles in 1979, I believe, at the Dorothy Chandler auditorium. He was well out of his seventies and could barely trot across the stage with his eighty year old legs. In fact my Aunt Polly who was in her sixties was sitting next to me and she gasped and said I hope he does not fall on his guitar. He stumbled a bit.
To some it must look cruel, heartless and unthinkable for me to mount such an eviscerating attack on the old master. Yet I'm glad to have seen him in the same way I'm glad I saw Walter Cronkite when I was under ten years old, in his prime reporting on the Vietnam war on television. Happy am that I watched the first Apollo moon landing, the Watergate trials and was one of the first in the early 1980's to see one of the two then extant copies of the Armenian film masterpeice Sayat Nova that existed. Clearly I was lucky to have seen him, myself being a man with such low ability for aesthetic discernment, was very lucky indeed.
Yet in some strange way I feel compassion for the old duffer. The same retroactive compassion I feel for Ronald Reagan, Ho Chi Min, Augusto Pinoche and many other despotic individuals who when they reached curmudgeon hood, were transformed by nature into warm teddy bear like edifices.
When Segovia was done playing that evening, my mother, her mother my grandmother and my grand aunt Polly when to a Denny's to get a bite. There was a lot of mothering going on that night. My grandmother said in her Dallas/Fort Worth Texas accent "That old boy can sure play, I wish he would have done a Chet Atkins tune or two." Aunt Polly joined in "Yeah heck, but he was better than Wayne Newton, I have to say I am surprised I liked that so much." All the while I in my youthful good looks was being eyed by a table of rude looking downtown LA punk girls. My mom really did not say too much because she did not want me to later correct her as to which pieces Segovia played and she knew I might. We ate our finely prepared Denny's meals and the conversation veered off towards crocheting and child support checks. As we left the Denny's the punk girls got up at the same time as us and as we passed them between the vinyl booths the leader called to me sotto voce. "Wanna to get naked?" All the mothers heard her.
Since I've been cast as some philistine Judge Garzon of the arts who wants to file depositions, bring charges and levy arrest warrants against one Andres Segovia, despotic abuser of guitarmakers, allow me to legislate from my bench once more.
December 2009, San Francisco CA. Conservatory of Music.
Lecture/Demonstration by Pepe Romero and distinguished associates on Faculty.
Subjects: Torres, Tarrega, Esteso, Barbero, Santos, et al.
Second half of lecture, specific subject: Relationship between Santos Hernandez and my father.
Speaker: Pepe Romero
Description: Pepe Romero speaks warmly on the topic of Santos Hernandez's relationship as a guitarmaker who built instruments for his father. The main point was that there was an occasion when his father was traveling through Spain due to the political climate of the time and that when he made his way to Madrid he was received with great tenderness by Santos Hernandez. Santos had in a prior trip provided Pepe's father with a guitar which his father paid for. On this trip seeing that Pepe's father was at odds financially Mr. Hernandez returned to Mr. Romero the money with which Mr. Romero had purchased the guitar. Mr. Romero kept the guitar with the heartfelt blessings of Santos Hernandez. The money enabled Mr.Romero to have some cash in pocket and not be stranded in Madrid "sin ti".
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Back to the Nosferatu of music, Herr Segovia; Because I have spent so much of my life in the pursuit of belles-letters, the sexual gaming and acquisition of LA punk chicks, the watching of Benny Hill, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, The Monkeys and MTV I have done my duty as an American. Unfortunately this activity has cost me dearly in the realm of being able to discern between one type of guitar and another or the level of playing of any guitarist. I thank any of you who have pointed this out to me. I am in your debt for I strive to make guitars and without your kind and gentle observations on the shortcomings of my aural skills, I would have remained ignorant of my faults.
I owe you a great debt of gratitude,
Party on Garth!
Sincerely,
Stephen M. Faulk Esquire
Juris Doctorate of Aesthetic Fartknockery
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Date May 26 2010 9:45:30
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Ron.M
Posts: 7051
Joined: Jul. 7 2003
From: Scotland
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RE: What IS the purpose of a flamenc... (in reply to estebanana)
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You know, estebanana..Writers get paid about 250 quid for writing and reading such pieces for BBC Rado 4 (UK Speech Radio).
I especially liked..
My grandmother said in her Dallas/Fort Worth Texas accent "That old boy can sure play, I wish he would have done a Chet Atkins tune or two."
I really think your excellent piece would have been accepted by the producer of a special Segovia programme..."The Man, The Guitar, The People, The Cats"....
(Unfortunately they do not pay travel expenses, so it might not be such a good deal as it at first sounded.  )
Anyway, at least we enjoyed it here!
(BTW I think Salvador Dali was also a cat lover, as I saw a documentary some years back, taken at his home in Spain.)
He was walking by the swimming pool, talking to the interviewer, when one of his cats walked by...
He immediately bent down and picked it up, petted it for a few moments, then swung it by the tail around and around his head and let go, so it flew into the air and landed in the middle of the pool with a "splosh".
The interviewer asked that wasn't this cruel?
Salvador said, "Nah...he LOVES it...all my cats do..They love flying and swimming..."
Some of these "geniuses" are a bit hard to understand fully by us lesser mortals I guess?
I dunno.... I just though it was strange...
cheers,
Ron
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Date May 26 2010 11:07:10
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: What IS the purpose of a flamenc... (in reply to Ricardo)
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Thanks Ron,
But I assure you no kitty's were harmed during the writing of my diatribe. I love cats and intend to own as many as possible when I reach my antisocial curmudgeonhood.
Also Aaron, I appreciate that you champion the balancing act in art, but in guitar making it really only counts where strings and sound are concerned. Yeah I guess we want balance, or at least equilibrium between different aspects of the guitars sound and structure.
However when it comes to art in general great artists and art runs the gamut of being mentally stable to psychologically unhinged. In flamenco you don't have to travel very far for examples. Take Manuel Agujetas, por ejemplo. I'm not going to say one way or the other what my opinion is, but he does not strike me as the kind of performer or man who exists on Prozac. Capullo is a bit nutty, I would hate to see his weirdnesses ironed out of him and there's always some eccentric gitano to cite as crazy, but I'll refrain as I like my ribs unpunctured by knives.
In the great scheme of painting and writing there is a cast of literally thousands of artists who are not "balanced". It reads like a who's who list of the art of the last five centuries and I'm talking about Europe alone not to mention some derelict characters in China like Li Po or the Japanese monk painter Sesshu who was the Van Gogh of Tian tai Shan monastery.
Van Gogh is an excellent example and one we all know. And there's Francis Bacon, Antonin Artaud, (who documented his own mental demise in journals) Delacroix, Velasquez, Bosch.
........ Dante, Melville, Bradbury......
Balance in art is a myth we borrowed from the Greeks. It was foisted on us by the Germans who were the first modern art historians and soundly killed off by Picasso around 1906 when he painted Demioselles de Avignon and shattered the Greek ideal of balance.
Welcome to the 21st century.
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Date May 26 2010 12:11:53
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aarongreen
Posts: 367
Joined: Jan. 16 2004
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RE: What IS the purpose of a flamenc... (in reply to mark indigo)
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quote:
lol - i heard that same story somewhere but with farruca instead of fandangos!
Actually your right, it was farruca.
I never met Escudero which is too bad, he had left NYC by the time I started going there with my guitars. He was a pretty interesting character as well, by all accounts. There was a music school for many years called the American Institute for Guitar which, when I knew it, was around the corner from the David Letterman theater on 54th st. Escudero taught there for a bit, as did Juan de la Mata, who is probably about 87 now and looks like he's 20 years younger. Anyways Sabicas used to hang out there and you got Escudero there as well......plus pretty much everyone in the guitar world in NYC, it was quite a place.
Sorry for the continuing donutification of the thread. I will cease to donutify any further.
Actually to help bring this thread back around, Escudero played a Hauser guitar for many years, with a tap plate added.
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Date May 27 2010 4:26:14
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