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RE: PDL says you dont need to study !
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Morante
Posts: 2179
Joined: Nov. 21 2010
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 RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to tele)
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Sorry, my English escapes me at times.
Conservatorio is music school: most towns have one. They cater for all ages and abilities: for example, in Cádiz, the sax professors are Carlos Villoslaba and Pedro Cortejosa, both of high professional standard and both have their young children enrolled.
Any instrument, piano, percussion, flute etc. can be studied with good professors. As a result, several of the young flamencos began by studying classical guitar and reading notation, then went off for lessons with Manolo Sanlúcar etc. But being flamenco by birth, their music does not suffer from this knowledge, and they can work with other musicians in other genres.
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Nov. 2 2013 17:56:21
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Erik van Goch
Posts: 1787
Joined: Jul. 17 2012
From: Netherlands
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RE: PDL says you dont need to study ! (in reply to tele)
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Being the son of a multi talented classical/flamenco guitar teacher i know both the advantages and disadvantages of (depending on) music notation and theory. It actually was the beginning of the friendship between my father and Paco Peña, who met during a guitar course in Mettmann in the early 80ties. My father was attending a lute corse (which turned out to be to simple for him) and Paco was giving a flamenco corse and experiencing some huge problems himself. His students turned out to be classical guitar players, well trained in music theory/music notation but not able to learn/play a single note by ear. Paco on his turn was only trained in the tradition of monkey see monkey do and was not able to offer them the notes on paper. When my father joined in he saved the day because he excels in both. So during the night my father made transcriptions for Paco's next days lessons and in return Paco paid my fathers flamenco course at Rotterdam Conservatory a visit. A couple of years later when Rotterdam Conservatory asked Paco to start a full time flamenco course at master level he agreed on condition my father would join in as well. As seen above (lack of) music theory/notation can have its drawbacks. Paco really regrets he is not able to write notes himself because up to today he is depending on others to do his transcriptions (for teaching purposes, publications or making/sharing arrangements with non flamenco artist like the various choirs he worked with).
Back to my father. In his performing years (he spend over 20.000 hours on stage) he was the composer/arranger of the band and added various pieces a week to their repertoire. They performed 6 hours a day, 363 days a year and could play for a week without having to repeat a single piece. Over the years he met and played with many artists. Some were able to play complex music from paper at full speed without any preparation (some were even able to read it in one key and play it in another key simultaneously) others were not able to read a single note. One of my fathers guitar students was a musical genius and for a performance in a big concert hall he was asked to play the banjo part. He borrowed my fathers banjo, unpacked it for the first time when entering the stage and gave a flawless performance, playing an instrument he had never played in a tuning unknown to him and on top reading a music sheet that had to be played in another key.
When my father met trio Siboney (3 voices, 3 guitars) he was very surprised to see there creative process. Although they were known for their tasteful arrangements making them seemed to be a struggle. They had no idea were to begin, tried out all possible variations in voicing and after days of struggle would end up with a piece that had exactly the same type of voicing as all there other pieces. Dude to their lack of professional approach they had to re-invent the wheel over and over again. My father could have made the same arrangement within an hour.
Not everything that is new to flamenco is new to music. Some of the alternative chord lines introduced to flamenco by Paco de Lucia and others were already used in similar ways in other kinds of music and probably would have found their way to flamenco sooner if classical music theory had been part of their life. I'm talking about the option to replace one chord for another (like in a standard alegrias copla playing #Fm in stead of B7) or to ad in between dominants at various places (so E>B7 becomes E>(#C7)>#Fm). When a student played Paco that beautiful granainas falsetsa by Gerardo Nuñez both Paco and my father disliked it, claiming it was a cheap copy of what they called American music. Still, when i asked them to name me an example of that music they could not offer me an example. But i must admit that when my father questioned the lack of musical and rhythmic variation in the tanquillos falsetas known to him he managed to make one himself that was quit agreeable. He simply took a couple of rhythmic variations he thought were overlooked so far and made some beautiful flamenco lines around it. It soon became one of the students favorite tanquillos endings but up to today not 1 of them was able to play the final cadence correctly because they all struggle with the rhythmic subtleties involved, despite the fact some of them are very experienced players. I can't blame them nor improve them because in all honesty i was never able to master the rhythm of tanguillos myself. Paco Peña never took tanguillos very seriously because he considers it to be a silly piece. When he was asked to compose a tanguillos falseta he instantly made one up that was extremely modern and exiting.
I already mentioned that classical players who have played from paper all their live can become a prisoner of written notes. A friend of me once was commissioned to make a music transcription of a famous song that had to be performed by a group of classical guitar teachers on stage. When i stated the offered 25 guiders was not a lot of money for all the work involved (the baselines were full of cyncopations) she surprised me stating she only had to list the chord progression, which left me totally flabbergasted since the song involved was called....... bambalabamba. The other side of the coin is that when i joined Flairck in their meeting with Wim Witteman (who happened to lecture music theory and composition at Utrecht Conservatory) asking him to arrange a Flairck piece for a symphonic orquestra he was able to play the handed partiture on his piano straight from paper in the same way we you and i read a book...in this case however he did not read a piano part (that didn't exist) but made an instant piano arrangement of the 4 voices of the violin, flute, base and guitar added together. Next he demonstrated a world of possibilities for adding new voices. That would be comparable with us being able to read 4 lines of text simultaneously wile making an instant analyses of the intent and formulating an answer (i actually met someone once who was able to read multiple lines of text simultaneously but he could only retell the content after his brain was allowed to digest the text a couple of hours.... how the hell do you discover you can do that???).
The first task i was given when studying music theory myself was to make a composition. I included a very nice chord that was rejected by my teacher for unclear reasons. The chord he suggested would totally destroy my composition and it really made me wonder what the hell i was doing there. I confronted my father with it and he just raised his shoulder claiming some people for unclear reasons liked 3 identical chords on a row more then one odd one in between, disturbing the paper line up. I had similar argues later on. One composition that was rejected on a couple of notes had to be returned as a final exam piece. Since i rejected the rejection i returned it a couple of mounts later without altering a note. I didn't even bother to refresh the page involved so the red pencil marks were still there. During that final exam a second teacher was present who asked why the hell that red disapproval mark was there.... the teacher who put it there had to admit he could not see anything wrong on second sight :-).
So my own years of studying music theory did not pass without a couple of firm disagreements on the field of harmony/arrangement because like paco i didn't know how to name things but i most certainly was able to distinguish good from bad. Still i'm very glad with what i learned and i know for a fact music theory (especially rhythm and phrasing) highly improved my abilities as a musician. Annotations often helped me analyze/deduct what was going on and despite listening to it hundreds of times i never noticed Vicente made 4 capital compas mistakes in his debut soleares until i tried to play it myself and my music sheet clearly showed there were only 11 beats in the compas. Do you need music theory to find that out, not really, Vicente himself discovered his mistake as well (after a couple of years).
Various times Paco Peña has forgotten a piece and had to be kickstarted by my father playing him the forgotten parts from partiture after which Paco would be able to play the piece again before you knew it. Paco once had to perform a non flamenco piece on stage with only a written score available. So in between the guitar lessons they gave to their students (1 hour a student sometimes over 10 on a row) they used the time students needed to (un)pack their guitar for a quick exchange of notes based on monkey see monkey do with my father playing the written score and Paco trying to memorize them (a few notes at the time) . At the end of the day my father was not able to remember a single note wile Paco could play the piece like it was on his repertoire for years. Some brains work more efficient then others and the brain of people like Wim Witterman, Paco de Lucia, Paco Peña and John Williams simply work on a totally different level then that of normal human beings, music wise.
Can music theory limit your abilities as a musician? It does when you become a prisoner of written notes and suddenly have to play music that does not exist on paper. Can a lack of theory limit your possibilities as a musician? It does when you are not able to communicate with whoever need written scores (you can call that their problem), have to perform music with people who are not familiar with flamenco, or have to play a piece yourself that is only available on paper. Fabulous musicians can be found on both sides of the coin. Music theory would not have improved Paco de Lucia's compositions (only speeded up some developments) although my father always has considered his sexted to be pretty amateurish from an arranging point of view. Like Todd stated, Paco might not know how to name things, he most certainly knows how to implement things and his understanding of music theory is impeccable.
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Date Nov. 3 2013 20:12:18
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