Cante Jondo Research Articles

Дух дуэнде в эстетической теории Ф.Г. Лорки и его воплощение в «Андалузской трилогии»

The article is devoted to the aesthetic views of Federico Garcia Lorca, the peculiarities of his perception of art and the creative process. The concept of duende is considered as a phenomenon of Spanish culture, correlated with the folk art of flamenco and cante jondo. The significance of duende in Lorca's aesthetics is revealed. The reflection of the author's aesthetic conception and the role of duende as the basis of the expressive beginning in the plays "Blood Wedding", "Yerma" and "The House of Bernarda Alba" are traced. The significance of flamenco and cante jondo stylistics in the embodiment of the duende spirit in the "Andalusian trilogy" is revealed.

Albeniz, from the piano to the wind

Albéniz was one of Celia’s favorite composers from her childhood and always felt a special connection to his work. However, in the fifteen long years that she has been studying music, she has never been able to play any of his pieces on the bassoon. Now that she has finished her master's degree -and she had to reflect on where she comes from and, ultimately, who she is-, she decided to investigate the composer in depth with the aim of arranging his Spanish Suite, originally written for piano, so that at the end of so many things, she can interpret it with her reed quintet. Thanks to its flexibility and wide palette of colors, sound, and articulation, the combination of reed instruments achieves a greater range of register and color, and provides Albéniz's music, inspired by elements of flamenco and Spanish folklore such as cante jondo, a texture and expressiveness that evokes the human voice. Caire Reed Quintet was formed in 2020, in the midst of the Covid19 pandemic crisis. The five of them are from Spain and they share the same passion for Albéniz. With this work the author wishes to offer other composers and performers the opportunity to discover, learn and experience how much the reed quintet's sonority can contribute to certain styles of music such as Spanish nationalist, reaching a greater range of register and color, and endowing this style of music from a new perspective.

To Africanize Spain: Twentieth-Century Spanish Poetry and the Persistent Forms of al-Andalus

To Africanize Spain: Twentieth-Century Spanish Poetry and the Persistent Forms of al-Andalus

The Atavistic Vision of Andalusia in Lorca’s Romancero gitano: History and Context

The vision of Andalusia found in Lorca’s Romancero gitano and the related ‘Conferencia-recital’ is best understood in the context of a long history of writings that present a variety of different perspectives: from the Romantic envisioning of Andalusia, the Generation of 1898’s exaltation of Castile, pre-modernista colorismo, the modernismo of Sánchez Rodríguez and Juan Ramón Jiménez, and andalucismo, through to several ‘theories of Andalusia’. Parallel to this run the main stages of research into cante jondo, a genre often held to express ‘alma andaluza’. Both traditions stress the many historical ‘layers’ of Andalusian civilization, leading to the notion of atavism.

Un poeta en las aulas: aproximación a una didáctica lorquiana

Este trabajo presenta una propuesta didáctica en torno a la figura y la obra de Federico García Lorca, cuyos destinatarios son los estudiantes de segundo ciclo de Educación Secundaria Obligatoria.A través de una metodología activa y participativa y una propuesta de actividades dinámicas, lúdicas, creativas e interartísticas se pretende acercar el universo lorquiano a los alumnos de secundaria. Se hace un recorrido por la trayectoria vital y literaria del autor granadino intentando que los alumnos disfruten y valoren su producción literaria. Esto contribuye a la formación de hábitos lectores perdurables y a su competencia literaria.Las obras sobre las que se fundamenta el diseño didáctico son: Poema del cante jondo, Romancero gitano, Poeta en Nueva York, Bodas de sangre, Yerma y La casa de Bernarda Alba.

Мануэль де Фалья, Интродукция к балету «Треуголка»: о тембровом воплощении национального начала

The article examines the introduction to the ballet “The Three-Cornered Hat” by outstanding 20th century Spanish composer Manuel de Falla from the point of view of its timbral organization and the idea of implementing a sense of national unity into music by means of synthesizing together the genre sources of the music of Andalusia, Castile, Catalonia and Murcia. Being the youngest representative of the Spanish Renacimiento in music, he turned out to be the only composer who was able to combine in an organic way the features of traditional flamenco with the new artistic trends of the previous century (Impressionism and Neoclassicism). The composer’s ubiquitous turning to the genres and strata of overall Spanish and regional folk music, as well as his tendency toward creating syntheses of folk and academic musical timbres led to the recreation in de Falla’s musical-theater compositions of the most widespread folk custom in Southern Spain – the tablao flamenco, practically in its traditional form, in particular, in the introduction to the ballet “The Three- Cornered Hat.” Thereby, the maestro’s ideas, which present an organic timbral unity between the sound of a symphony orchestra and folk musical colors, have displayed a broad spectrum of new coloristic solutions for composers of the younger generation and various national music schools. Keywords: timbre, Spain, flamenco, tablao, ballet, cante jondo, tradition, Manuel de Falla.

Wyobraźnia a prześladowanie. Społeczność cygańska w wierszach Federica Garcíi Lorki

Artykuł po krótkiej prezentacji historii przybycia grup cygańskich na Półwysep Iberyjski skupia się na ich obrazie wyłaniającym się z wierszy Federica Garcíi Lorki zawartych w jego dwóch znanych tomach poetyckich: Poema de cante jondo (1931) oraz Romancero gitano (1928).W wypadku pierwszego tomu oś analizy koncentruje się na próbie scharakteryzowania cygańskiego charakteru pieśni znanych jako cante jondo w odwołaniu do rozmaitych wypowiedzi publicznych i wykładów autora oraz ich poetyckiego odbicia. Analiza tomu drugiego obejmuje przede wszystkim próbę ukazania konfliktu między społecznością cygańską, charakteryzującą się wyobraźnią i inspiracją, a funkcjonariuszami Gwardii Cywilnej, reprezentującymi porządek i represyjny utylitaryzm. Na plan pierwszy wysuwa się siła wyobraźni cygańskiej, pozwalająca im przetrwać godnie największe prześladowania i represje.

<em>Debla</em>: un arcano del cante flamenco (del vocativo <em>romaní</em> al sustantivo <em>caló</em>)

Desde que Antonio Machado padre publicó su densa colección de Cantes Flamencos (1881), se viene especulando sobre el significado de la palabra debla, que da nombre a la más antigua y dramática de las «tonás», también la más gitana,cuyas raíces se pierden en la profunda noche del cante «jondo». El estribillo («macho») en caló que la remata -Debla barea o deblica barea- ha suscitado múltiples y caprichosas interpretaciones entre los flamencólogos, poco preocupados por el dialecto gitano español y por los préstamos de éste a la copla flamenca, que han llegado a hablar del «misterio» de la debla. El presente estudio viene a deshacer los hilos de un arcano fabricado, al menos desde el punto de vista lingüístico, a partir de una sencilla fórmula exclamativa gitana.

Nights in the Spanish Gardens. Meaning and inspiration

Name: Samuel Tirado Villaescusa Main Subject: Classical Piano Research Supervisor: Bart van Oort Title of Research: Nights in the Spanish Gardens: Meaning and inspiration Research Question: Which are the most important sources of inspiration in the piece Nights in the Spanish Gardens and how all of them affect the performance of the soloist and the orchestra? Summary of Results: Manuel de Falla's piece Nights in the Spanish Gardens has become popular during the last twenty years. Several of the greatest performers have recorded it achieving impressive results. However, the piece presents key aspects from the Spanish folklore and French impressionism that, usually, are not taken into account. Searching information for my research, I discovered that the most important sources of inspiration come from »cante jondo« (a Spanish primitive chant), the Spanish guitar and the music of Claude Debussy. Thus, I found several examples that prove the connection and help the performer to make the interpretation as coherent as possible. The research process changed my vision about topics such as the role of the soloist, the interpretation of ornaments, melodic lines and rubato as well as the imitation of the guitar in De Falla's music. Furthermore, this information could also help not only pianist performing Nights in the Spanish Gardens, but also any musician playing Manuel de Falla's music. Biography: Samuel Tirado begins his studies in Salamanca, where he completed a bachelor degree with Patrin Garcia Barredo. He has participated in masterclasses with teachers like Claudio Martinez Mehner, Ferenc Rados, Edith Fischer, Kennedy Moretti and Galina Eguiazarova among others. He has performed as a soloist and chamber music member and in places such as the national auditorium in Madrid, auditorium of Cuenca and theaters in Salamanca, Ciudad Real and Ávila. He has also played in countries such as Holland, France and Austria.

Silenced Keys to Literary and Musical Interplays between Lorca and Falla

Author(s): Orringer, Nelson R. | Abstract: Between 1920 and 1936, Spanish composer Manuel de Falla and his friend and folk-music pupil Federico Garcia Lorca, Spanish poet and playwright, wrote many of their best-known works, all affected by the other artist. The many interconnections between them exceeded the printing space available to the author for his 2014 book on those links. The present article puts those silenced finds into print for the first time. Falla´s 1908 piece “Andaluza” attempts to express the soul of Andalusia by imitating rhythms, modalities, melodies, adornments, and folk cadences of that southern Spanish region. The work, together with others by Falla, inspires at least two poems and two poetic dialogues by Lorca: the two “Rider's Songs” from the 1924 anthology Canciones or Songs and two short allegorical dialogues of 1925 gathered into Poema del Cante Jondo or Poem of Deep Song. While all these analogies between Falla's music and Lorca´s poetry center around a variety of male Andalusian archetypes, still other likenesses between the two artists show up in Falla´s compositions examining feminine innocence and the two Lorca poems “Two Girls,” two studies on Andalusian woman's purity from Poem of Deep Song.

Public Enemy or National Hero? The Spanish Gypsy and the Rise of Flamenquismo, 1898–1922

The vindication of the Gypsy as a hero in some works by Manuel Falla and Federico García Lorca and through the cante jondo competition of 1922 is well known to scholars. What is perhaps less known is that Falla and Lorca reacted against a long tradition of abusing Gypsies in the media, that peaked during the Restoration. This article analyses the cultural production that prompted Falla and Lorca to write in defence of the Gypsy, and pays particular attention to the work of Rafael Salillas, Eugenio Noel, and journalists writing in reaction to the rise of flamenquismo from the 1880s on.

Cien años de “El amor brujo” (1915-2015) Manuel de Falla, entre lo culto y lo popular

Manuel de Falla´s Cruel Love subtitled Gypsy story in two parts is a ballet with cante jondo whose premiere was given, in a first chamber version, in Madrid´s Lara Theatre in April of 1915. With only two characters on stage, the attractive gypsy Candelas and her boyfriend Carmelo who are haunted by the ghost of her previous lover, we encounter an original anti-romantic version of the relationship between love and death struggling for the liberation of the soul through that of the body, through flamenco dance and cante jondo. This work was written after a seven-year stay (1907-14) in the Paris of La Belle Epoque and contributes to the renewal of nationalism in music as it has the special interest of questioning the social frontiers between “classical music” and “popular music”. The result is a both complex and popular piece in which are found synthesized such different influences as those of Felipe Pedrell, Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinski.

Tournée de García Lorca por los ateneos del norte de España (diciembre de 1930)

This article reconstructs the lecture tour that Federico Garcia Lorca made through the North of Spain in December 1930, following his prolonged stay in the United States and Cuba. The tour took him through Logrono, San Sebastian, Gijon and Oviedo. In the last city named his talk had to be cancelled due to the political upheaval following on from the failed military coup in Jaca. In his tour Lorca gave two lectures, The Poetic Imagery of Don Luis de Gongora, which although already wellknown, was presented here in a different version, and The Arquitecture of Cante Jondo, which the poet had never delivered before in Spain. The coverage given to these lectures in the local press projected Lorca as a poet increasingly admired by the people of his country and allows us to analyze the variations introduced in them.

La copla andaluza y los poetas

From the so-called «fin de siglo» to the thirties some of the Spanish poets relied on the folk song –and more specifically on the «cante jondo» or flamenco– to define an alleged Andalusian soul. In opposition to the cheerful, colourful and folkloric Andalusia described by poets like Reina and Rueda, there are other Modernist authors like Villaespesa, Sánchez Rodríguez, Juan Ramón Jiménez or Darío who refined the literary image of Andalusia from the distinctive notes of sadness or grief, thus initiating a thematic chain which from the twenties extended Lorca’s image of «Andalucía del llanto» under Neopopularism and the Vanguard movement. This trend continued in the next decade, when Cansinos Assens and the Caba brothers placed similar emphasis on tragic Andalusia, based on an analysis of the «cante jondo» in which metaphysical, social and historical aspects were mixed. This paper aims to examine some of the key aspects of the relation between the sadness of the Andalusian song and Spanish poetry in the first third of the 20th century.

The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto

74 World Literature Today reviews as one of the most observant of writers, whose insights and musings manage to create and illuminate the very fabric of our lives. Piotr Florczyk Los Angeles, California Banana Yoshimoto. The Lake. Michael Emmerich, tr. Brooklyn, New York. Melville . 2011. isbn 9781933633770 Many reviewers seem to have read The Lake through an Orientalist lens; despite the novel’s simplistic language , which offers little more than its own existence on the page, many reviewers willfully mistake such writing for profundity. Banana Yoshimoto ’s (b. 1964) awkward attempts to create compelling prose lead, more often than not, to caricatures such as “When things get really bad, you take comfort in the placeness of a place,” which only weaken the work. Indeed, her desire to craft memorable moments of figurative language are largely strained, although there are occasional flashes that bring a smile to the lips. The banality of the writing, and the painfully awkward sentence structure (which, it should be noted, is not the fault of Emmerich, whose excellent translation captures all too well the deficiencies apparent in the original), leave the reader constantly wondering why it is necessary to plough through the narrative at all. A story that asks the reader work for its treasure succeeds when the reward is at least worth that effort. The Lake, while offering hints that our engagement with the characters and their tale will leave us satisfied, never fully achieves that objective. It is this missed opportunity that is the novel’s greatest shortcoming, for we read in the penumbra of an exquisite work that lies just beyond sight. Despite these significant shortcomings , The Lake may be Yoshimoto ’s best work since Tugumi (1989; Eng. Goodbye Tsugumi, 2002). There is a strange, unresolved undertone of uncertainty in The Lake that makes us yearn for a fuller exploration of the tentative relationship between Chihiro and Nakajima. In what may be the most compelling moment in the novel, the protagonist says, “Looking back now . . . I wanted so badly to hold his image in my mind’s eye. . . . And that’s really all it was.” The story is a recollection, and the implication is that their love was insufficient, their parallel paths through a childhood as pariahs too tenuous a bond to keep them together. This, if confirmed , would have been a powerful comment on both love and pain. This window into their history beckons provocatively, for it is singular: never again does Yoshimoto permit us a glimpse of this future Chihiro. In the final analysis, this putatively poignant novel about two lost souls, each with the emotional scars of his or her nontraditional childhood intact, fails at its most basic level: We cannot connect to either Chihiro or her lover with anything more than a facile awareness that they might be people worth knowing . Although they reveal the source of their painful pasts, that is not enough to overcome the more fundamental impediment—they do little to make us care. Despite Yoshimoto’s obvious attempt to invest her characters with some psychological depth through trauma, they remain, ultimately , shallow and uninteresting. Erik R. Lofgren Bucknell University Verse Victor Hernández Cruz. In the Shadow of Al-Andalus. Minneapolis, Minnesota . Coffee House. 2011. isbn 9781566892773 IntheShadowofAl-Andalusopenswith a selection of epigraphs one might expect in a scholarly publication. Quotations by the medievalist María Rosa Menocal and the eleventh-century Córdoba poet Ibn Hazm, among others, illustrate the context of the works that follow, though here that context is the author’s invention. “I am asking questions of history and have answered them through imagination,” Victor Hernández Cruz explains in the introduction, an eloquent and lushly written contemplation of the historical, cultural, geographic, linguistic, musical, and literary “knots [and] layers of weaving ” that inspire his poetry. Just as rich is the network of literary and musical allusions in the poems. From the troubadours, Alfonso el Sabio’s Cantigas de Santa Maria, and the Jewish and Arab intellectuals of medieval Spain to popular poetic traditions such as the romancero , fado, and cante jondo, Hernández ...

On the way to ‘duende’ (through Lorca's Elogio de Antonia Mercé, ‘la Argentina’, 1930)

This article analyzes how Lorca develops the concept of ‘duende’, finding a crucial missing link in the Elogio de Antonia Mercé, ‘la Argentina’ (1930). ‘Duende’ crystallizes around 1929/1930 when the poet explicitly takes into account the art of the dancer in performance. Three aspects of performance are singled out and systematically traced through Lorca's evolving reflections on popular art and the struggle of the modern artist to create the new – from his first lecture on the cante jondo in 1922 to the Arquitectura del cante jondo (1930) and finally Juego y teoría del duende (1933). The conclusion is drawn that it is in the performance and reception of a text – whether it is heard or read – that the artist's agonistic stand between tradition and modernity, repetition and singularity, is played out, in an invitation to the listener or reader to celebrate his or her mortality.

A Companion to Federico García Lorca. Edited by Federico Bonaddio . Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2007. Pp. x+213.

<i>A Companion to Federico García Lorca</i>. Edited by Federico Bonaddio . Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2007. Pp. x+213.

Federico García Lorca: música y poesía : la problemática del cante jondo

The topic of my essay is the musical work of Federico García Lorca and the effect of music on poetry. The aim is to present an objective image of García Lorca, the musician, disregarding his reputation as poet and dramatist. In this extract, I discuss the theory of cante jondo. The differences between Lorca’s and later experts’ results are presented from the perspective of modern flamencology. The first disputed aspect is stylistic categorisation – while the poet makes a distinction between cante jondo and cante flamenco, flamencologists consider cante jondo as a subtype of flamenco. The origin of the genre is even more problematic, and, in the absence of written documents, the debate between the representatives of the Andalusian and the gypsy origin is still unclosed. Considering the place of origin of cante jondo Lorca did not state his opinion, therefore, based on some references, I try to clarify if he shared his teacher’s, Manuel de Falla’s opinion, which is different from what experts claim today. Only part of the analysis of Poema del cante jondo is published here, but after the in-depth examination of the volume it can be stated that despite the disputability of his theory, the poet could recreate the emotions and thoughtfulness of “deep song”.

"Do You Know What It Will Look Like?": On the Relevancy of Adorno's Theory of Society

"Do You Know What It Will Look Like?"On the Relevancy of Adorno's Theory of Society Rolf Tiedemann (bio) Translated by Sean Nye (bio) Like the Pyramids or the Acropolis, Auschwitz is a fact. It is the sign of the human. The image of man is from now on inseparable from the gas chamber. —Georges Bataille Whoever comes from Germany to Spain in order to speak about Adorno is absolved from the difficulty of needing to introduce an unknown author.1 Just in my own, by no means complete, collection of translations of Adorno's writings into Spanish and Catalan, I count no fewer than twenty-four volumes: almost as many as Adorno himself published in German; with the exception of two volumes that were translated while he was still living, although they were all first published after 1969, the year of Adorno's death. And already in 1983, the philosopher must have been so popular in your country that he was inducted into the trivial immortality of a crime novel with one of his most difficult books; in any case, Montalbán considered Aesthetic Theory worthy to be cited in one of the famous auto-da-fés by his "Pepe" Carvalho. Thereafter, everyone who wanted to tackle practically self-evident lecture topics such as "Adorno and Spain" or "Adorno's view of Spain" would, however, have fallen into the greatest imaginable difficulties: there aren't any topics of such a kind, and Spain was certainly not one of Adorno's topics. He did not speak Spanish, nor did he ever visit Spain. The great paintings of Spain lay outside of his interests, so much so that Greco is named just once or twice as a precursor to Expressionism; Velazquez and Goya are not found in his works. Neither did he seem to take note of the musicians Albéniz or Granados. De Falla was for him, wrongfully and unsustainably, more [End Page 123] craft than art; "Noches en los jardines de España" even refined and noble kitsch. Adorno cites Calderón a single time, but only to cast doubt that he could have known Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. He once encountered Ortega y Gasset in Darmstadt towards the beginning of the 1950s, and he had nothing but contempt for his writings. To be sure, one encounters Don Quixote comparatively more often, and he held extraordinarily high regard for such poetry as Lorca's dramas, but with that, Spanish literature in his writings and indeed also in his knowledge may admittedly be largely exhausted. The novel of the errant knight primarily served him as an early example of the bourgeois "experience of the disenchanted world" (Notes to Literature, 30, 11/41), but he scarcely had an eye for the exemplary, and last but not least exemplary Spanish, art of Cervantes. He wrote about Lorca, but not about the poet of "Poeme del cante jondo" or "Bodas de sangre"; instead he wrote on the occasion of a desolate sentence he found in a German magazine and which says nothing about the poet but only makes known much about the, already at that time, "political climate spreading in Germany": "One may only think of the victims of fascism as though they were the real criminals: otherwise not only would Mr. Franco be insulted, but also the threatening, healthy and cozy common sense" ("Gleichwohl," 20.2/499). Spain—you won't want to hear it, and I say it only hesitantly and with the request that you not see in it any affront to your hospitality—Spain was in Adorno's intellectual household, first of all, the Falangist dictatorship, which outlasted the National Socialists in his own land for three decades; Spain was for him the land of Caudillo Francisco Franco, who would outlive Adorno himself by five years. He rejected repeated invitations to Spain, always with a reference to Franco. During the mid-1960s, a singer who had befriended him and with whom he often performed publicly had once almost talked him into performing together in Madrid, but at the last moment, he still declined: with the explanation that he could not step foot in the country where...

Cante Jondo: German Literary Gypsies and Theoretical Nomads

Cante Jondo: German Literary Gypsies and Theoretical Nomads