Flamenco's revival
Lorca, Almodovar, and Rosalia
There’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed as a first generation Macedonian from the Greater Chicago (Little Balkan) area, which I fully realized after watching Pedro Almodovar’s Dolor y Gloria. The film begins with a memory of song. Aging filmmaker Salvador Mallo submerges himself into a pool, and recalls the waters of his youth: washing linens in a river with his mother and the village maidens. One maiden, played by Rosalía, breaks into song, a rendition of “A Tu Vera,” at which all the women join in, a cappella, a bulerías rhythm snapped by Rosalía emerging at the closing verse. It is the only scene in which Salvador’s mother is truly joyful, without pain or bearing the stress of the peasant life.
Originally “A Tu Vera” was recorded by Flamenco superstar Lola Flores, whose version was more of a mainstream sentimental pop ballad. The version in Dolor y Gloria is more archetypal of flamenco, particularly of the darkly Phrygian and resonant bulerías style (flamenco encompasses many modal and rhythmic systems). Almodóvar superimposes Rosalía, our current flamenco superstar, over that of his childhood’s. “A Tu Vera,” like all sentimental torch songs, is about the burning yearning of love and desire. But when Almodovar’s women sing, the labor of peasant life is made less troubling. In fact the scene is joyful: the women laugh and make dirty jokes, they bring Salvador into their space, and they sing that dark music to at least make light.
The Macedonian wedding (the most sublime cultural event in Macedonian culture) often contains many tragic songs that hundreds of joyful Macos shout and dance to, such as “Što Imala Ksmet Stamena” (What Awful Fate Stamena Has), about a young maiden caring for her dying mother. Stamena leaves her mother’s bedside to collect cold water from the village well, but on the way, she sees a group of young lads dancing the oro. She joins.
The music of Southern Europe is of a special darkness, an eruption of emotion containing sorrow and ecstasy, something terrible, something religious, all at once. Flamenco is one such musical tradition, a crossroads of sorrow.
Flamenco is the music of the gitanos. Flamenco is physical. Flamenco is a deep song. Flamenco is the music of Lorca’s duende.
Flamenco is uniquely Spanish, but was influenced by Eastern musical tradition. The traditional music of Arab cultures and Turkey is based on maqam structure. Maqam is simply a mode, an eight note set of pitches that resemble the Western scales of Classical music, but that are executed differently. In maqam based music, melodies are often narrow, usually meandering around the same four or five notes, before modulating to a different pitch aggregate. Flamenco contains a dark mode known as Phrygian, in which the first two notes of the scale are a half-step (or a minor second) which is a dissonant interval. The archetypal “Spanish guitar sound” that is so often stereotyped in popular media is actually just the first three chords of a Phrygian Dominant scale, which in fact is widely used in flamenco and Eastern music.
Lorca and Manuel de Falla once believed that flamenco would die. They feared the modernizing world would destroy human’s need for transcendental ideals and religion (spoiler alert: they nailed it).
In an effort to preserve flamenco, Falla set out to compose a uniquely Spanish Classical Music, which at that time 1) did not exist and 2) was actually only being composed by Russian grandmaster Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov (Capriccio Espagnol). Falla composed two masterpieces, the epic ballet El Amour Brujo, the music of which used flamenco modes and rhythms, and choreography which fused traditional ballet fluidity with the pounding physicality of flamenco steps, and Noches en los jardines de España for piano and orchestra.
Lorca notes in his “Theory and Play of Duende” that Manuel Torre, “a man who had more culture in his veins than anyone I’ve known,” listened to Falla play the piano part of Noches en los jardines de España and remarked, “all that has dark sounds has duende.” Lorca’s Deep Song poems (cante jondo) read like lyrics meant to accompany the solemn soleá and buleriás, or the driving sevillanas and alegrías flamenco dances, and indeed should be performed. It is not until the Romancero Gitano that Lorca goes one level deeper and captures the Roma culture of Andalusia, the sorrow and joys, and the mystical worldview of the gitanos. It is at this point that the duende arrives. Indeed, the dark verse of the Romancero Gitano is peak duende.
Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a temple of resounding Dionysian ecstasy and shimmering Apollonian brilliance, complete with a courtyard mosaic of Medusa, arrays of androgynous sexual personae of Greek sculpture mutilated by time, which reside in the Chinese Loggia, lying adjacent to the dark cavern of the Spanish cloister. As you go deeper you will find is the masterwork of John Singer Sargent, El Jaleo–nearly the size of the wall. I visit it, revere it, as often as possible. Indeed, it is also peak duende.
Sargent’s Impressionist approach is uncanny and terrifying. He does not give his figures realistic human features. Notice that where eyes should be, the men of El Jaleo have instead empty caverns of blackness; the guitarists bend forward in musical motion, the clappers are in angular Apollonian form, and the singer, in rapturous ecstasy is arched back belting the deep song. To me, he is the focal point. His body is less stiff. He is overcome. The main dancer stands at the Golden Ratio. The two female dancers admire her, too, grabbed in viscera-colored shawls, their bodies fluid and Dionysian compared to the men’s stately solid stances. They revere her, but in a different way from the men, who let her sexual power overwhelm them. The female dancers are looking up to her. To understand the power, the duende that exudes from the main dancer, we read the faces of the ensemble–because we too, are them.
Flamenco has also found itself in the abstract. Appalachian composer George Crumb has set several fragments of Lorca to music. Crumb was known, admired, and has influenced generations of composers globally. His music is ethereal, resonant, ghostly. It gets under your skin. He often asks performers to play their instruments in nontraditional ways, what we composers now call “extended technique.” Crumb’s Lorca pieces include the electrifying and virtuosic Madrigals, Book I-IV, the spellbinding chthonian mysticism of Night of the Four Moons, and–arguably Crumb’s masterwork–Ancient Voices of Children. Here, duende appears.
Indeed, “Ancient Voices” is an abstract flamenco. Duende appears several times, most notably in the dance movements. “Dance of the Ancient Earth” begins with a narrow and heavily ornamented oboe melody, reminiscent of flamenco singers’ melismatic singing techniques. Asymmetrical rhythms (much like the tapping of a flamenco dancer’s shoes) are juxtaposed with sparse, darkly resonant moments. The “Dance of the Sacred Life Cycle” appears in the fourth movement, containing some of the most explosive and expressive vocal melodies. The tom-tom drums part is a clear flamenco element, tapping away triplet figures, also reminiscent of flamenco shoe tapping.
And of course, there are Lorca’s deep songs, each of which revolve around the motif of childhood. “Ancient Voices” begins with “El niño mudo” (The mute boy), in which a young boy searches for his missing voice and finds it captive in the body of a cricket. Crumb ends the cycle with “Balada de la placeta” (Ballad of the little square). An older man wanders into a little square and encounters children playing. They question him:
“What is in your festive divine heart?”
“What do you hold in your springtime hands?”
“What’s in your red and thirsty mouth?”
“Why do you stray so far from the little square?”
“Are you going far, very far, from the sea and the earth?”
The man replies to each of these questions, but Crumb only sets to music his last response: “I’ll go far, further than these mountains and seas, near the stars, to ask Christ our Lord to give me back my ancient soul of a child I once had.”
Flamenco originates from Andalusia, just south of Almodovar’s birth region. Almodovar’s most poetic scenes take place in the pueblo, the village. Volver is his most poetic film. It’s his great drama of women, capturing the complex relationships between daughters and mothers, sisters and mothers, the lives of superstitious village women plagued by tragedy, murder, and untold secrets of pain. Raimunda, the heroine played by Penelope Cruz, is recently widowed after her daughter Paula murders her stepfather (who she thinks is her biological father) after attempted rape. Raimunda and Paula hide the body in the freezer of a restaurant that recently went out of business. She decides to reopen the restaurant, illegally, in the typical village way, and ends up being a local success.
In one scene, Raimunda, Paula, and the local village women host a large evening party for a film crew, in which two guitarists begin strumming the notes of a childhood song Raimunda recognizes, a song her mother taught her. The song, “Volver,” is another sentimental-ballad turned-flamenco. Originally a tango by Argentinian Alfredo La Pera, the song is lip-synced by Penelope Cruz to the magnificent voice of living flamenco icon, Estrella Morente–maybe the only popular flamenco artists to exude duende. As the title notes, the song is about return, about our earth wanderings, how we return to the things we love, desire, how we grow old still desiring, yet continue to think back, because the past is sweet. Even though we once ran from it, we are always running back.
It’s silly and paradoxical to think, as Lorca and Falla did, that flamenco would die if not saved. Had not Lorca and Falla preserved the essence of flamenco, others eventually would have. And that’s the thing: when you want to preserve something, it usually means others do too, even if they don’t exist in your timeline. Flamenco has re-emerged in jazz–take the Miles Davis record Sketches of Spain (used extensively in Almodovar’s Tacones Lejanos), the art music of George Crumb, and in our own time through the music of Rosalía, who blends pop, flamenco, reggaeton and other musics of the Caribbean into her aesthetic. Many consider Rosalía a serial appropriator, but artists must cultivate.
Flamenco is essentially a folk music. It is vernacular. But it is high art. Sublime. Better yet, duende. Flamenco is about everything: love, death, terror, loneliness, joy. Flamenco lives because it is a crossroads. It encompasses all of our passions and pains, our sense of the sacred and the profane.
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