Duende, the reason why I’m here has become nearly extinct in flamenco (in the city at least) and my research in the field has led to many experiences that have deepened my knowledge and made me realize that I have arrived in Sevilla about fifty years too late to experience the duende in flamenco.
The legendary Manuel Torre once told a singer, “You have a voice, you know the styles, but you will never triumph, because you have no duende.” I think that his statement applies to much of the flamenco music heard today as well. Flamenco was born out of the caves in Granada and the first songs (the siguiriyas) came from misery, sadness and longing – these songs contain all the “black sounds” of duende.
Manuel Torre (1878-1933) is one of the most famous Romani flamenco singers in history. He primarily sang siguiyriyas and solea (cante jondo or deep song).
Today through the appropriation of flamenco and commercialization of musicians the same emotional honesty required to access a state of duende is almost impossible to access. This may be because musicians are now attempting to copy recordings of former flamenco masters which has reduced the importance of individuality or it could be because most tourists only want to see the flashy, sensual kind of flamenco. Whatever the reason may be, duende has become a rare occurrence in flamenco music today.
This, however, doesn’t mean that duende has ceased to exist. Federico Garcia Lorca said that “Every art…is capable of duende,” and so instead of feeling disheartened by what I’ve learned about flamenco, I feel like I have a much clearer idea of what I’m searching for and am excited to explore a new vein of Spanish music.
Instead of focusing my last week of field study on bullfighting as planned, I’ve decided to focus my last week on studying how the Spanish Civil War impacted Spanish artists and composers throughout Europe and inspired them to create great pieces of work, pieces that invoke the spirit of duende.
Republican female and male militia fighters march at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in July of 1936.
The Spanish Civil War broke out in the hot summer of 1936. To simplify things (a lot) the last king of the Spanish monarchy was overthrown by the Republican forces who established a new constitution that instituted “freedom of speech and freedom of association, extended suffrage to women in 1933, and stripped the Spanish nobility of any special legal status.” In this constitution they also allowed regions to become autonomous which was one of the prominent issues of 20th century Spain. Both Catalonia and the Basque Country exercised this right. The Republic also imposed strict rules and regulations on the Catholic church (that had enjoyed immense power since before the Inquisition) which many religious leaders including the Pope said deprived Catholics of their civil liberties. This eventually led to the conservative uprising led by Fascist Francisco Franco.
The Fascist army was heavily backed by Mussolini and Hitler while the Republican forces fought only with the people who remained loyal to the Republic which was the majority of Spain. Though the Republicans repeatedly sought help from several countries, they were almost entirely ignored. I am reading a book called Hell and Good Company by Richard Rhodes that details the brutality of Franco’s army through the writing of incredible writers like Ernest Hemingway and I am constantly amazed that the Republicans were able to hold on to Spain for so long.
Francisco Franco (1936-1975) shakes hands with ally Adolf Hitler (1889-1945).
Unfortunately the Republicans lost the war in 1939 and Spain remained under Franco’s rule until his death in 1975.
This week I will finish reading Hell and Good Company and do more research into the composers and artists who were significantly impacted by the Spanish Civil War like Pablo Casals and Picasso, what they created in that time period, the ways that duende shows up in their work from this time period.
Last week I got sick. The awful kind of sick that left me in bed, delirious for 4 entire days when all I wanted to do was go out and adventure! On the bright side I did get a lot of reading done, watched a few documentaries, and discovered a new academic paper that has given me a whole new perspective of flamenco.
I think that the best place to start this entry is with the history of flamenco. Although there are many different theories of the beginning of this genre, the most probable history begins with the Spanish Inquisition in 1480.
The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition (Spanish Inquisition) was first established in Sevilla by Catholic monarchs Ferdinand the 2nd and Isabelle the 1st to rid the country of Muslims, Jews and Catholics who were suspected of secretly practicing other religions. In 1480, the first 6 people suspected of secretly practicing Judaism were burned alive in Sevilla. Although we know that thousands were killed during the Inquisition, the exact number is unknown. Estimates range from 2,000 to 10,000.
Before I move on to talking about the Inquisitions impact on flamenco, I want to talk about barrio Santa Cruz that is now a bustling tourist area in the center of the city. It is a beautiful neighborhood, marked by cobblestone streets and colorful buildings that stand so close, I imagine one could almost make out the text on your neighbor’s newspaper if you looked out the window. This neighborhood is known as the Jewish quarter of the city, which made it a central focus of the Inquisition.
One of the streets in Santa Cruz used to be named Calle Muerte or Death Street because many Jewish people were murdered on it by the Catholics. At the beginning of the Inquisition a group of Jewish men decided to plan an ambush of the Catholic army in an attempt to begin an uprising against the Inquisition, but one of the mens daughters, Susona, told her Catholic lover of their plan and the Jewish men were burned alive. After her fathers death, Susona was so tormented by what she had done that she hung herself with chains off of her balcony and ensured that her severed head was displayed after her death as a warning to others. Today the street is called Calle Susona and you can see plaques commemorating her suicide next to the window where her head was displayed.
The window where Susonas head was displayed in Santa Cruz.
Through this story, one can begin to see all the anguish and pain that the Spanish people endured and it is no wonder that many of the gypsies, Jews, Muslims, and eventually Christians fled to the hills to escape the Inquisition. They lived together in caves, living largely on food they could rob from passing caravans and sharing stories, art and music. “It is thought that from the common life of these persecuted peoples appeared the first semblances of flamenco we know it. Muslim, Jewish, Indian, and Christian religious and folk music blended, developing over the years into a musical form clearly sophisticated in many ways, yet developed at a primitive level by an outcast society.” (Pohren 40)
As with the story of flamenco, the origins of the word ‘flamenco’ is also debated but the the most likely story is that ‘flamenco’ is a mispronunciation of the Arabic words ‘felag’ and ‘mengu’ (felagmengu), which means fugitive peasant. (Pohren 41)
“The main form of flamenco at that time, the cante jondo, expressed the suffering of these outlawed people, who through the years were condemned to serve in the galleys, chain gangs, and in the Spanish army in America, were prohibited to talk their own language, and who, during one prolonged period, suffered the death penalty for just belonging to a wandering or outlawed band.” (Pohren 41)
These are some of the caves outside of Granada, Spain where people hid from the Inqusition.
On Saturday night I decided that I had been sick for long enough and it was high time for an adventure. I had been researching various flamenco clubs and was determined to find a club untarnished by greed and tourism. I found two small flamenco clubs in the old gypsy neighborhood of Triana but unfortunately both of them are permanently closed. Although this discovery was disappointing, it was not entirely unexpected.
Flamenco was a form of music that was only played by the outsiders of Spanish culture until around the mid 1800’s when cafes cantantes began to form. These cafes were basically taverns that had a set group of flamenco performers, supplemented by guest performances. These cafes enabled flamenco to largely lose the stigma that was attached to genre and the music thrived during this time. Although the cafes created a creative environment in which flamenco flourished, they also led to its swift decline and near extinction.
Cafes Cantantes were the first places that flamenco musicians were paid to perform, thus bringing the most talented musicians from all over the Andalusia to musical areas like Triana. In the early 1900’s, tourists became interested in flamenco but focused mainly on the flair and color, not the depth and meaning of the music. This led to the creation of operatic flamenco and flamenco theaters which quickly put the cafe cantantes out of business.
A picture of a painting from the Museo de Bellas Artes in Sevilla by Manuel Cabral Bejarano entitled “Baile en una caseta de feria” painted in the late 1800’s.
The butchery of flamenco and the destruction of duende in the music, took form in flashy, sexualized performances that were extremely lucrative and brought the formerly outcasted music form to the masses. The upside of this ugly transformation of flamenco was that people all over the world were exposed to flamenco and many came to Spain to search for the real thing, for duende, just like me.
With the renewed interest in flamenco, many flamenco cafes opened and are now called tablos. With the tablos we have been able to watch history slowly begin to repeat itself. Tablos, like most businesses want to make money so they tell their guitarists to play faster, their dancers to dance more sexually, and the singers to just wail something that sounds pretty. This commercialization of flamenco musicians is once again destroying the music, and the true flamenco and duende, exists only in the small villages and coastal caves that it began in.
“Each day another leaf falls from the admirable tree of Andalusian lyrics, old men carry off to the grave priceless treasures of past generations, and a gross, stupid avalanche of cheap music clouds the delicious folk atmosphere of all of Spain.”
Federico Garcia Lorca
On our walk through Triana, we found no trace of flamenco. The winding streets were dead until we reached the Guadalquivir river where hordes of tourists sat huddled over tapas and wine. We stopped briefly at a bar called the New Orleans Jazz, but there was no jazz so we decided to try to find one of the tourist tablos across the river. We walked through downtown and up the hill through winding streets until we hit cobblestone. It was 2am and we eventually found ourselves in a silent neighborhood where all the homes were shuttered for the night and just when we thought we were lost, we found across La Carboneria.
It’s almost impossible not to get lost in the narrow streets around La Carboneria!
Unfortunately we got there right as the singer was finishing and after he left, the only music the remaining musicians played was a fusion of classical music and flamenco. Now that we know where this tablo is, we will try going again earlier this Friday to see if they will play any true flamenco.
Before I wrap up this post I would also like to talk a little bit about famed flamenco guitarist, Paco de Lucia. He was an incredible guitar player, some say he was the best of all time. He not only helped legitimize flamenco as an art form in Spain, but through fusing jazz and Latin music with flamenco he became the figurehead of the ‘New Flamenco’ movement of the 1970’s. He also is credited with being the first person to use the cajon (Afro-Peruvian box drum) in flamenco music. If you would like to learn more about de Lucia’s life and musical influence I would highly recommend watching Paco de Lucia: A Journey.
I have seen Paco de Lucia’s influence in every single encounter I’ve had with live music in Spain. Just the other night I was eating at a small bodega next to my apartment in Los Remedios and got to watch an old man sing and strum soleas on his guitar while his son pounded out rhythms on the cajon.
Hopefully I will be able to find more music this week. Over the past few weeks I have read so much about flamenco, but I have yet to really feel like I’ve actually heard it. Even as I write this I sit at a sidewalk cafe watching a flamenco dancer stomp her way through a song, bludgeoning the song of the cantador and the guitar with every step. A crowd of tourists surround them, watching with wide eyes, thinking that this must be real flamenco, not realizing that this is the kind of thing that may very well lead to flamencos ruin.
I also visited the Museo de Bellas Artes this week which is in an old convent that was built in 1594 by King Ferdinand the 3rd of Castile.
Yesterday I took a walk through the beautiful streets of Santa Cruz to see the old house of Susona and came across a few plaques that show places that Georges Bizet used in the famous opera Carmen. This week I will watch Carmen and explore the parts of Sevilla that were featured in the book and the opera.
I have contacted a flamenco school and it’s looking like I’ll be able to start taking flamenco classes this week and I am really excited to see what I can learn from the people who are working to preserve flamenco and of course, find the elusive duende.
We stood at the entrance of the iconic Feria de Abril underneath a towering arch that was adorned with bright colored paint and thousands of flickering light bulbs. From here you could see the beginning of endless waves of the red, green, and white striped casetas that formed the temporary city. Oohh’s and aahh’s reverberated through the crowd as we watched blazes of starry fire chase their way through the midnight sky. The sound of a lone guitar crawled through the cool air, emerging between the loud bangs and anonymous voices. This marked the end of the Feria.
The gate that marks the entrance is different at every Feria and takes months to make!
For six days and nights we celebrated in this city’s labyrinthine streets. We drank too much manzanilla, ate too much fried fish, admired the beautiful traditional Spanish dresses, and attempted to learn how to dance sevillanas. It was as beautiful as it was exhausting. Throughout the week I was immersed in a world of color that highlighted so many of the things I have come to Spain to learn but as expected, the only thing I learned about duende is that it does not exist in the Feria. As Federico Garcia Lorca said in his lecture, duende is all “the black sounds”. Duende is a state of extacy that is invoked when the artist calls upon all the sadness and crushing despair of the world and expresses it in its purest form through music and art. The Feria is a time for people to celebrate and forget their sorrows so, needless to say, I did not find it there. Two weeks before the Feria de Abril, Sevilla hosts one of the most famous parades of Semana Santa (Holy Week) in Spain. During this week thousands of people gather in the streets to mourn and pay homage to Jesus Christ. From what I have heard, this week is where the duende is very present. Hooded and masked religious groups solemnly march through the streets, some are barefooted, chained and shackled. Women wear all black and impossibly big statues of the bloody Christ are carried through the streets. People mournfully play trumpets to the slow beat of the drums and occasionally someone will break out in a desperately sad saeta as the floats make their way down through the city. The Feria de Abril provides a sharp contrast to Semana Santa. It is a much needed release after a period of mourning and penance and though the city basks in the warm sun after a long period of darkness, reminders of the mournful procession still flicker endlessly through on every television in Sevilla.
Families drive through the Feria in the afternoon and show off their dresses, carriages and horses.
As for the most popular genre of music played at the Feria de Abril, it is surprisingly not flamenco, despite the colorful sea of flamenco dresses that dominate the landscape. It is actually sevillana. Sevillanas’ roots lay in old Castilian folk music that became heavily influenced by flamenco once it made it’s way into the Sevilla province of Spain in the 18th century. The music is very simple; it typically follows a 3/4 metre and has four or seven parts. Each of these parts are given three verses (coplas) and the last verse always ends with music. There are specific dances for specific types of Sevillana songs and people do not really improvise which is one of the many things that distinguish it from flamenco. Although the song structures are very simple, the lyrical content is very diverse. Sevillanas are usually about lighthearted things like farming, love, celebration, and wine.
Everyone in Sevilla knows how to dance sevillanas and for the duration of the Feria even those who weren’t on the dance floor clapped and stomped along to the unending rhythms. The illuminated casetas (tents) vibrated with music and walking down each street wanderers were bathed in a mix of sounds and rhythms. In addition to sevillana, I heard cumbia, flamenco, and at one point I even found myself in a crowd bellowing “Cielito Lindo” with a traditional Mexican mariachi band!
During Feria week I read the beginning of The Art of Flamenco by D.E Pohren, an American who came to Spain in the 1940’s after becoming fascinated by flamenco. After writing three important academic texts about flamenco he was awarded the title of “Flamencologist” and elected to the Catedra de Flamencologia of Jerez de la Frontera, “the only non-Spaniard ever to have been so honored”. In the introduction he talks about going to a small village in the outskirts of the Sevilla province to attend a big gypsy festival centered around a series of gypsy weddings. Pohren described the celebration as “four days of laughing, loving, love-making, the gypsies driving themselves to a wild frenzy, tearing at their clothes, but always good-humored and staying within certain gypsy limits and laws regardless of their delirious drunken state”. The more days I spent in the delirious gaiety of the Feria, the more Pohren’s descriptions seemed to fit. I became curious about the roots of the Feria de Abril in Sevilla and if there were similar ferias happening in small villages throughout Andalusia. Fortunately for me, my room mate Pilar, is actually from a small village right outside of Sevilla!
One of the dozens of streets that form the temporary Feria city.
Through talking with Pilar and doing a bit of research I discovered that the first Feria was put on in 1847, beginning as a livestock fair. The next year the first casetas were set up and eventually the Feria got so big that it had to be moved to it’s new permanent location in Los Remedios. Pilar told me that villages in Andalusia also have their own ferias that are very similar but have much more of an open, community atmosphere where all the casetas are open to the public and people share their wine and food much more freely. The music at the village Ferias is very similar to music heard in Sevilla but more emphasis is put on local songs. I am still unsure as to what role the gypsies play in all of these Ferias and I lean towards thinking that the gypsies have played and still play a vital role in these celebrations beyond the obvious musical contributions but anything I could write about that would just be speculation at this point.
The contributions of the gypsies in Spanish culture has been largely minimized in many texts if not entirely removed and I have found it pretty difficult to find reliable information. Even today, there are a few Spanish music professors who deny the gypsies essential contributions to flamenco! To me, this seems absolutely ridiculous. Anyone who has a basic knowledge of flamenco knows that it would not be what it is without the gypsies. The Feria de Abril was brilliant, dazzling, and intoxicating. It was also exhausting, and for now everyone walks around in a happy haze through a city that is in a collective hangover. Most restaurants close to the Feria are closed for the week and even many of the universities have given their students a week off to recover.
A couple rides into the Feria on a horse. Women sometimes wear their traditional riding outfits, but it is very common to see women riding side saddle in their traje gitanas.
This week I will continue my search for duende in Sevilla. D.E Pohren said that today the true flamencos can be found playing in the streets and at cafes so this is where I will begin. I will also try to find a flamenco school and hopefully begin taking classes!
