The quarter is over, my final presentation is finished and I will be heading to France in 5 days. Thanks to everyone for posting such incredible articles and for commenting on mine. I really learned a lot this quarter!
Here is a link to my presentation on duende and flamenco! It was really hard to edit all the information that I learned this quarter down to 30 slides and I hope it all makes sense.
If you are interested in learning more about flamenco and duende I listed all the books and movies I found particularly helpful at the end of the presentation under “Works Cited”.
Singers who I would recommend listening to are Estrella Morente, Nina de los Peines, and Cameron de la Isla.
My favorite guitar players are the ledgendary Paco de Lucia, Sabicas, and Tomalito.
Although I’m not very interested in flamenco dancing, I absolutely love Carmen Amaya and have included a video of her in my presentation. Antonio Gades was also an incredible dancer.
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask in the “comments” section on the bottom of the page and I will answer as best I can!
“But there are neither maps nor exercises to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned, that he smashes styles, that he leans on human pain with no consolation and makes Goya (master of the grays, silvers, and pinks of the best English painting) work with his fists and knees in horrible bitumens.”
-Federico Garcia Lorca (In Search of Duende 60)
For the past week I have focused my attention on how the Spanish Civil War impacted music and art both during and after the war. When speaking about duende, Lorca said that Spain is “a country of death, a country open to death.” Duende and war are tied together in many ways. The presence of death is a vital component of the duende and for people who have not seen true horror and felt the kind of pain that war creates, I think the state of duende may be harder, but not impossible, to access. While studying the Inquisition and the Spanish Civil War I have noticed a spike in creative works that contain duende made within these time frames.
Let’s look at the basic origins of flamenco (for more information see my blog post about the Inquisition), when the Inquisition began large groups of people from many cultures had to escape into the hills to avoid persecution. These people survived solely on what they could scavenge and rob from passing caravans and for many of these people being found meant they faced execution. Undergoing these immense hardships together meant that music was shared and mixed into the most primitive form of flamenco, the cante jondo (deep song). Federico Garcia Lorca explained the siguiriya (the oldest form of cante jondo) as a song that “begins with a terrible scream that divides the landscape into two ideal hemispheres. It is the scream of dead generations, a poignant elegy for lost centuries, the pathetic evocation of love under other moons and other winds.”
It seems that over the years, the more distant death and anguish became, the more duende seemed to fade from the music and art of Spain. In the early 1900’s the great composer Manuel de Falla, who is widely known for integrating Spanish folk music into his classical compositions sought to revive cante jondo and began a festival that aimed to bring together all the cantadores who sang with duende.This festival was part of a larger movement to combat the commercialized form of flamenco that was beginning to take hold of Spain, and to remind musicians what duende was and why it was so important.
A portrait of Manuel de Falla (1876-1946).
Unfortunately the movement to revive flamenco was largely unsuccessful but duende lives in all the “black sounds” and it wasn’t long until it surfaced again.
In the summer of 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out (for more information on this see my last post). The war is often referred to as a “testing ground” for World War 2 because of the multitude of medical advancements made but also because of the immense brutality. “The record of nationalist atrocities is sickening,” says Richard Rhodes in his book Hell and Good Company, “…extending to gang rape, castration, and mutilation in the name of restoring the glory of Christian Spain.”
Although there were many horrific atrocities carried out by the nationalist army during the war, the most famous is perhaps the aerial bombing of the small Basque town of Guernica in 1937. This bombing is known as the first raid carried out on a defenseless civilian population by a modern air force and inspired many artists, including Pablo Picasso who painted his famous anti-war painting Guernica.
Guernica by Pablo Picasso.
The Spanish Civil War inspired painters like Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, and composers like Pablo Casals, Manuel de Falla, and Joaquin Turina. When the war ended many of these people were either banned from ever returning to Spain or they simply chose not to.
Pablo Casals, so devastated by what had happened to his country stopped performing in protest. In Pablo Casals: A Biography the author says “His withdrawal into silence was the greatest action he could make.” When Casals finally began performing again, he refused to perform in any country that had oppressive governments or that supported Franco’s regime. At the end of every performance he would finish with the Catalan folk song The Song of the Birds that had given hope to the Catalan people during the war and throughout the duration of the dictatorship. He was a really incredible man and I would highly recommend reading his autobiography Joys and Sorrows.
A portrait of Pablo Casals (1876-1873).
In the August of 1936 Franco’s army took over the small town of Alfacar in southern Spain. Shortly afterwards they arrested Federico Garcia Lorca and executed him because he was gay and anti-nationalist. A prominent Spanish writer who was loved by many, this act of brutality prompted those who loved him to take a creative and political stand against Franco.
One of the most well known writers who wrote about Lorca’s death is Luis Cernuda. After the war Cernuda fled to London and never returned to Spain. War and death profoundly affected everything he wrote and the feeling of duende is persistent in most of his work.
These scattered profiles are in no way meant to be conclusive but I hope that they provide some sense of the effects that the Spanish Civil War had on Spanish artists, composers, and writers and the work it inspired them to create.
Still Life with Old Shoe by Joan Miro.
People who remained in Spain suffered greatly after the war but under Franco’s oppressive regime art and music was heavily censored which is one of the reasons why most of the works with duende were almost entirely created outside of Spain.
Some of the most well known composers, like Manuel de Falla, were “forgiven” by Franco for any sympathies they had for the republican party and offered large grants if they returned to Spain but as far as I’m aware none of them accepted and most never returned to Spain.
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!
I was jostled awake by a pocket of turbulence as the small plane began its descent into Sevilla. I been asleep about an hour- the first sleep I’d gotten in the thirty-something hours I’d been traveling. As I gazed out through half-closed eyelids at the pastoral farmlands below, I slowly registered the words coming over the planes speakers. “I… Had… The time of my life… And I owe it all to yooou!” Huh. Then the voice behind me: “Oh my gawd! Look at the voineyards! This is where they get all the de-liscious woine!” Had I gotten on the wrong flight in my sleep-deprived state? Were these the pastoral farmlands of upstate New York I was flying over? The quick patter of the spanish flight attendant reassured me that I was not a few thousand miles off course, and by the time I was fully awake, we were touching down outside of Sevilla.
I quickly escaped from the New Jersey patois, and my boyfriend and I made our way to baggage claim. My backpack swished through the flaps of the conveyor belt, and was retrieved. The bulk of the luggage came through, any my boyfriends pack had not appeared. Over the next slow twenty minutes, a few bags poked their way through, until finally the attendant approached. “No mas. That is all.” Well, shit.
Mural in the Madrid airport.
We waited in line at customer service while the woman in front of us had a heated argument with the Iberia Air employee. I could only make out a few words here and there, but she didn’t seem/in the least pleased with the outcome. It didn’t look good. Finally it was our turn, and within two minutes we were done, assured that the bag was simply on the next flight and would be hand-delivered to our apartment by the following morning. At first relieved that it had been found, I hoisted my own pack, and then turned sharply to my boyfriend. “Wait a minute. So you don’t have to lug your backpack all the way into town? You get to just casually walk along, and they’ll just deliver it to you?” He simply grinned, and we continued on into our adventure.
We arrived in Triana around 4pm after finding our way through busses, metros, and a tangle of unfamiliar streets. The apartment we rented this week is in a tall anonymous building, one of the many that tower over 5 brick covered pedestrian streets that overflow day and night with wine and tapas.
Sunset over the Guadalquivir river facing Triana.
While reading about flamenco over the past few weeks I have seen the phrase “Flamenco is a way of life” and it is something that has really stuck with me. I know that fluxus art is meant to break down the barrier between life and art but I haven’t really been able to envision what it would look like for an entire city to live and breathe art! I have seen this every day since I’ve been in Sevilla.
I have begun to navigate my days by sounds and smells. Lunch begins when the hum of voices, clattering plates, and the smell of meat comes through my window. Siesta begins when the city falls into silence. Tapas begin with faint laughter and distant sounds of clinking wine glasses but it’s really dinner that everyone is waiting for. Dinner begins around 11pm with booming laughter, greetings, singing, arguments, and robust smells of fried fish and meat. Each day follows a strict rhythmic pattern while simultaneously being fluid and free.
The view of a bodega outside our bedroom window during lunch.
People have been breaking into song randomly at bodegas over tapas, clapping along to music in department stores, and even the news reporter has been singing his announcements on TV. I’m not sure how normal these things are or if everyone has just been excited about the Feria de Abril starting on Monday at midnight. Probably a bit of both.
Next week I’ll be writing all about the Feria! Seven days of round the clock drinking, singing, dancing, and carnival rides. Not sure how I’m going to keep up but I’ll give it my best shot to ensure you all get all the facts. It’s a hard job but somebody’s got to do it.
There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen
– William Wordsworth, The Prelude. Book 12. 208-218 (1850 edition)
Most of us have there “spots in time” that give us a moment of reprieve when life gets stressful and overwhelming. I have many of these moments scattered throughout my brain that emerge at random throughout the day.
The commute into town on the Amazon river.
I am often transported to the fall before last when I was staying in the outskirts of a little town in the Peruvian Amazon. I was there during rainy season and the jungle was hot and the river ran high. During the days I would sit on the second floor of my tambo (hut) listening to the sounds of the wood expanding and contracting with humidity, monkeys howling in the trees, the frogs singing in the bookshelves, and the distant sound of the Amazon river rushing while I read. Some days I would call Luis and ask him to take me into town a few miles upriver. These rides in Luis’ boat are the moments I most often think of. The hum of the motor, lapping water, distant sounds of people, wooden shacks propped up above the water like flamencos, sunsets that danced like flames down the river, rain drops falling into reflections of shattered clouds…
Houses on stilts on the Amazon river.
Although Wordsworth’s poems had lots of obvious religious influence he spoke of himself as a “worshiper of Nature” and I found this really interesting because it reminded me of the tribes in the jungle who quite literally do worship nature, often through drinking a root called ayahuasca.
An ayahuasca vine in the jungle.
Ayahuasca is a vine that can be found in the Amazon that has psychedelic properties and has been used in tribal ceremonies for hundreds, if not thousands of years. This vine is not only considered a vital component in ceremony in the jungle, it is considered to be a feminine spirit that is essentially “the soul of the dead” that inhabits the jungle. Ayahuasca brew is used in ceremonies in combination with repetitive ritualistic song sung by a shaman that is meant to summon this spirit who will guide and help the participant. Though the tribes believe in many other spirits that inhabit the jungle, I most often heard locals attributing strange winds in the jungle and abnormal nocturnal animal activity on the spirit of ayahuasca. In our case these strange occurrences were only a thief who was broke into the compound when “security” was sleeping—but that’s another story.
The Amazon at sunset.
In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton connects the two broad concepts of indelible moments and “higher power” in a section about the sublime. In actuality, he was really writing about what makes up a sublime place but I think he perfectly described what makes experiences like taking a drug that’s meant to invoke “the soul of the dead” and accessing duende (who in mythology is an impishforest spirit who lures children into the forest and sometimes eats them) a euphoric, spiritual experience and not something that just scares the holy hell out of you.
“Sublime landscapes do not therefore introduce us to our inadequacy; rather, to touch on the crux of their appeal, they allow us to conceive of a familiar inadequacy in a new and more helpful way. Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically introduces viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.” (164)
When I think of my most reoccurring “spots of time” like navigating the Amazon river in a tiny wooden boat, I find that they are all moments in which I felt a strange serenity in realizing how small and inadequate I really am; typically when surrounded by some great natural wonder. Although I suppose it’s fairly obvious, thinking about duende in the same way helps make a bit more logical sense of a concept so strictly rooted in emotion.
“Journeys are the midwives of thought.” states Alain de Botton somewhat grandiosely in his book The Art of Travel. It’s not that I don’t agree with this statement, it just seems like a really dramatic and overly complex way to say that new experiences make us think differently and about different things. The Art of Travel left me feeling really on the fence. I mean, I watched de Botton’s interview with the BBC and have seen the things he’s created at his school, The School of Life, and I was really excited to read this book but after reading it I just felt – exasperated. De Botton presented many simple and interesting ideas but presented them in such a revelatory fashion that the simple ideas somehow felt invalid and foolish.
Charles Baudelaire.
Charles Baudelaire
De Botton’s knowledge and writing skills were most prominent in the sections written about other people. Although I found it a strange choice, my favorite was his section on Charles Baudelaire who has long been one of my favorite poets. I think it’s safe to say that the French poet’s works are full of duende – longing, depression, despair, and of course death. As mentioned in The Art of Travel, Le Voyage was written by Baudelaire after his return from a particularly traumatic and ultimately unsuccessful voyage to India.
Baudelaire came to see travelers as poets set on journeys to discover new horizons that would somehow make sense of and dissolve the despair they had felt at home – but as he found out sadness is tied to a person like a dark shadow that can not be easily escaped. De Button wrote about Le Voyage as if it is a piece that simply shows Baudelaire’s ambiguous feelings towards travel it is much more than that, it reflects his ambiguous feelings towards life. It contains all the horrors and wonders that exist in this world.
Astonishing voyagers! What splendid stories
We read in your eyes as deep as the seas!
Show us the chest of your rich memories,
Those marvelous jewels, made of ether and stars.
We wish to voyage without steam and without sails!
To brighten the ennui of our prisons,
Make your memories, framed in their horizons,
Pass across our minds stretched like canvasses.
Tell us what you have seen.
Escapism
Something I found particularly interesting in The Art of Travel is all the immensely dark reference material de Botton used. I was surprised to see the likes of Marquis de Sade, Gustave Flaubert, and Baudelaire mentioned in a travel book and it seemed really odd to me. Of course I love all these authors but they all tend to write about devastation and escape which was really strange to read in between sections of de Botton’s “breezy” travel stories, though once I became aware of this I began to notice excess pessimism littered throughout the book. The childish fight over a desert, his challenge to get out of bed in the morning, the excessive use of the word “despair” in passages about mundane details…Even the artists that he chose focused more on depression and loneliness like Edward Hopper and his BBC interview he said things like he hopes his children do not become avid readers because people who love books are depressed. The Art of Travel began to seem more like a story of a man who desires escape more than a philosophical travel book.
A portrait of Marquis de Sade shrouded by demons by H. Bieberstein (Paris, 1912).
Conclusion
The Art of Travel definitely had some great information in it but was shrouded in superfluous description that really lost me. I think that though the ideas presented were good, they were not worthy of the revelatory tone the book was written in which may have been warranted if it was written in the 19th century. I loved certain sections like the ones about Charles Baudelaire, Edward Hopper and Alexander von Humboldt and am looking forward to reading more profiles later on in the book.
This week I read the first lecture in the book In Search of Duende by Federico Garcia Lorca. This lecture was about cante jondo, it’s roots and its essential components. I have always loved Lorca but I was completely floored by his writing in this paper. Just wow. His is so eloquent. He did not just write about duende, he wrote every word with duende. It’s almost as if he eats and breathes duende and is incapable of producing anything that isn’t miraculous. This summary of what I learned from his lecture is littered with quotes but I felt it absolutely nessicary. One of my favorite quotes from this paper is “The wind is a character who emerges in the ultimate, most intensely emotional moments. He comes into sight like a giant absorbed in pulling down stars and scattering nebulae.” I’ve read the entire paper about ten times now and I continue to get lost in his words.
A portrait of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936).
Anyways, besides drooling over Lorca’s writing, I’ve learned quite a lot about cante jondo that I didn’t previously know historically and emotionally. I feel a lot more in tune with my research topic (duende) and more prepared to begin my field study.
Cante Jondo
Federico Garcia Lorca begins his lecture on cante jondo (deep song) by saying,
“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.”
This statement, and really, this entire lecture is a call for future generations to not let all the passion and true beauty of cante jondo die away, it is a pleading for Andalusians to reject the mutated, flashy, and fake deep song that has polluted the region.
In case you aren’t already familiar with cante jondo, it is the most important component of flamenco. The other two components are guitar and dance. Although cante jondo is an essential part of flamenco, it is not usually heard in flamenco today. Kind of confusing right?
Ok, let me try to clear this up.
Cante jondo is the name “given to a group of Andalusian songs whose genuine, perfect prototype is the Gypsy siguiriya.” This type of song laid way for other songs still sung by the gypsies such as polos, carceleras, martinetes, and solares. These songs inspired the song forms that falsified flamenco is made of such as malaguenas, rodenas, and granadinas (to name a few) which different in rhythm and basic structure.
Andalusian gypsies dancing in the Sacromonte Caves in Granada, Spain.
Another important difference between modern flamenco and cante jondo is that cante jondo has roots that extend back to the days before the gypsies migrated from India, whereas flamenco did not even solidify into a song form until the eighteenth century. As Lorca said “Cante jondo is imbued with the mysterious colors of primordial ages; flamenco is a relatively modern song whose emotional interest pales before that of deep song.”
Below I have posted a video with Indian singers and another video with a well known Andalusian gypsy singer. The similarities between these two song forms is pretty astounding.
A few essential similarities between the gypsy siguiyira and classical Indian folk music is the use of “enharmonism” to modulate the melody. My technical music knowledge doesn’t extend much past this point but enharmonism has something to do with a “melodic ambient that rarely goes beyond the sixth; and the reiterated, almost obsessive prolongation of a single note, a procedure proper to certain techniques of hypnosis and certain forms of historic recitation”. Apparently this has lead many to believe that song existed before language.
Poems
Another vital part of cante jondo songs is their deep and mysterious lyrics which delve into the very soul of sorrow and pain. Lorca notes that one of the most remarkable part of Andalusian poems is their lack of emotional balance or “lyrical equilibrium”. Emotiveness is the songs most prominent trait. In Search of Duende is so beautifully written, there is no possible way I can put cante jondo into words like Federico Garcia Lorca.
“Cante jondo always sings in the night. It knows neither morning, nor evening, mountains nor plains. It has only the night, a wide night steeped in stars. Nothing else matters.
It is a song without landscape, withdrawn into itself and terrible in the dark. Cante jondo shoots its arrows of gold right into our heart. In the dark it is a terrifying blue archer whose quiver is never empty.”
This is the true nature of cante jondo, and it is also the true nature of duende.
I think it’s very important to note how heavily Arabic culture influenced cante jondo, not only musically but lyrically. Many of the prominent themes in Andalusian poetry are found in Arabic poetry as well, such as weeping, the wind, the Woman (pain), and the obsession with hair and wine.
