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I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Saturday, June 1, 2019

Surprise

Lorca's main impact on Flamenco before the late 1970s is attributed to a work that

1) is not by Lorca, in the conventional sense, and

2) has nothing at all to do with flamenco.

I think that is what I love about scholarship. Finding something anomalous and then having to explain it. Of course, once you investigate it, it makes perfect sense. The popularity of the folk songs that Lorca collected, arranged, and recorded persists to this day. They are not flamenco music in their origins, and Lorca is not the composer or author of the verbal texts. But you can simply make them "aflamencadas" by singing them in that style. They are folkloric; they have that existential connection to Lorca; you don't have to write new tunes for them, or approach the dense symbolism of Lorca's own poetry. This is Apocryphal Lorca all over again and I'm loving it.

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