Whereas most musicians struggle to attract followers and proselytize with their songs, the RGC artists seem bent on turning people away, singing lyrics that are often obscure even to native Spanish speakers. Whereas people generally enjoy the experience of swaying to a rhythm and clapping to a beat, the Andalusian 12-beat phrase effectively discouraged such audience participation. Whereas people often appreciate the experience of being drawn into a song, feeling its development towards a conclusion, RGC songs were off-putting performances that end abruptly and left listeners to fend for themselves. Whereas listeners generally enjoy the experience of identifying with the emotions expressed by the singers, the exaggerated emotionality of RGC performances was often more of a turn-off than a turn-on. And the rough and raw sounds presented by many cantaores did little to reverse this situation. In short, flamenco music as illustrated by the RGC performances is, with just a few exceptions, musically inhospitable. (Washabaugh 24)
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
What if books on jazz were written by people who hated jazz. You might get something like this:
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8 comments:
This person writes like an undergraduate. Pulling B- or C.
Four whereases in a row. That must be some sort of a record.
Apart from the word-choice or sentence structure issues, the propositions are not serious. How is a 12-beat metrical unit inimical to clapping? (Alternately, what can account for the lack of clapping during performances of the 4-beat rhythmic structures of Anton Bruckner?)
You've talked about popular art criticism, e.g. New Yorker reviews. I do think it's possible for those to walk the tightrope of presenting subjective responses with the right rhetorical touch so their subjectivity is preserved and they have the chance to work rhetorically, to persuade you to look or listen. But it's a difficult trick. The rest of us need to take care to show our work.
The twelve beats are in fact marked by hand claps! But the accented notes in these 12-beat phrases are asymmetrical, so the rhythms are a bit difficult to follow.
Emphasis on "a bit". It wouldn't take much of a look around to find complex-seeming rhythmic skills that ordinary people acquire if they want to. (Other musical traditions -- or in the West, ballroom dance.)
I have decided this writer only likes country music and when he is dressed up, Mozart. He'd hate Bartok.
You don't have to like all the music you write about, but there is a sense that if you don't like it at least enough to see what people who do like it, like about it, then you will miss a lot of nuances. Imagine if you wrote about opera that way: "the screeching sopranos" and the "pompous tenors." the overelaborate costumes and the ridiculously melodramatic plots, etc... You would be laughed out of the room. Only flamenco gets this treatment.
I should confess that for all the flamenco I've listened to, I haven't learned to hear the 12 beats as a group of 12. Rather I hear a ternary rhythm (like 12/8, I suppose) with shifts of stress like hemiola.
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