The Absent Center

Flamenco music is the absent center in music inspired by Lorca. It is a strangely elusive target (to switch my metaphors around a bit.) Not even flamenco musicians want to set him to music as flamenco, but instead want to do something else with him. 

Really, the vernacular tradition of Spanish folksong is far more important than flamenco per se. That is just one part of it. 

Maybe part of the difficulty of writing about music is that the object of attention is so difficult to write about that most critics don't even conceptualize the nature of the problem itself. For me, one place to start is in Edwin Denby's dance criticism. Denby cuts through a lot of the bullshit just by writing about what he is actually seeing on the stage. That seems a good place to start, with a thick description of what is observable.