Since Guido de Arezzo invented pentagram, the occidental music has been developed on scores. Musicians met the perfect tool to understand relationship between notes, chords, armories, scales, a wonderful conceptualization of the music that include all the musical knowledge … really all?
During the XX century popular music supported on analogic or digital media become more important as business that all the classical music and there were very special people that play and discover new musical ways (Academy, of course, hate them) and really exceptional players. A paradigmatic case was Hendrix. I do not remember who, but a very good 70's guitarist say that “And them Hendrix appeared from nothing ...”. A genius, whose fingers and head looked being directly connected by optical fiber. How Hendrix conceptualized music will be a mystery forever. But he did anyway without any notion on paper.
But what has this in common with flamenco? The great mathematic Mandelbrot, father of fractal mathematics, was a subversive mathematician that claims that mathematic thinking was lost in the paper and had forgotten the use of other tools. Most of the modern mathematics are being developed with a complex writing and proper language, but ancient mathematics were developed by using figures, pure visual intuition based on lines an circles.
Flamenco has this special aspect. Flamenco as other Word music in usually learned from experience, from a parallel conceptualization to the classical scores, using the musical rhythm in a very special way.
Usually, basic music students learn music with 2/2, 4/4 or 3/4 rhythms. All is right, because then start with notes, scales, chords, etc. The harmony and the melody is the pit of the Western music. The beat, the rhythm is just a rigid skeleton. Its even similar in popular music as blues or country music.
In flamenco things change. The most important is what you can do with the skeleton and also that tricky concept that jazz call ‘swing’ understanding as these feeling and coherence during a jam session.
With respect to melody and harmony, flamenco usually use in Phrygian scale and usually is played with Andalusian cadence or major tones. But, despite Andalusian cadence is a basic characteristic, the key is into the rhythm.
The old Flamenco and the mature jazz love each other because they are part of the same philosophy. But despite jazz is focused on harmony flamenco is focused on rithm using less frequents rhythms types as the hemiola (a mixture of 3/4 and 2/4 rhytms) and the overexploitation of swing. Hemiola can be found in classical music and other musics.
Flamenco player thinks in small ‘pieces’ of rhythm and over this rhythm there is a pseudo-improvisation in a musical game between singer and guitar player. Singer and player are collectors of short pieces of music than match perfectly on these ‘pieces’ and surprise each other choosing more or less in an random way these pieces from their collections.
This short ‘pieces’ full of hemiolas (or not, it depends) and studied breath are call ‘compás flamenco’. Its study is the base of flamenco. Each style of compass has their own tones and subjacent melodies with infinite possibilities. The mixture of the ‘compás’ and these tones generate all the styles of flamenco that are called ‘palos. the 'compás' is usually learned on a clock model, because most of this styles of 'compás' include 12 beats.
Flamenco is not a different played music, is a music played from other point of view. And the concept of 'compás', that is not exactly rhythm, is the keystone
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