Male-female relationships contained considerable amounts of codependency, sado-masochism, self-destruction, and (in compensation) large amounts of transgressive ecstasy. With his selective compassion, unabashed elitism, neoromantic primitivism, spurious notions of purity and contamination, classificatory compulsion, lack of sociological acumen, nostalgia, and racialist aesthetics, he paved the way for numerous 20th-century flamencologists.Īs Mitchell observes, the performance styleĬan strike even the most open-minded as brazen, overwrought, tortured, or histrionic. He is critical of scholars like Demófilo in the 1880s: Forms of creativity that originated with the “wrong” people can always be redeemed (and thereby transformed) by talking or writing about them in ways associated with established genres. A given expressive behavior becomes art because the right people rally to redefine it as such in accordance with their needs at a given historical moment and usually in conscious opposition to some other group’s standards. In practice only a small range of creative endeavors come to be designated as Art with a capital A. He reflects (evoking jazz, and reminding me of China-I plead guilty on all counts),Īll forms of human expressive culture may be intrinsically or potentially artistic. one that we might ask about our esteem for the ravings of mad women and men in WAM opera, for that matter.
Why does flamenco deep song appeal to people who never shared the traumas that precipitated its birth? But Mitchell confronts the crucial question: Cante jondo has long entranced outsiders, from Lorca and Falla’s 1922 festival to the films of Carlos Saura. Music can convey the most profound expressions of anguish, from the arias of the Bach Passions to the hymns of mourning of the Li family Daoists. Flamenco artistry as we know it today makes sublime psychodrama out of alcoholism, fatalism, masochism, and ethnic rivalry. To be worthy of deep song, male performers needed to get their hearts trampled by some dark-skinned dancer female singers needed to be abandoned or battered by their men. At the behest of playboy-philanthropists, the haunting cries and brash guitars of a stigmatized underclass were harnessed to explore every aspect of co-dependency. Flamenco creativity sought to recover Catholicism’s lost catharsis in saloons, bordellos, and prisons. While recognizing the power of cante jondo, Mitchell takes a refreshingly detached, even jaundiced view:Ī decoding of flamenco from a psychohistorical perspective will reveal self-pity, posturing machismo, hypersensitive adolescent egos, and a defensive flight into narcissistic ethnicity.Īgain, as a counterpoint to the wholesome family revamp subtly promoted in the Rito series, Mitchell shows that the moods and musical techniques of cante jondoĪre inseparable from alcohol abuse. Timothy Mitchell, Flamenco deep song(1994).Besides Washabaugh’s social analysis, I’m also much taken by
It may be nourished by the toques of the guitar, and may lead into dancing but at its heart is anguished solo singing and palmas. As we saw in my previous posts, the soul of flamenco is cante jondo (“deep singing”).