Spanish Fandango

by Pedro L Gili

Title

Spanish Fandango

Artist

Pedro L Gili

Medium

Photograph - Photography

Description

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Winner in "Faces" FAA Contest, (1st place), March 2013
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Winner in "Flamenco" FAA Contest, (1st place), June 2013
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Beyond her heels, the click of details:
Head, hands, eye, skirt, fan, shawl, shoulders,
hips
Ripple from her center, touch on each other,
Never overlap.

Or she pauses, holding stillness in her body.
Then bends low,
In a long curve, shawl outstretched behind her,
A great bird's wing slowly turns.


Many of the details of the development of flamenco are lost in Spanish history.

There are several reasons for this lack of historical evidence:

1. Flamenco sprang from the lower levels of Andalucian society, and thus lacked the prestige of other art forms among the middle and higher classes. Flamenco music also slipped in and out of fashion several times during its existence.

2. The turbulent times of the people involved in flamenco culture. The Moors, the Gitanos and the Jews were all persecuted, and the Moors (moriscos) and Jews were expelled by the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. Many of the songs in flamenco still reflect the spirit of desperation, struggle, hope, and pride of the people during this time of persecution.

3. The Gitanos have been fundamental in maintaining this art form, but they have an oral culture. Their songs were passed on to new generations by repeated performances within their social community. The non-gypsy Andalucian poorer classes, in general, were also illiterate.

4. There was a lack of interest from historians and musicologists. "Flamencologists" have usually been flamenco connoisseurs of diverse professions (a high number of them, like Felix Grande, Caballero Bonald or Ricardo Molina, have been poets), with no specific academic training in the fields of history or musicology. They have tended to rely on a limited number of sources (mainly the writings of 19th century folklorist Demofilo, notes by foreign travellers like George Borrow, a few accounts by writers and the oral tradition), and they have often ignored other data. Nationalistic or ethnic bias has also been frequent in flamencology.

This started to change in the late 1970's and 1980s, when a growing number of musicologists and historians began to carry out more rigorous research.

There are questions not only about the origins of the music and dances of flamenco, but also about the origins of the very word flamenco. Whatever the origins of the word, in the early 19th century it began to be used to describe a way of life centered around this music and usually involving Gypsies. In his 1842 book Zincali, George Borrow writes that the word flamenco is synonymous with "Gypsy".

Blas Infante, in his book "Orígenes de lo flamenco y secreto del cante jondo", controversially argued that the word flamenco comes from Hispano-Arabic word fellahmengu, which would mean "expelled peasant". Yet there is a problem with this theory, in that the word is first attested three centuries after the end of the Moorish reign. Infante links the term to the ethnic Andalucians of Muslim faith, the Moriscos, who would have mixed with the Gypsy newcomers in order to avoid religious persecution. Other hypotheses concerning the term's etymology include connections with Flanders (flamenco also means Flemish in Spanish), believed by Spanish people to be the place of origin of the Gypsies.

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Note: The "Fine Art America" watermark does not appear in the final print.
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December 13th, 2012

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