The Flamenco Effect

In mainstream musicological scholarship outside Eastern Europe, Boris Asaf’ev (1884-1949) occupies a distinctly marginalised position. Frequently categorised merely as an institutional functionary of Soviet musicology or as the composer of state-sanctioned ballets such as The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, his theoretical output has rarely been acknowledged. This omission is further compounded by a simple historical reality: Asaf’ev himself never wrote a single line about flamenco. His primary empirical focus remained anchored in Russian opera, classical symphonism, folksong, and nineteenth-century Western European repertoire.

Yet, as argued in my monograph The Flamenco Effect: Authenticity, Community and Tradition in the South of Spain(2020), when set alongside the historical evolution of Andalusian song, Asaf’ev’s theoretical framework offers an extraordinarily potent method for confronting the archival silences that obscure flamenco’s nineteenth-century formation. Rather than treating flamenco as an immutable, mystical artefact of romantic folklore, applying Asaf’ev’s theoretical project outlined in Muzykal’naya forma kak protsess (two volumes, 1930/1947) allows us to map precisely how regional folk genres, such as the fandango or the seguidilla, were re-cast and codified as they migrated into professionalised spaces.

At the heart of Asaf’ev’s musicology lies the concept of intonatsiya (literally “intonation”, but also more). For Asaf’ev, intonatsiya is not a passive acoustic property or an immutable arrangement of intervals. It represents the smallest meaningful unit of musical thought: an acoustic gesture charged with collective human memory, social tension, and historical experience (not unlike Philip Tagg’s “museme” – see bibliography below). Music retains its capacity to communicate only because a given culture maintains an “intonational dictionary”, an active repository of recognised vocal inflections, rhythmic figures, and gestural codes that listeners immediately comprehend.

When applied to the mechanics of flamenco cante, intonatsiya clarifies how flamenco positions and manages its agency in the face of extraordinary hostility. The microtonal inflections of the pujío, the percussive weight of the rasgueado, and the strict structural parameters of the compás are not decorative flourishes appended to a melody. They carry the accumulated social history of marginalisation, labour, and domestic performance, operating as precise intonational vectors that dictate how tension is stored and released across the performance.

This becomes particularly evident when examining the structural mechanics of cante through Asaf’ev’s triad of formal motion: Initium, Movere, and Terminus. Asaf’ev argued that musical form is an ongoing temporal process driven by the interplay between initial impulse (initium), continuous motion or elaboration (movere), and cadence or closure (terminus). In the architecture of a palo, the singer does not merely navigate a pre-existing pitch template. Through the deliberate application of vocal weight, breath control, and tonal pressure during the temple, the performer establishes the initium, setting the intonational stakes of the stanza. The subsequent tercio acts as the movere, an arena of sustained physical and sonic labour where the singer exerts vocal friction against the harmonic grid of the guitar. The ultimate arrival at the remate provides the terminus, resolving the accumulated acoustic tension.

In my monograph The Flamenco Effect, this process of enlargement (agrandamiento) is shown to be a manifestation of vernacular agency. By examining how the communal four-line fandango abandolao of Alosno is stretched into a metrically free six-line fandango personal, or how the Castilian seguidilla is expanded into the verso dolorido of the siguiriya, we see how performers exert tonal pressure and vocal weight to re-cast inherited folk materials. Crucially, this demonstrates how flamenco performers act as active musicological agents. Through their manipulation of intonatsiya, singers like Antonio Chacón and Pastora Pavón (La Niña de los Peines) actively re-worked “stock” (in Russian intonatsionnyy zapas) Andalusian folk material, exercising a sophisticated form of vernacular reworking in real time to navigate both commercial markets and elite demands.

Furthermore, Asaf’ev’s insistence that musical forms evolve through social conflict provides a vital counterweight to idealist accounts of flamenco history. As domestic, communal musical practices moved out of private juergas and into the commercial environment of the mid-nineteenth-century cafés cantantes, their intonational vocabulary underwent a radical transformation. Localised gestures of Andalusian folk song were subjected to intense tonal and physical pressure, professionalised to meet the stylistic demands of a paying public. In Asaf’evian terms, this transition represents a fundamental shift in the social dictionary of intonations: a process in which folk idioms are reorganised into complex, virtuosic structures while retaining the emotional resonance of their origins.

This culminates in what The Flamenco Effect terms “the Great Phrygian Defiance”. By centring its harmonic architecture on an intensified Phrygian mode and the structural tension of the flattened second, flamenco asserts an autonomous musical logic that remained fundamentally illegible to genteel amateur outsiders and bourgeois “rescue” projects. Ultimately, reading flamenco through Asaf’ev helps us think about the relationships ship between material processes (enforced migration for example) and processes of aestheticisation (the intensification of Phrygian logic, the move away from communal forms of expression to more individualised forms, and so on). Flamenco emerges not as a frozen artefact or a passive effect of theory, but as an ongoing process of acoustic negotiation: a living culture of structural resistance where sound, social memory, and human labour continuously converge.

Bibliography

Asaf’ev, Boris, Muzykal’naya forma kak protsess, 2 vols (Moscow and Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1930-1947).

Elphick, Daniel, “Boris Asafiev and Soviet Musical Thought: Reputation and Influence,” Muzikologija-Musicology 30 (2021), 35-56.

Frolova-Walker, Marina, “Boris Asafiev in 1948,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 145, no. 1 (2020), 149-183.

McQuere, Gordon D., ed., Russian Theoretical Thought in Music (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983).

Orlova, Elena, B. V. Asaf’ev: Put’ issledovatelya i muzykal’nogo kritika (Leningrad: Muzyka, 1964).

Rybak, Nikolai, Teoriya intonatsii B. V. Asaf’eva (Moscow: Muzika, 1980).

Tagg, Philip, “Analysing popular music: theory, method and practice,” Popular Music, 2 (1982), 37-67.

Timberlake, Anicia, “Boris Asafyev’s Intonatsiya and German Folk Song in the German Democratic Republic,” Music and Politics 14, no. 2 (2020), 1-24.

Viljanen, Elina, The Formation of Soviet Cultural Theory of Music (1917-1948) (Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2017).