#cante jondo
-
Demófilo and the Folkloric Turn: The 1881 Colección as a Foundational Text
When Antonio Machado y Álvarez published his Colección de cantes flamencos in Seville in 1881 under the pseudonym “Demófilo”, he did not merely assemble an anthology of Andalusian lyric verse; he staged an intervention. Appearing precisely at the moment when the café cantante was consolidating the commercial professionalisation of flamenco, the Colección sought to rescue…
-
Why Analysing Flamenco is Difficult
Within the discipline of musicology, the formal analysis of flamenco presents a unique set of challenges that test the limits of conventional music-theoretical frameworks. Whilst Western art music relies heavily on a written score to anchor and stabilise pitch and temporal parameters prior to execution, flamenco operates from within an oral paradigm of transmission. When…
-
Disciplining the cante: From café cantante to Tablao
The performance spaces of flamenco have always been deeply intertwined with the material realities of Spanish politics and capital. The transition from the late nineteenth-century café cantante to the mid-twentieth-century tablao represents a deliberate restructuring of cultural production. By examining the political economy of the tablao, we uncover the mechanisms through which the regime of General Francisco Franco instrumentalised an…
-
The First Reviewers: Journalism and the Invention of Flamenco Criticism
When we look back at the Golden Age of flamenco (c. 1870–1930), analytical focus tends to rest entirely upon the performance spaces of the cafés cantantes or the private intimacy of the cuartos. Parallel to this musical practice, however, a significant textual industry was emerging within the daily press. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, journalists,…
-
The Modernist Invention of Tradition: Re-evaluating the 1922 Concurso de Cante Jondo
A persistent characteristic of the historiography of flamenco’s Golden Age (c. 1870–1930) is the tendency to impose a narrative of decline and rescue. The most prominent casualty of this approach is the Concurso de Cante Jondo, held in Granada during the festival of Corpus Christi on 13 and 14 June 1922. Standard historical accounts frame…
-
Labour, industry, and the professionalisation of the cantaora
The transition of flamenco from domestic and communal spaces (of, for example, the juerga or the latifundio) to the commercial stage represents a significant shift in the socio-economic status of the cantaora and the cantaor. This process, in the last decades of the 19th century, was not merely a change in venue but a fundamental restructuring of…
-
The saeta and the star-system: professionalising the sacred voice
As we move into Semana Santa (Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday) the obvious topic to discuss this week is the palo of the saeta. The saeta, an a cappella (a palo seco) lament sung during Holy Week in Spain, is often framed as the ultimate expression of spontaneous, raw religious devotion. Yet, the…