Liberating the truest music
Flamenco, Spain and the gypsy soul
Miranda Gold reviews Escritos Flamencos by Federico García Lorca, edited by Carlos García Simón. Originally published in the TLS, April 2024.
“Flamenco is the towering creation of our people”, Federico García Lorca wrote to the music critic and composer Adolfo Salazar in 1921. It was a pivotal moment for Lorca – he was entering into a passionate engagement with the music, which would be integral to the evolution of both his artistic process and his sense of identity.
The poet’s relationship with flamenco would deepen in his later years, as he became actively involved in the revival of cante jondo (“deep song”), the purest form of flamenco. Cante jondo would in turn pervade his writing and shape his understanding of the national psyche. The concepts of blood and nation are never far from one another in his lectures, collected here for the first time along with poems, fragments from interviews and some personal correspondence. The conflation of race and land suggests a vision that sits awkwardly with Lorca’s claim to be “a man of the world, a brother to all men … of course I don’t believe in political fronts”. Cante jondo is nourished by an alchemy of sources, though, and so too was Lorca’s complex, shifting ideology.
The cante jondo poems (1921) that open Escritos Flamencos show how Lorca translated his experience of this genre into a music of his own. Not only was he learning the guitar from gypsies at the time, he was also accompanying their performances. The unnerving gothic images of death and transformation in close proximity to vulnerability – a woman moves between “black butterflies”, a “fog snake” at her side – show how he was assimilating the idea of duende (a fleeting rapture that can accompany flamenco) more than a decade before his understanding of this ineffable concept began to crystallize. Lorca doesn’t distinguish between flamenco and cante jondo at this stage, and it is curious that several of these poems praise the cantaores, or singers, who were seen by their critics as quickening the decline of cante jondo, distorting it into the superficial (and, Lorca would later insist, “vulgar”) flamenco. These cantaores displaced many of the gypsy singers, popularizing a music that smoothed over the jarring rhythms and raw emotion of cante jondo to provide a more palatable music for the masses.
The lectures themselves have an intoxicated, even frenzied quality. The first, given in 1922 for the Concurso de Cando Jondo, isn’t afraid to reach for the apocalyptic: the future heart…