Song of the Outcasts: An Introduction to Flamenco [Paperback]

Flamenco has taken the world by storm in recent years. From London to New York and Los Angeles to Tokyo, huge crowds come to experience the power of flamenco. Ironically, though, if the performance is authentic - and mnuch in the tourist trade is not - the uninitiated may find it utterly baffling. The music itself, and the use of the voice to sing it, are entirely unfamiliar. The rhythms are exotic and strange, the intensity of feeling startling.

It is the song of the outcasts, the poorest of the poor. Though it is not exclusively the music of the Gypsies, they are its catalysts and spiritual torch-bearers, and so their story helps us to understand the music. Author Robin Totton writes - and offers the music on the accompanying compact disk sampler - from his life among them, for he has come as close to flamenco as any outsider can hope to do. Clearly he has fallen under its spell, and readers will gladly follow as he walks us through the poetic song-forms, the rhythmic guitar, and the flamboyant dance, as well as the vocabulary, names and places of the living art of flamenco. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Most people think flamenco is dance (or guitar). Yet it is song first and foremost. The song is so strange, and the rhythms so complicated, that our western music does not help us to understand it. Much subjective gush has been written about it. And yet it can be explained. I try to do this, both for song and dance, working on the assumption that the reader may have no musical knowledge. Hence the need for a recording of the various song-forms. I also try to help you find the real thing as against what is put on for the tourist trade, and to tell something of the story of the Gypsies of Andalusia. Above all, I have tried to make the book personal and readable - to make you want to turn over the page. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Robin Totton lives in England and Spain, where he has been exploring flamenco for nearly a decade. He has published a guide to Andalusia and is a correspondent for the flamenco magazine El Olivo. A scholar and teacher of broad interests, he holds degrees from Oxford, has studied at the Sorbonne and Salamanca, and has taught in Britain and France. Totton has played variously guitar and viola, as well as singing in Michael Tippett's Morley College Choir, Oxford University Operatic Society and the Choeur Philharmonique de Paris. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

It is folk music in the sense that it is of the people, not an art learned as classical music is learned. But the term can be misleading, because it has associations for us that do not apply. For us, folk music is either "pure" and enjoyed by a minority, who tend to preserve its purity and by the same token fossilize it. Or it is popularized, like country music in the United Sates, and taken over by Nashville, or else taken up by such artists as Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and politicized to create a highly professional protest music in the folk form.

But "folk" meaning "of the people," yes. In the flamenco venues you will come across a sprinkling of lawyers, bankers and businessmen; but most of the ones that I know are itinerant peanut or prawn vendors, laborers, market workers, factory hands and such. The word "folk" may also mislead, by conjuring up the image of jolly peasants, albeit dressed in garishly exotic dresses. The people who both perform and live flamenco are as riddled as you or I by fax and plastic and computers, supermarkets, school tuition, and carbon monoxide.

Immediately, I feel the need to justify the phrase "people who live flamenco." A hundred yards up the street from my apartment is a disco hat dispenses rock on Friday and Saturday nights. Within a minute or two of its closing, at about two-thirty in the morning, a crowd of young people pours out into the street, factory workers, secretaries, and students, all chattering and laughing. I imagine this scene is familiar wherever there are discos. What happens next is different. Someone starts to clap a rhythm; others join in; then one of them starts to sing. And what they sing is flamenco - specifically Bulerias because this is Jerez, where the buleria was invented. They have danced to rock music for the last three hours; now for the next three they'll sing flamenco. I do not want to suggest a romantic scene; it is a gray and rather grubby street, and when you are trying to sleep at four in the morning, the noise, punctuated by the sound of broken glass, is not romantic. I only want to show that flamenco is essentially not a matter of stage performance, nor does it belong to some fictitious, Carmen-ridden past. It is an everyday part of the lives of a lot of the inhabitants of Andalusia. And it is more flourishing now in the beginning of the twenty-first century than it was ten or twenty years ago. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.