Seguiriya

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The Seguiriya or Siguiriya is one of the oldest forms ( Palos ) of Flamenco. Along with the Soleá , it is one of its two most important historical pillars.

history

In the music of the Andalusian gitanos , songs called Seguiriya appeared in the early 19th century - the Gitanos pronunciation for Seguidilla . With the transition into the musical tradition of the Gitano families, however, their character had changed: the happy folk song had become a slow song, characterized by tragedy and pain.

The origin may lies in the songs of mourners , plañideras because the Seguiriya was also under the name Seguidilla playera known - possibly a corruption of Seguidilla plañidera . An opera from 1820, La máscara afortunada , contains a piece called Las Playeras , the meter of which corresponds to that of the Seguiriya.

In the era of the cafés cantantes , which began to spread from Seville to Spanish cities from around 1850 , the songs, which were initially sung in private, found their way into the public. Songwriters like Paco La Luz and singers like Silverio Franconetti led them to an art form and made a name for themselves with it. At the beginning of the 20th century, flamenco spread further into the fine bars of Madrid and into high society. This was accompanied by the development away from the rough cante jondo , from the traditional Seguiriyas and Soleares , towards softer, more pleasing pieces. Intellectuals like the poet Federico Garcia Lorca and the composer Manuel de Falla saw “one of the most valuable artistic forms of expression in Europe” at risk. Together, in 1922, they launched the Cante jondo competition in Granada . The singer Diego Bermúdez Cala , known as El Tenazas , who was born around 1850, impressed the judges and the audience with a Seguiriya . However, he botched his performance on the second day of the competition while drunk. In view of his overall performance, the jury nevertheless awarded him the prize, alongside Manuel Ortega, who was just 12 years old and who made his career under the name Manolo Caracol from that moment on .

The first to venture into a dance interpretation of Seguiriya was Vicente Escudero (1888–1980) in the 1930s - an experimental dancer with great expressiveness who knew how to combine the aesthetic categories of modernity with the formal language of old times.

The competition of 1922, the initiative of de Falla and Garcia Lorca, had attracted attention, but had no lasting effect in the general performance practice of flamenco in its time. The public still preferred the more pleasant forms. It was not until the 1950s that Spanish artists and audiences returned to the brittle, classic forms. An impetus from France contributed to this: on behalf of the electrical company Ducretet Thomson , the guitarist Pedro del Valle Pichardo , known as Perico el del Lunar , published an anthology of flamenco singing, which was supposed to take the old forms into account. It was published in France in 1954 and in Spain in 1955 by the company Hispavox , which was founded specifically for this purpose . With the Concurso Nacional de Córdoba competition , which has been held regularly since then, the Seguiriya found its way back onto the public stage alongside the other old forms of flamenco.

Dramaturgy and form

The Seguiriya is originally a duet between singing and guitar. Some authors take the view that in the beginning it was even a pure vocal piece without instrumental accompaniment.

The guitar marks the beginning with a steady beat. Brief attacks and hits on the bass strings initiate the singer's performance. They also usually close off each stanza and introduce the following ones. The classical beginning of the chant is the sound sequence tiritiritiri ; like a cornet in a musical theater, it is supposed to attract the audience's attention.

Then the singing voice interprets a poetic text without much melodic embellishment, but with high emotional intensity. She leaves the field to the guitar again, which varies its original theme. The singing comes back into the scene again, with a powerful melismatic interpretation.

The guitar can use the finale for extensive modulation. At the very end she insistently marks the rhythm of the Seguiriya.

The Seguiriya dance is simple, solemn, and serious. The dancer accompanies the singing with sweeping, slow step passages ( paseados ) and sweeping arm and finger movements. These movements are straight, geometric, upright, strongly oriented towards the vertical; of similar "beauty as Gothic architecture". The dancer supports caesuras with light drumming ( punteado ) and now and then with proud stamping ( desplante ). In the vocal breaks he or she shines with zapateados , which have to be dry, powerful, precise and sharp. Vicente Escudero described the character like this:

«Con la ‹seguiriya›, la guitarra y el cante no pueden utilizar acrobacías y fantasías. El baile tampoco admite frivolidades ni florituras. Si se baile la ‹seguiriya› hay que hacerlo con el corazón y sin respirar. O, mejor aún, ha de ser el propio corozón el que no permita que se respire. Sólo de esta forma sería yo, por ejemplo, capaz de bailar en un templo sin profanarle. Hasta parece que el sonido rítmico y grave de las cuerdas obliga a recurrir a la liturgia. "

“In the 'Seguiriya', guitar and singing are not allowed to afford tricks and fantasies. Neither does dance allow frivolities and embellishments. When doing the Seguiriya, one has to do it with the heart without breathing. Or better yet, you have to be your own heart that doesn't allow yourself to breathe. This is the only way I can dance in a church, for example, without desecrating it. It even seems that the rhythmic and heavy sound of the strings obliges one to refer to the liturgy. "

- Vicente Escudero

There are also purely instrumental interpretations of the Seguiriya on the guitar.

Verses

The coplas of a Seguiriya, its stanzas, consist in ideal-typical form of four verses: an eleven-syllable third verse between three short, six-syllable verses. The following verse, handed down from the 19th century and sung by Manolo Caracol in 1958 for a recording on Hispavox, is a typical example:

Cuando yo me muera
te pido un encargo
que con tus trenzas de tu pelo negro
me amarres mis manos.

If I die,
do me a favor
with your pigtails from your black hair,
tie my hands

The oldest recorded Seguiriya, from the first half of the 19th century, was sung by El Planeta :

A la luna le pío,
la del alto cielo,
como le pío que me saque a mi pare
de onde esta metío.

I whisper to the moon,
there in the high sky,
I whisper that he should free my father
from where he is being held.

The long verse can be divided into a five- and a six-syllable half-verse, so that the stanza can also be read as a five-liner. However, the orally transmitted coplas are never entirely uniform.

Another well-known copla is this:

Una noche oscurita
a eso de las dos
le daba voces a la mare de mi alma
no me respondío.

In the pitch black night
at two o'clock in the morning
I screamed for my beloved mother,
she didn't answer.

A variation is the Seguiriya corta or Seguiriya corrida . It consists of two six-syllable verses that surround an eleven-syllable verse.

music

singing

Singers can rearrange the interpretation of the text as they wish. The selection and the order of the coplas are also free. One does not sing una seguiriya , but por seguiriyas : in the Seguiriya style.

The singers also pause and break the copla into several sequences, tercios . They accentuate with heckling , lalias , and melismatically sung vowels. Such a fragmented text is difficult to understand for a listener who is not familiar with it.

Pastora Pavón, La Niña de los Peines , interpreted the copla ( Una noche oscurita ) shown above as follows:

Aa a -i
(short guitar solo)
Aa a - i -i- i , una noche oscurit a
(longer guitar solo)
a eso de-
- e las dos
a es o d e las dos, a eso de-
-e las dos
( Guitar solo)
Le d a ba voc e s
(guitar solo)
Le d a ba voc e s a la mare d e mi alma n o -
- o me re
-espondí o .
Voces le daba a la mare d e mi alma d e -
-e mi co-
oraz ó n.

Traditionally, the singing voice in the Seguiriya is rough, hoarse and powerful - appropriate to the tragic character of the Seguiriya. After Francisco Ortega, called El Fillo , this voice is called voz afillá . She became known through singers like Manolo Caracol , Terremoto and Pansequito .

harmony

The tonality of the Seguiriya is Phrygian , like that of some other Palos. The Andalusian cadence is characteristic . In contrast to the Soleá, for example, the root note is a and not e .

rhythm

The rhythm of the Seguiriya follows the 12 / 8 ¯ clock, which often occurs in other Palos. The Seguiriya has its own emphasis scheme:

[ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12]

Or, in a simpler way of counting:

[ 1 2 1 2 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2]

Clapping hands to support the rhythm plays a big role, especially with the dancer's interludes.

Styles

The seguiriyas are usually classified according to their origin. A work by the authors Luis Soler Guevara and Ramón Soler Diaz examined 736 Seguiriyas, which they divided into 60 variants according to musical criteria and the arrangement of the texts. A coarser classification distinguishes the Seguiriyas:

Web links

information

Examples - vocals and guitar

Examples with dance

Instrumental interpretation

References and comments

  1. ↑ Ángel Álvarez Caballero: El cante flamenco . Alianza Editorial, Madrid 2004, ISBN 978-84-206-4325-0 , p. 67 .
  2. ↑ Bernard Leblon: Flamenco . Palmyra, Heidelberg 2001, ISBN 3-930378-36-1 , p. 29 (With a foreword by Paco de Lucía ).
  3. ↑ a b c Miguel Ortiz: Seguiriya. In: FlamencoViejo.com. March 15, 2010, Retrieved October 4, 2015 (Spanish).
  4. ↑ Bernard Leblon: Flamenco . S. 34-35 .
  5. ↑ Kersten Knipp: Flamenco . Suhrkamp , Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 978-3-518-45824-2 , p. 83-84 .
  6. ↑ deep, intimate song
  7. ↑ Manuel de Falla, quote from Kersten Knipp: Flamenco . S. 129 .
  8. ↑ Kersten Knipp: Flamenco . S. 134-137 .
  9. ↑ Kersten Knipp: Flamenco . S. 189 .
  10. ↑ Kersten Knipp: Flamenco . S. 139-140 .
  11. ↑ Kersten Knipp: Flamenco . S. 209 .
  12. ↑ a b c d Seguiriyas. In: flamencopolis.com. Retrieved October 6, 2015 (Spanish, section La Estructura Formal del Estilo ).
  13. ↑ a b Palos del flamenco. La seguiriya. In: globalflamenco.com. June 23, 2014, Retrieved October 8, 2015 (Spanish).
  14. ↑ a b José Luis Navarro García: Historia del Baile Flamenco . Volume II.Signatura Ediciones de Andalucía, Sevilla 2010, ISBN 978-84-96210-71-4 , pp. 108 .
  15. ↑ The translation temple is also possible . Church seems more obvious here with regard to the next sentence and the cultural context.
  16. ↑ José Luis Navarro García: Historia del Baile Flamenco . Volume II, p. 106 .
  17. ↑ a b Bernard Leblon: Flamenco . S. 86-87 .
  18. ↑ Ángel Álvarez Caballero: El cante flamenco . Alianza Editorial, Madrid 2004, ISBN 978-84-206-4325-0 , p. 50 .
  19. ↑ freely translated; for further interpretations see Brook Zern: Everything You Didn't Want to Know About El Planeta, The First Great Singer in Flamenco History. In: Brook Zern's Flamenco Experience. Retrieved on November 26, 2015 (English, by Manuel Bohórquez - Translated with comments by Brook Zern). and Payo Juan: El planeta. The very first historical flamenco singer. In: http://flamencochords.blogspot.de/ . October 13, 2014, accessed November 26, 2015 .
  20. ↑ probably in prison
  21. ↑ a b c d Bernard Leblon: Flamenco . S. 55-56 .
  22. ↑ a b line modified for the sake of the meter compared to the translation in Leblon, Flamenco
  23. ↑ The melismatically sung vowels are set in bold italics.
  24. ↑ Bernard Leblon: Flamenco . S. 86-87 .
  25. ↑ cf. Alejandro Román: La Armonia del Flamenco en the Contexto de la Música Popular y del Jazz. In: Academia.edu. P. 3–4 , accessed September 12, 2015 (Spanish).
  26. ↑ Bernard Leblon: Flamenco . S. 61 .
  27. ^ J. Miguel Díaz-Báñez, Giovanna Farigu, Francisco Gómez, David Rappaport, Godfried T. Toussaint: El Compás Flamenco: A Phylogenetic Analysis . In: Proceedings of BRIDGES . Mathematical Connections in Art, Music and Science Verlag = Southwestern College. Winfield, Kansas Aug. 1, 2004, p. 61 ( mcgill.ca [PDF; accessed October 9, 2015]).
  28. ↑ Bernard Leblon: Flamenco . S. 57-58 .