Research Catalog

Title

Flamenco deep song / Timothy Michell.

Author

Mitchell, Timothy (Timothy J.)

Publication

New Haven : Yale University Press, [1994], ©1994.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

vi, 232 pages; 22 cm

Summary

• The dramatic and erotic folk-musical style known as flamenco arose among the stigmatized outgroups of Andalusia - fugitive Jews, Moors, gitanos, blind beggars, harlots, and others - but was quickly embraced and canonized as a fine art by Spanish aristocrats. This lively, highly readable book by Timothy Mitchell is the first full-length investigation of flamenco as well as an absorbing introduction to the cultural psychology of Spain itself.
• With an arsenal of critical theories honed to a sharp polemical edge, the author targets racialist and politicized mystifications of flamenco and deflates the still-influential primitivism of de Falla and Lorca.
• He demonstrates that flamenco is a densely historical phenomenon, whose "moods and musical techniques alike are inseparable from alcohol abuse." The denizens of saloons, bordellos, and prisons poured out their woes in guttural deep song, and their haunting cries and brash guitars were quickly taken up by the playboy-philanthropists who frequented the dives.
• Performers of deep song explored every painful aspect of tragic love; male singers told of having their hearts trampled by some dark-skinned dancer, females of having been abandoned or battered by their men. Guitarists were often expected to double as pimps. Flamenco artistry as we know it today makes sublime psychodrama out of alcoholism, fatalism, masochism, and ethnic rivalry.
• Mitchell's scholarship sparkles with irony and anecdotes drawn from two centuries of untranslated works. Ultimately he confronts the crucial question: Why does flamenco deep song appeal to people who never shared the traumas that precipitated its birth?

Subject

Flamenco

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

1. Introduction -- 2. Style and Ideology -- 3. Deep Song Sociology: An Overview -- 4. Traumatic Ethnogenesis in Spain -- 5. Missing Links in the Evolution of Flamenco -- 6. The Flamenco Attitude -- 7. Wealth, Ideology, and the Magic Other -- 8. Romantique Espagne -- 9. Deep Song As Psychodrama -- 10. Flamenco's Golden Age -- 11. How Flamenco Became Art -- 12. A Capricious World -- 13. Culture in the Blood -- 14. Beyond Ethnicity: The Future of the Flamenco Idiom.

ISBN

0300060017 (alk. paper)

LCCN

94010659

OCLC

• 30318884
• ocm30318884
• SCSB-14489372

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries