Flamenco Music and National Identity in Spain

William Washabaugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138107755
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317134855
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Music
• Index: Social Sciences

Flamenco Music and National Identity in Spain explores the efforts of the current government in southern Spain to establish flamenco music as a significant patrimonial symbol and marker of cultural identity. Further, it aims to demonstrate that these Andalusian efforts form part of the ambitious project of rethinking the nation-state of Spain, and of reconsidering the nature of national identity. A salient theme in this book is that the development of notions of style and identity are mediated by social institutions. Specifically, the book documents the development of flamenco's musical style by tracing the genre's development, between 1880 and 1980, and demonstrating the manner in which the now conventional characterization of the flamenco style was mediated by krausist, modernist, and journalist institutions. Just as importantly, it identifies two recent institutional forces, that of audio recording and cinema, that promote a concept of musical style that sharply contrasts with the conventional notion. By emphasizing the importance of forward-looking notions of style and identity, Flamenco Music and National Identity in Spain makes a strong case for advancing the Spanish experiment in nation-building, but also for re-thinking nationalism and cultural identity on a global scale.

Chapter 1
Heritage Music

If flamenco music had ever been considered quaint and exotic, it is no longer. Now in the twenty-first century, it has gone global, with the result that flamenco is arguably a world-music as much as it is Spanish style. More importantly, it has gone patrimonial. It is now a heritage style, a governmentally approved and supported musical genre that is intended to enrich and solidify a national citizenry. Given these changes, scholars are quickly learning that flamenco is something much more than an odd treasure. Its global appeal and its national value demand a more thoughtful characterization of its nature as a musical style and a more sophisticated appreciation of its role in current political developments.

Back in the twentieth century, flamenco scholarship focused attention on a relatively small and restricted set of issues. Scholars and aficionados described the situations of Spanish singers, dancers, and guitarists, many of whom were Gitanos, some not. But almost always, the scholarly focus was narrow,1 and the issues addressed were assumed to be aesthetically autonomous, historically unique, and largely incomparable. As a result, flamenco scholarship had the feel of a greenhouse enterprise, where outside concerns were kept outside and where scholarly fertility was frequently inbred.

However, in the twenty-first century, such narrow scholarship is inadequate because of recent developments that have altered the whole flamenco scene. Flamenco is now an explicitly national music style, and this new status marks a change that changes everything. Nothing in flamenco is now quite the same as it was before the emergence of this ‘flamenco nation’. ‘Flamenco’ now refers to ‘heritage music’, and it turns popular attention to musical history in a way that it never has before.

Although the term ‘heritage’ may remind nationalists of cultural loyalties, it should also prompt critical reflection. The idea of ‘heritage’ can no longer be accepted out of hand as it might have been when Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote— with nationalist movements surging forward in the early decades of the twentieth century—saying, ‘style is ultimately national’.2 He proposed that ‘true style’ or ‘native taste’ is born in the collective past and repeated in the present as a reflex of that now ancient birth. Such a proposal now seems simplistic at best, if not dangerously chauvinistic. Be that as it may, Williams’s view of heritage music defined by past practices still reverberates in the literature about national musical styles, both within and beyond Spain, and it is these reverberations that have prompted this present work.3 In the face of popular fascination with an allegedly magical past, I aim to direct attention toward flamenco in the future, not as a magical art, but, more simply, as an opportunity for realizing Andalusian solidarity and autonomy.

To shift gears in this way, from a fascination with the musical past to a concentration on a hopeful future, is difficult and not just for flamencos. Artists and scholars everywhere have found it challenging to rethink such fundamental notions as musical style and patrimonial heritage. As performances in different traditions contend for recognition and seek UNESCO authorization of their patrimoniality, their adepts and interpreters are hard at work reconceiving the nature and constitution of the ‘true style’ that allegedly satisfies ‘native tastes’. As a result, a rich body of literature has emerged to wrestle with the idea of musical heritage-styles. Still in all, most of this literature continues to assume that a musical style is something that is aesthetically autonomous and is somehow rooted in the relatively unreflective past experiences of artists. As such, musical styles: (1) can facilitate resistance to opposing political forces;4 (2) can be responsive to the marketplace5 and to cosmopolitan interests;6 (3) can facilitate the creation of cultural identities;7 and (4) and can incorporate and reproduce entrenched social categories.8 However, only a few studies have actually confronted the notion of musical style in and for itself. Only a few have questioned the autonomy of style by documenting the impact of external forces on musical performances.9 And fewer still have suggested that a national musical style is not really definable or classifiable, and that a style cannot be either celebrated or marketed because it is not an object, not an ‘it’ of any kind.10 The paucity of such studies may well be the result of an ambient fear that nationalist enterprises would be subverted by questioning the concreteness and objectivity of the musical styles that serve as national symbols.

Michael Ignatieff ran up against such fears when he tried to make sense of the conflicts between Serbs and Croats in the 1990s.11 He unearthed deep-seated feelings and passionate commitments in both groups, but almost always with shaky foundations and uncertain grounding. The nationalists he spoke to all assumed that their traditions had sprung from the sacred past and that their traditional objects, right down to the cigarettes they smoked, were canonized by that same sacredness. So, for example, Serbs and Croats each embraced their cigarettes as patrimonial objects and as precious gifts from past generations. And they did so despite the fact that none could explain quite how the gifting came about. Although Ignatieff succeeded in documenting local convictions about these cherished cigarettes, he was unable to substantiate the alleged deep and hallowed roots that supported those convictions. The lesson learned is that tracking heritage-loyalties into the past is difficult at best, and likely to produce only wispy results.

What he did uncover were the developmental steps that made it possible for relatively insignificant objects like cigarettes to grow into important cultural symbols. It seems that, over the course of time, when one community finds it necessary to defend its value and dignity as it faces-off against others, it selects one or another object, ramps up its cultural significance, and puts it into play during cultural confrontations. Moreover, as time passes and as face-offs grow more intense, those objects grow more sacred and become, seemingly automatically, more clearly defined.

In other words, nationalist efforts to document heritage objects tend to assume that their deep histories render them natural and unique, a special gift for a special people. And accordingly, the people, who regard them as their special gifts, come to feel a sense of responsibility to preserve them and to honor their history. So, they teach about them, enshrine them, archive them, freeze them, trying desperately to keep them from changing; and, in the end, something like a cigarette becomes much more than just a cigarette. It becomes a patrimonial object and is transformed into a centering magnet that draws a community together. But, by the same token, it also becomes a massive wall that separates communities from each other. The cigarette may carry endearing patriotic value, but it simultaneously inclines people to become resentful for all the times that such value has been disrespected. In sum, patrimonialization is a process that facilitates modern nation-building by fueling both pride and resentment.

This patrimonial process requires extraordinary political balance. Nationalists who advance a politics of identity must, it seems, affirm the historical importance of their heritage-objects, but, as they do, they must walk a fine line between using these objects to dignify themselves and fueling excessive resentment towards outsiders. Such balancing efforts characterize current nation-building initiatives among the Bretons in France, the Szeklers in Romania, the Walloons in Belgium, the Québécois in Canada, the Abkhazians in the Caucasus and the Lazistanis in Turkey, to mention just a few. Every one of these sitatios involves a tug of war. Promoting homeland-dignity is typically the explicit goal, but it is often achieved at the steep price of increasing resentments towards outsiders. Just so, as recounted in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, internal solidarity for the island nation of San Lorenzo was purchased at the price of resentments directed toward outsiders. Indeed, the founding fathers of San Lorenzo were quite explicit about the need for such resentment, and so they—Corporal McCabe and Bokonon were in on this plan together—agreed to outlaw Bokonon, and legislated unusually harsh penalties for anyone caught practicing Bokononism (that is, death by ‘the hook’). Such harsh measures helped to reinforce the productive resentment that this tiny island nation needed to establish its independent footing in the world.

No one is quite sure how to balance constructed solidarity with constructed resentment. Vonnegut’s narrator, who witnessed the rise and fall of San Lorenzo, was, to understate the case, diffident about the possibilities for such a balance. Little wonder, then, that some political thinkers consider Janus-faced nationalism to be an unworkable assemblage of divergent forces, and, in consequence, they look towards some sort of post-national politics to supplant it. But despite such criticism, nationalism will probably persist because the nation-state, in practical terms, is the only game in town.12 And so, the dialogue that aims to address and resolve the dangers associated with the patrimonialization of national objects must be pursued, and it must not fail to address the nature of those objects and their allegedly historical provenance.

Spain

Spain is a country that has been grappling with these very problems in new and dramatic ways since 1978. Specifically, the Spanish are tackling the most intransigent dilemmas associated with nationalism and patrimonialization, and they are doing so in a political atmosphere riddled with even deeper antagonisms than any of the examples referred to above—with the possible exception of San Lorenzo. This Spanish experiment is of monumental significance and deserves global attention because of the challenges it faces and because of the unprecedented ambitiousness of its vision.

In the wake of Francisco Franco’s extreme centralist nationalism that dominated Spanish politics between 1939 and 1975, Spain’s parliamentary monarchy, which was mapped out in the constitution of 1978, aimed to achieve a new kind of political balance by developing a quasi-federal union that unites Spain’s seventeen autonomous regions. This new Spain, still under construction, is aiming to draw attention to cultural centers without rejecting outlying communities, and it is doing so by promoting centralizing forms of cultural heritage without generating overly antagonistic oppositions that might divide regions from each other. The dangers and uncertainties that accompany this experiment are evident in daily news reports from the Basque region, Cataluña and Galicia, the ‘historic communities’ where the temptation to build divisive walls is intensely felt and perennially debated.

In even more dramatic ways than these ‘historic communities’, Andalucía, the region in the south of Spain, is addressing the challenges of nation-building as it courses towards political autonomy. Unlike other Spanish communities, Andalusians are reinventing themselves politically by falling back on a curiously compromised patrimonial object, namely flamenco music. It is important to note, after all, that flamenco song and dance was conscripted by Franco for use as a symbol for Spanish national identity.13 Now in the twenty-first century, its rescripting as a distinctly Andalusian symbol strikes some as awkward and others as deeply unsettling. The flamenco that was a Spanish national symbol not so very long ago is now being reconstructed as a distinctly non-national and emphatically regional cultural marker. Flamenco is currently being used to oppose the political interests that it once served.

The relevant facts are that the current government designated flamenco music as a patrimonial object and marker of Andalusian identity in 2007: ‘Exclusive power is accorded to the autonomous community of Andalucía regarding the knowledge, conservation, investigation, formation, promotion and diffusion of flamenco as a singular element of Andalusian cultural patrimony’.14 With this move, the Andalusian government aims to counter Franco’s hyper-nationalism, which, as it happened, also leaned heavily on the patrimonial force of flamenco music. Ironically, then, one and the same cultural object has been conscripted into patrimonial service in two polar opposite interests. Flamenco has been used to emphasize the unity of all Spaniards on the one hand, and it has served to mark the distinctiveness of Andalusians on the other.

Clearly, the latter situation, with its strong emphasis on regional autonomy, has supplanted the hyper-nationalism of the first three quarters of the twentieth century. But memories of Franco’s nacional flamenquismo persist. And so, everyone who is involved in the new politics of flamenco is keenly aware of pressures to both embrace and reject flamenco as a political symbol. Although Catalans can cling to their national dance, the sardana, with unqualified equanimity, knowing that it has been a longstanding symbol of resistance to Franco as much as a marker of Catalan identity,15 the Andalusians who embrace flamenco cannot easily escape the fact that their patrimonial object was itself used by Franco, sometimes in ways that undermined Andalusian solidarity.

So the Andalusian autonomy movement faces a special challenge, namely, it must manage the development of patrimonial flamenco in such a way as to unite the eight different provinces of the region while simultaneously avoiding blowback from the fact that Franco’s regime relied on this very same object. And, although the regional government, the Junta de Andalucía, is committed to distancing itself from the flamenco-reinforced cultural centralism of the Franco years, it is nevertheless using flamenco to support a kind of regional nation-building that curries nationalist loyalties but stops short of launching a ‘perverted’ new form of hyper-nationalism.16

Rendering this process even more complex is the fact that the government has avoided delimiting this patrimonial flamenco. Although it has pronounced it to be an identity-symbol, it has not accompanied this pronouncement with a definition. No one in the government has corralled this music, determined its constitution, or declared what exactly it is. Indeed, the author of the Junta’s text confirmed to me that the Junta made an explicit decision not to define and delimit the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• General Editor’s Preface
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Heritage Music
• 2 The Musical Style Called Flamenco
• 3 Indications of Flamenco
• 4 Flamenco Hybridity
• 5 Flamenco Transgressions
• 6 Three Legs
• 7 Autonomous Flamenco
• 8 Flamenco Cinema
• 9 Studio Flamenco
• 10 The Agony of Andalucía
• Postscript: UNESCO and Flamenco
• Bibliography
• Index