Flamenco by William Washabaugh

Author:William Washabaugh [Washabaugh, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781317134862
Google: gH0GDAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-15T03:13:02+00:00

Cante and the Body

The remainder of this chapter will argue that flamenco bodies hint at processes other than those described as communal or competitive. Specifically, we need to open up a larger role for both muscle memory and bodily pain in the process of song. Our discussion will focus first on music and memory and then move to the issue of music and pain.

Program no. 40 (see Chapter 9) in the “Rito” series opens with a scene that illustrates something of the connection between body and memory in flamenco song. The scene was shot in a simple and bare tavern in La Cabeza de San Juan, Cádiz, where seven men are gathered, for drinking, smoking, and singing. A man, with a guitar resting upside down on his thighs, taps out a rhythm of bulerías that the group turns and twists and elaborates into a symphony of percussive sounds with song and dance. The demeanor of the group throughout the nearly four minutes of performance is relaxed and unconcentrated…almost off-handed. Their lack of concentration suggests that their rhythmic competence is managed less by their minds or hearts or spirits than by their nerves and muscles. This rhythmic competence is neither genetically programmed, as suggested by Molina (1985: 63ff.), nor culturally distinctive, as suggested by Mairena (1976: 79). Rather, it is the product of years of repetition. In the simplest terms, the rhythmic competence displayed in program no. 40 is a matter of habit.

As a habit, rhythmic competence might be passed off as peripheral and incidental. It is neither. An increasing amount of evidence suggests that the control of complex musical rhythm is central to human activity (see Calvin 1990: 194; Chanan 1994: 85f.). Moreover, the musical rhythms that are handled by the ear probably involve other senses, the visual, the olfactory, etc. since “the memory of one sense is stored in another: that of tactility in sound, of hearing in taste, of sight in sound” (Serematakis 1994: 216). Rather than being narrow and peripheral, the rhythmic abilities displayed in this program are of broad and central importance.

A significant feature of these abilities is that they are social rather than individual. The habitual control of flamenco rhythms is collaborative; it is a moment of social coordination. Such rhythmic collaboration illustrates another side of what Connerton has called “rites”, that is, events of “social memory” through which people establish “continuity with the past” (see Connerton 1989: 44f.).

Connerton’s term “rite,” like term rito in the title of the documentary film series, refers to events that link the present to the past. However, now it should be becoming clear that the links that song establishes are forged by bodies as much as by minds. Habitual control of collaborative rhythms is a transtemporal physical ability that operates more powerfully and effectively than ordinary words. For one thing, such rhythmic abilities are phylogenetically more profound than speech insofar as they are widely shared by non-humans (Donald 1991: 175). For another, these rhythmic abilities are socially profound in the sense that they emanate from what Bakhtin would call “the lower bodily stratum.

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