La universalización del flamenco. De Música Mediterránea a Música Trasnacional
ISSN: 2014-4660
Year of publication: 2012
Issue Title: Música en el Mediterráneo
Issue: 2
Pages: 80-100
Type: Article
More publications in: Etno: Cuadernos de Etnomusicología
Abstract
Since the 1980s, Ethnomusicology has addressed the issue of Mediterranean music with different approaches, and flamenco is usually included in this category. Mediterranean music is however too broad a category, and therefore insufficient to account for the processes through which flamenco, especially since the last quarter of the twentieth century, has become one of the most accepted and disseminated popular music of “roots”. This article focuses on the analysis of some steps through which flamenco has been historically opening to new audiences. For this we distinguish between two types of approaches in the context of studies in Mediterranean music: one, in which we refer to the work of Peter Manuel, will serve to characterize the first flamenco, which from the outset was born as urban music and as music of roots (with significant traditional-folk resonance), the other, more modern, considers the Mediterranean as synonymous of commercial syncretic music and associated with certain processes of construction of new cultural identities. This serves to explain some aspects of the most recent popularization of flamenco, delving into the interaction experienced in the late twentieth century between the expressive codes of flamenco and those of Popular Music. In the central part of this article we propose an index of those core elements of flamenco aesthetics, in which, beyond the logical evolution to which they are subjected -as is characteristic of all artwere already well consolidated as classic references in the late nineteenth century. We will call them the central elements of flamenco aesthetics.