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2018 Duende: Illuminating the Untranslatable David Williams Cobb

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COLLEGE OF MUSIC

DUENDE:

ILLUMINATING THE UNTRANSLATABLE

By

DAVID W. COBB

A Thesis submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Music

2018

David W. Cobb defended this thesis on April 11, 2018. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Frank Gunderson Professor Directing Thesis

Michael B. Bakan Committee Member

Aimee Boutin Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank the women in my life, Paula, Arden, and Maya, whose unflagging support has gotten me through this program. I would like to think the inimitable Dr. Frank Gunderson for his wonderful guidance and encouragement. I also want to thank my other committee members, Dr. Michael Bakan and Dr. Aimee Boutin, and all of the excellent faculty of musicology at Florida State University. Lastly, I want to thank those who have participated in this thesis. There are Spaniards from multiple generations that have grown up with flamenco in their ears and blood. There are Cubans who learned flamenco on their native island and brought their passion with them to Miami. There is an Eastern European guitarist who fell in love with flamenco on a family vacation in Spain. There are Americans with no roots in Spain that have come under the spell of flamenco, each in their own way. These performers have subjugated themselves to the rigorous practice and study of flamenco, and play it not for riches and fame but for their love of the music. I hope to capture a sense of their dedication in this thesis.

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

NOTES ON ORTHOGRAPHY AND ITALICIZED TERMS ...... vi Abstract ...... vii

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1 Purpose ...... 1 Theoretical Approach and Methodology ...... 3 Review of Literature ...... 6 Stance ...... 8 Chapter Summary ...... 9

2. LOS RAICES DEL FLAMENCO Y DUENDE (THE ROOTS OF FLAMENCO AND DUENDE) ...... 12 Flamenco History ...... 12 Federico Garcia Lorca and Duende ...... 16 An Analysis of Juega y Teoria del Duende ...... 20 Duende, Juerga, and Trance ...... 24 Duende and Tarab ...... 27 Conclusions ...... 29

3. ESO TIENE MUCHO DUENDE: THE AUTHOR’S EXPERIENCE ...... 31 Historical Interlude: Nuevo Flamenco ...... 31 Field Note: 6/6/2017 ...... 32 Field Note: 6/16/2017 ...... 34 A Textual Investigation of Duende...... 35 Music and the Performer’s Body ...... 39

4. FLOW ...... 48 Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi and the Psychology of Optimal Experience ...... 48 Characteristics of Flow ...... 50 Flow Methodology...... 51 Flow and Music ...... 53

5. AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF DUENDE ...... 57 Duende Con Mis Hermanos ...... 57 Paco Fernandez and Siempre Flamenco ...... 64 Elementos ...... 72 Conclusion ...... 77

6. CONCLUSIONS ...... 80 Lorquian Duende ...... 80 The Physiology and Psychology of Duende ...... 81 Duende as Emotive Performance ...... 83 A Theory of Deep Playing ...... 84

iv APPENDICES ...... 89

A. HUMAN SUBJECTS COMMITTEE APPROVAL ...... 89 B. EXPRESSIONS USED IN JALEO ...... 90 C. INTERVIEWS ...... 91

REFERENCES ...... 92

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 97

v NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY AND ITALICIZED TERMS

Spanish words will appear in italics regardless of frequency of use. Borrowing from Chuse, flamenco and cante jondo will appear in lower case, while Nuevo Flamenco will be capitalized.

Notes on the Use of Gitano

This thesis uses the term gitano exclusively to mean the Iberian Roma of Andalusia. This is in keeping with local provenance and usage. “Gipsy” being an older term in common usage is substituted for gitano only if it is directly quoting source material. According to ethnomusicologist

Carol Silverman, Roma is the “in-group” term of the Romani rights movement, and includes the extant diaspora (Silverman, 48).1 Gitano speaks to the distinct identity and history of the Iberian

Roma, and as evidenced in the Gipsy Kings song “Somos Gitanos,”2 “We are Gitanos,” it is the preferred epithet among the Iberian Roma.

Notes on the use of “Cante Jondo”

Cante jondo refers to a subset of flamenco repertoire known for its grave mood, and distinct from cantes chicas, light songs that are more divertissement than social ritual. This thesis uses cante jondo to mean the older styles of gitano flamenco, a la Federico Garcia Lorca. This use equivocates cante jondo with puro, the styles dubbed “pure” by the flamenco aficionados.

1 Carol Silverman, Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 43. 2 Gipsy Kings, Somos Gitanos, CD (Columbia, 2001).

vi ABSTRACT

Duende has long been a fixture of the gitano lifescape in Andalusia, Spain, and is often invoked in relation to flamenco performance with such variance in meaning that it is difficult to attain an understanding of what duende really is, and more importantly, what it means to contemporary flamenco performers. The word is often portrayed in spiritual and poetic terms, which are evocative but imprecise in definition. This thesis seeks to construct an understanding of duende that is derived from both the traditional gitano setting and the modern context of commercial performance, one that explains the phenomenon through the lenses of ethnomusicological theories of embodiment, the psychology of optimal experience (flow), and the neuroscience of musical experience. As a by-product of coming to an understanding of duende, I have constructed a theory of deep playing, which intersects with these phenomena. Deep playing privileges the experience of the performer, and describes a processual phenomenon with specific conditions and variables, with the key indicators expressed by Autonomic Nervous System arousal, and the climax demonstrated through a flood of chemical neurotransmitters, creating a feeling of transcendence.

vii CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Purpose

Duende is a word whose meaning must be felt to be understood. This Spanish concept has been described in many ways, from the “indefinable lifeforce that surges through the deepest part of the self”3 to the struggle every artist undergoes as they “climb the tower of … perfection” in their artistic expression.4 While its entry in the Dictionary of Untranslatables traces its etymological root to “the owner of the house (duen de casa),”5 it is typically translated into English as “elf,” or the more sinister “demon,” reflecting its Andalusian folk use as one of variety of mischievous spirits. Duende has long been a fixture of the gitano6 lifescape in southern Spain, and is most often invoked in relation to flamenco performance with such variance in meaning that it is difficult to attain an understanding of what duende really is, and more importantly, what it means to contemporary flamenco performers.

My interests in duende evolved from my experiences as a member of Maharajah Flamenco

Trio. Since 2011, we have been creating our own version of Nuevo Flamenco, one that has been met with great enthusiasm by audiences and listeners. Over time, the Trio has developed a deep familiarity with the music and each other’s musical personalities, reaching a new paradigm of performance as an ensemble. One night, our playing and synergy had been notably strong, and after the show, the percussionist, Ramin Yazdanpanah, commented that our performance had

3 Juan Serrano and Jose A. Elgorriaga, Flamenco Body and Soul: An Aficionado’s Introduction (Fresno, CA: The Press at California State University, 1990), 15. 4 Federico Garcia Lorca and Christopher Maurer, Deep Song and Other Prose (New York: New Directions Publications, 1980), 44. 5 Barbara Cassin, “Duende,” The Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 6 The group of ethnic Roma native to Andalusia. More on this group is found in Chapter 2, under Flamenco History.

1 “mucho duende.”7 That was the first time I encountered the word duende. As I began looking for it in future performances, the seeds of this thesis began germinating. Eventually, I experienced what I thought was a moment of duende. The best descriptor would be transcendence, which Alf

Gabrielsson defines as a strong experience with music where “the narrator feels as if he/she is put in a trance or ecstasy,” and “there may be a feeling of totally merging with something.”

Transcendence is often described by those who experience it as “mysterious” or “supernatural.”8

To this, I would add that manifestations of duende are presented to the performer as perfect moments, stretching across a time made elastic by the groove of the music, where an emotionally charged synergy infuses the performers, and often includes the audience within its sphere of influence. These events always result in a strong sense of fraternity among the trio, leaving me with a feeling that we had accomplished this together. As I investigated duende, no single source seemed to describe it in a manner that aligned with my experiences, or define it phenomenologically. Often portrayed in spiritual and poetic terms, this thesis presents an investigation of duende as a phenomenon of human experience, with my duende experience characterized as a specific psychology of performance, designated by a set of physiological indicators.

Through a review of the literature, ethnographic fieldwork, and the analysis of my own experiences, this thesis seeks to construct an understanding of duende that encompasses both the traditional gitano setting and the modern context of commercial performance, one that explains the phenomenon through the lenses of ethnomusicological theories of embodiment, the psychology of optimal experience (flow), and the neuroscience of musical experience. In attempting to define

7 “Much duende.” 8 Alf Gabrielsson, Strong Experience in Music: Music Is Much More Than Just Music, 15th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

2 my duende experiences, I have constructed a theory of deep playing. Deep playing privileges the experience of the performer, and describes a processual phenomenon with specific conditions and variables, with the key indicators expressed by Autonomic Nervous System arousal, and the climax demonstrated through a flood of chemical neurotransmitters, creating a feeling of transcendence.

Theoretical Approach and Methodology

This project presents its own challenges in developing the appropriate theoretical approach, as there are many variables and facets to any study attempting to understand duende. It must first be situated in its historical context and usage, then the word itself must be further parsed into its different manifestations. The term duende is holistic, and used to describe phenomena that encompass the experiences of performer and listener. These experiences are separated by the physicality of playing, and it is this aspect of duende that I am most interested in addressing. While

I discuss aspects of the listener’s experience, the ethnography presented here privileges the voice of the performer as both passive and active participant in the creation of duende, and narrows its focus to performative experiences. Though I discuss duende as it appears within gitano cultural habitus, the limitations of the ethnography of this thesis are such that I must rely on the experiences of those who perform flamenco professionally; a far different social context.

Another challenge lies in what Charles Seeger called the “linguocentric predicament.”9 Just as music and language are not equivalent forms of communication, making it difficult to accurately write about music in a universally understood lexicon, there is a lack of vocabulary for describing

9 Seeger, Charles. “Speech, Music, and Speech about Music.” In Studies in Musicology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977: 16-30.

3 the phenomena of ecstatic listening and playing, and musical transcendence; characteristics of my duende experience. It is for this reason, that I have decided to examine duende through the lens of embodied experience, using the language of neuroscience and psychology to describe this phenomenon.

Judith Becker’s Deep Listeners10 provides a multidisciplinary approach to trance studies through neuroscience and cognitive psychology, one in which a phenomenological investigation of duende might be embedded. Deep listeners are described by Butler as “persons who are profoundly moved, even to tears, by simply listening to a piece of music.”11 This emotional response to music is close to the ecstatic listening of duende, and provides a compliment to my theory of deep playing.

To describe some of the psychological processes of duende, I have engaged with

Csikszentmihalyi’s flow. Several factors determine my approach to studying the relationship between duende and flow that separate this work from other literature on music and flow. The most pertinent is lack of equivalency. I do not claim duende to be flow, only that flow can describe some of the psychology behind duende, while providing a phenomenological methodology for understanding duende processes. Most flow studies employ Csikszentmihalyi’s Experience

Sampling Method (ESM) to provide the metrics for statistical analysis. Because of the small sample of participants, and the fact that this study does not use the same random response prompts of ESM, I have eschewed this methodology. With questions derived from the ESM, and designed to elucidate and explore perceptions of duende as part of performance, I have conducted in-depth interviews using ethnographic techniques.

10Judith Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). 11 Ibid., 2.

4 Further support for the commonalities in the range of interpretations will be drawn from first and second-hand accounts of duende experience as relayed by flamenco practitioners in literature and online testimonies. The interpretations will also be contrasted with the author’s personal experiences with duende as a participant-observer to reveal a hermeneutical understanding of duende as it manifests for and is discussed by contemporary flamenco performers.

The ethnographic interviews, conducted in Tallahassee and Miami, Florida, provide insight into how this particular set of performers thinks about duende. In the approach of re-presentation espoused in Michael Bakan’s work within the autism community,12 I have preserved large sections of the interview dialogues, omitting my voice if it interrupts the flow of thoughts, and allowing the voices of the participants to directly express their views to the reader. In this way, the ethnography of each voice holds a unique space in the book, so that each maintains their personality and individuality in the minds of the reader.

Through my involvement with Maharajah Flamenco Trio I have met other performers of flamenco living in Florida. The participants in this thesis are drawn from this pool. They range in age from late 20s to early 60s, and are professionally engaged with flamenco. Paco and Celia

Fonta, the heart of the Miami-based group Siempre Flamenco, are two such contacts. Paco, a native of Spain, grew up on flamenco and Andalusian culture. Celia, an American, has been dancing flamenco for many years. They introduced me to Paco Fernandez, a flamenco guitarist from Seville performing as their guest artist for the month. My relationship with the Fontas led me to another group performing in the Miami area called Elementos, a troupe practicing a traditional style of flamenco. They too have lent their voices on this fundamental aspect of flamenco.

12 Bakan, Michael B. 2016. “Music, Autism, and Disability Aesthetics.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 69 (2): 548-53.

5 Understanding the deeply subjective nature of my research, this project could not have been written in a positivistic or completely empirical mode. It seeks to explain my duende experience, as much as those within my flamenco network. In choosing to situate my prose in reflexivity, I hope to weave the narrative of my understanding of duende into the research done both in the text and in the field, holding personal experiences as a frame of reference.

Review of Literature

A necessary starting point for understanding duende as it relates to flamenco, and interpreting the ethnographic data collected for this thesis, is Federico Garcia Lorca’s Juega y

Teoria del Duende (The Theory and Play of Duende). In Maurer’s English translation of Lorca’s

1933 lecture, the meaning of duende, as viewed by Lorca and his contemporaries, is presented as a fundamental aspect of inspiration and creativity.13 An early proponent for preserving the flamenco of the past, this thesis explores how Lorca’s passion stems from his personal connection to the culture of Andalusia and his embrace of gitano aesthetics. Though it could be viewed as a way of romanticizing the gitano, there is a deeper understanding behind his interest in this phenomenon. His influence on aficionado culture in Spain necessitates that any academic discussion of duende holds this lecture as a frame of reference for understanding the contemporary uses of duende. As Lorca is a well-known literary figure, there is a body of literature dedicated to his life and work. Of these, Ian Gibson’s Lorca: A Life,14 provides biographical information, as well as the social context in which Lorca’s works were created and presented. Edward Stanton’s

13 Lorca and Maurer, Deep Song and Other Prose. 14 Ian Gibson, Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1989).

6 The Tragic Myth15 engages with Lorca’s heartfelt appreciation for cante jondo and discusses how

Lorca applied the ideals from gitano culture in his work. Robert Havard’s commentaries and translation of Lorca’s Romancero Gitano provides insight into Lorca’s artistic engagement with cante jondo and gitano culture.16 This context situates Juega y Teoria del Duende within the time and place that Lorca penned it, and supports my original analysis of this work. I distinguish ethnographic seed from poetic chaff in his prose, and identify aspects of Lorquian duende that hold relevance to the goals of this thesis.

Maria Assumma’s “Garcia Lorca and the Duende”17 and Marion Papenbrok’s “The

Spiritual World of Flamenco”18 present theorizations about the ritualistic complex that is traditional flamenco performed among gitanos in intimate settings, and how the concept of duende is used to describe the ecstatic experiences that occur in this setting. Though the ethnography of this thesis focuses on contemporary commercial performers of flamenco, the roots of duende found in the cultural rites of gitanos is another layer of meaning and usage that colors modern conceptions. As Assumma makes the claim that duende is a form of music-induced trance, it becomes necessary to explore this concept.

The phenomenon of ecstatic listening and performance in Arab music called tarab is a strong analogy to duende. Ali Jihad Racy’s writings, particularly “Creativity and Ambience: An

Ecstatic Feedback Model from Arab Music,”19 and Making Music in the Arab World examine tarab through the ethnography of artists and audience members, and in the vast native literature

15 Edward F. Stanton, The Tragic Myth: Lorca and Cante Jondo (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1978). 16 Federico Garcia Lorca, Gypsy Ballads, trans. Robert G Havard, Hispanic Classics (Warminster, UK: Aris and Phillips Ltd., 1990). 17 Maria Cristina Assumma, “Garcia Lorca and the Duende,” in Performing Ecstasies: Music, Dance, and Ritual in the Mediterranean, ed. Nancy Van Deusen and Luisa Del Giudice (Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 2005). 18 Marion Papenbrok, “The Spiritual World of Flamenco,” in Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia, ed. Claus Schreiner, trans. Mollie Comerford Peters (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1990). 19 Ali Jihad Racy, “Creativity and Ambience: An Ecstatic Feedback Model from Arab Music,” The World of Music, New Perspectives on Improvisation, 33, no. 3 (1991): 7–28.

7 on Arab music. Comparing the two traditions presents an interesting oral/literary binary that is briefly explored.

While Becker provides a means of understanding the physiology of duende,

Csikszentmihalyi provides a framework for understanding its psychology. His research on flow, the psychology of optimal experience.20 spans many decades, and has been incorporated into the works of other researchers in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, music, and behavior. I examine optimal experience in light of the evidence on duende, in order to find ways to apply a proven phenomenological methodology to this concept. Other research involving music and flow are examined for contemporary applications of flow, and to uncover aspects about flow that go beyond Csikszentmihalyi’s nine flow traits.

Stance

Recognizing my place as an Anglo-American male who has lived his entire life in the southeastern United States is an important consideration when contemplating my relationship to something that is fundamentally a cultural product of Spain. Though flamenco is originally a part of gitano culture, embedded in its own history, customs, and language, flamenco music is played around the world. As an Anglo-American performer of flamenco, the issue of appropriation has been present in my mind throughout the experience. It is Maharajah Flamenco Trio’s mission to foster inter-cultural understanding through our music and words. In my experience, once someone has been touched by music from another culture, they develop an affinity for the people of that culture, regardless of the source. This affinity creates empathy, and ultimately leads to recognizing

20 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).

8 the humanity in all of us. Our success has helped inspire and educate people, and yet we still profit from an art that we are essentially borrowing. Even though 90% of the music we play is originally composed, it is situated within the idiom of flamenco. Beyond the tension of outsider status, the commodification of flamenco creates a disharmony between what is new (Nuevo Flamenco) and what is authentic (pure). This tension was present when I interviewed Paco Fernandez, from

Sevilla. My Anglo-ness was a barrier to our conversation beyond the need for us to go through a translator. I sensed a defiance in him against the idea of defining duende, one that seemed rooted in ideas of cultural propriety.

On other occasions, my cultural outsider status within the context of flamenco has been obvious to me, and caused hesitation in my declaration of having felt the duende. What I have experienced, whether it is duende or not, has almost always occurred within the context of performing flamenco; thus, I call it duende. One thing that the range of responses found in the ethnography of this thesis demonstrate is that duende is in the eye of the beholder. My years of performance experience, and growing familiarity with the social life of flamenco music, allows me a promontory from which to observe and comment about duende outside of its historical social connotations, providing a new perspective that reflects flamenco’s global presence.

Chapter Summary

The narrative presented in this thesis unfolds chronologically, from the origins of the gitanos to the present day, while tracking my journey into duende as it unfolds. I share my insights, based on years of performance experience within and outside of the flamenco genre, and document the evolution of my thinking on how to define duende in a manner suitable for an ethnomusicological work.

9 Chapter 2 situates duende in the context of flamenco by providing an overview of the origins of the gitanos and flamenco in Andalusia. It then examines duende as it came into popular usage through the work of Federico Garcia Lorca. The traditional setting of duende experience is then explored through the writings of Assumma and Papenbrok. Comparisons between duende, trance, and tarab delineate the similarities and differences of these phenomena.

Chapter 3 begins with a brief history of Nuevo Flamenco, a style of music that resulted from global influences, providing the background for the genre practiced by Maharajah Flamenco

Trio. Through field notes, some of my performance experiences are examined through the lens of duende, delineating some of the factors that promote a duende-inspired performance. Following my field notes, this chapter looks at ways duende has been described in the literature on flamenco, and explores theories of embodiment as a framework for understanding and interpreting duende.

The musical embodiment theories in Becker’ Deep Listeners are complimented by concepts like musical feel, entrainment, groove, and affect.

Chapter 4 examines the origins of Csikszentmihalyi’s flow, and the way it has been used to investigate musical performance. Flow provides a psychological framework for understanding the mental processes of duende and deep playing. Its nine characteristics are examined, and a survey of literature on flow and music is undertaken, providing other characteristics that link flow to duende.

Chapter 5 delves into the ethnographic interviews conducted for this project. They are arranged so that, starting with my experience, I move from within my circle of musical partners to the broader flamenco community, providing a broader understanding of how duende is interpreted by contemporary performers of flamenco, and how these concepts tie into my research and experiences.

10 Chapter 6 synthesizes the research and ethnography, providing an understanding of what duende means to flamenco performers today. It concludes with a theory of deep playing that examines the necessary components and processes involved, illustrated through a hypothetical

Maharajah Flamenco Trio performance.

11 CHAPTER 2

LOS RAICES DEL FLAMENCO Y DUENDE (THE ROOTS OF FLAMENCO AND

DUENDE)

Flamenco History

To understand the modern conceptions of flamenco and duende, it is necessary to explore the intimate link between these things and the gitanos of Andalusia. The gitanos are a subgroup of the larger historical phenomenon of the Roma diaspora. Linguistics and genomic evidence place the Roma as being indigenous to northern India. An itinerant people for generations, they left their homeland 1,500 years ago as a single group, and moved west across Asia Minor.21 Around 900 years ago they entered Europe from the Balkans, where some remain to this day, while others continued west, as far as Ireland. Migration flows into the region of Andalusia in southern Spain beginning in the later part of the fifteenth century led to a sizable Roma population from whom the gitanos descended.

The new homeland of the gitanos has been a unique place throughout human history.

Bound on the west by Portugal and the Atlantic, in the south by the Mediterranean, and in the north by the rest of the Iberian peninsula, Andalusia has been as much a part of North Africa and the

Mediterranean world as it has of Europe. From the last refuge of Neanderthals in Europe,22 to a repository of Neolithic art,23 to a Phoenician colony, a Roman province, and a Moorish Caliphate,

Andalusia has a rich and varied history as a crossroad between worlds. At the conclusion of the

21 Isabel Mendizabal et al., “Reconstructing the Population History of European Romani from Genome-Wide Data,” Current Biology 22, no. 24 (December 18, 2012): 2342–49, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.10.039. 22 Clive Finlayson et al., “Late Survival of Neanderthals at the Southernmost Extreme of Europe,” Nature 443 (September 13, 2006): 850. 23 John Gill, Andalucia: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

12 nearly five-hundred year reconquista, when Christian Iberian forces finally expelled the last emirate from Granada, life in Andalusia changed drastically for those who had lived under Muslim rule, including the gitanos. The religious tolerance of the Caliphate gave way to the Inquisition, which expelled or murdered many of the remaining Sephards and Moors. The gitanos who converted were kept separate from the dominant Christian society. Like all converts, they were held with suspicion and marginalized. They were forced to live in ghettos called gitanerias,24 or flee to live outside of society in the backcountry and caves like those of the Sacramonte outside of

Granada. It wasn’t until 1783, under Charles III’s reign, that the gitanos were granted Spanish citizenship.25

With the ensconcement of the gitanos in Andalusia, the music of Iberia, with its older substrates of Greek, Carthaginian, Roman, and Byzantine layered over by the later influences of

Moorish, Sephardic, and Christian musics, fused with the music and musicality of the gitanos, brought over 5,000 miles from the northwest of India. The gitano adaptation and interpretation of native Andalusian music would eventually be called flamenco.

The origin of the word “flamenco” has enjoyed a healthy discussion, mainly based in philology and linguistics. Reiterating the findings of that debate, it is widely accepted that the earliest uses of “flamenco” were synonymous with someone who was “ostentatious” and

“dashing.” In the later part of the eighteenth century, this term was employed to describe a certain gitano lifestyle of reckless machismo.26 The use of flamenco to describe their music or its practitioners arose in the 1850s.27 Gradually, it became a generic term for music played primarily

24 Claus Schreiner, Madeleine Claus, and Reinhard G. Pauly, Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1990). 25 Israel J. Katz, “Flamenco,” Grove Music Online (Oxford Music Online, 2001), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592639.article.09780. 26 Schreiner, Claus, and Pauly, Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia. 27 Loren Chuse, The Cantaoras: Music, Gender, and Identity in Flamenco Song, Current Research in Ethnomusicology (New York: Routledge, 2013).

13 by the gitanos of Andalusia that included, but was not limited to, their tradition of cante jondo

(deep song).

The history of flamenco shows an ever-evolving art form that began in the cultural mélange of Andalusia. The cante jondo of the gitanos was originally a sung tradition, sometimes accompanied by concussion sticks or raps on a table. Intimately linked with the economically depressed and oppressed social conditions of the gitanos, these earlier songs were reminiscent of lamentations. Around the beginning of the nineteenth century, the guitar was introduced as an accompaniment to the cantaores, the flamenco singers.28 The guitars of this era were smaller, of varying shapes and numbers of strings, but still widely popular among gitanos and non-gitanos alike. Luthier Antonio de Torres Jurado (1817-1892) built the first modern classical guitar in 1859.

Torres’ construction methods resulted in louder guitars with balanced expression and quickly became the mold for the modern classical and the modern flamenco guitar. Endorsement of the

Torres guitar by leading performers of the day, like the Spaniard Francisco Tárrega, and after it, by Andrés Segovia, helped popularize this design.29 It was not until the 20th century that the guitar became a solo instrument in flamenco.30 Its widespread use and popularity led toque (guitar playing) to become one of the three main components of flamenco.31

The cafés cantantes era beginning in the 1840s both cemented cante, baile, and toque

(singing, dancing, and guitar-playing) as the essential elements of flamenco, and standardized the song styles of flamenco performance. The evolutions of cante gitano (gitano song) and cante andaluz (non-gitano folk songs from Andalusia) intersected to form the repertoire that would later

28 Schreiner, Claus, and Pauly, Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia. 29 Bert Oling and Heinz Wallisch, “Guitar,” The Complete Encyclopedia of Musical Instruments (Edison, NJ: Chartwell Books, Inc., 2004). 30 Schreiner, Claus, and Pauly, Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia. 31 Ibid.

14 be called puro (pure) by the aficionados. Other styles from Spanish America were incorporated and, in the words of Israel Katz, “gypsified” (aflamencada),32 such as the colombiana, guajíra, and the extremely successful rumba.33 Regarded as the golden era of flamenco, the cafés were the first time that gitano music received widespread public performance, and marked the beginning of the rise of flamenco to national icon. Their popularity transformed them into cultural institutions that could financially support gitano musicians. The prospect of a professional flamenco career created competitive conditions that allowed flamenco artistry to flourish, reaching a new zenith of skill and composition (Papenbrok, 1990).34 The cafés cantantes persisted into the 1910s when flamenco made its leap from regional flavor to national entertainment with flamenco opera.

The 1920s saw further transformations as flamenco opera rose in prominence. An era of commercialization moved flamenco into a theatrical setting, where it was performed by professional companies in large venues, and reached a wider audience. Sergei Diaghilev and the

Ballet Russes brought flamenco to Paris with their performance of Cuadro Flamenco in 1921, with music by Manuel de Falla, and sets and costumes designed by Pablo Picasso.35 Though this production brought flamenco international recognition, it began a codification of flamenco dance that was viewed as both an elevation of the form, and a stripping of the improvisational aspect of the baile. Musically, flamenco opera incorporated the styles of cantes andaluz, at the expense of cantes gitanos styles, particularly the twelve count compas, like siguiriyas, alegrias, and bulerías.

Though the commercialization of flamenco at this time was seen by the aficionados as a vulgarization, devoid of authenticity, these flamenco opera merely reflected the tastes of the wider

32 Katz, “Flamenco.” 33 The basis here for the rumba flamenca’s success comes from long term popularity of the Gipsy Kings, rumba specialists, and the use of its rhythms and strum patterns in many world music ensembles. 34 Schreiner, Claus, and Pauly, Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia. 35 Manuel De Falla and Pablo Picasso, “Cuadro Flamenco Suite of Spanish Dance and Music,” Library of Congress (blog), May 17, 1921, https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200185234/.

15 Spanish population, and the orientalist attraction of the exoticized other in Western culture in the early twentieth century.36

The popularity of flamenco opera attracted worldwide attention, and productions continued uninterrupted throughout the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The regime of Francisco Franco used the refined and theatricalized flamenco as a symbol of nationalism, providing cultural propaganda for his fascist dictatorship. Performers of the older styles had fewer economic opportunities, and as a results, there was a general suppression of flamenco’s artistic development.

It was within the cultural milieu of the flamenco opera of the 1920s that our first duende protagonist appears.

Federico Garcia Lorca and Duende

Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) was a Spanish poet, playwright, member of the influential group of thinkers called Generación de '27, and friend to the likes of Manuel de Falla and Salvador Dalí. Much celebrated in his time, his murder by anti-Republican operators in

Grenada in 1936 cast a pall over his works, which were suppressed during the Franco regime.37

While the circumstances of his death have remained a mystery, what he left behind was a body of poems, plays, and lectures full of imagery and sentiment that Lorca felt embodied the essence of cante jondo. Lorca was not a gitano, however, in them, he recognized something ancient that spoke to the human condition, and specifically to his condition as a romantic person with a deep feeling for their worldview.38

36 Schreiner, Claus, and Pauly, Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia. 37 Gibson, Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life, xxi. 38 Lorca’s well-documented homosexuality, speculated to be one of the reasons he was singled out by the right-wing militants who murdered him, could be the reason that Lorca believed he had “a fellow feeling for those who are being persecuted. For the Gypsy, the Negro, the Jew…the morisco [moors], whom all granadinos [citizens of Granada]

16 Lorca was born in the summer of 1898 in the farming village of Fuente Vaqueros, a rich land of olive groves and apple trees, seventeen miles from the city of Granada, in the south of

Andalusia. Granada was the final stronghold of the Moors before being permanently expelled from

Iberia in 1492, the same year Columbus successfully attempted his first trans-Atlantic passage. In

Lorca’s opinion, this lingering Muslim influence contributed to the richness of culture in Granada, a richness that proved influential. Lorca’s father was a landholder from a musical family, and his mother was a schoolteacher. Following the loss of Cuba to the United States in 1898 (the year of

Lorca's birth), and the subsequent loss of cheap cane sugar from the former colony, domestic sugar production rose, and Lorca's father, having sown his land with sugar-beets, found financial success.

Lorca grew up in affluence, but he was never separated from the rest of society, and he cultivated friendships with several gitano families.

Lorca was fascinated by the sound-world of Andalusia. According to his biographer, Ian

Gibson, Lorca began talking at an early age, but prior to that, he was a precocious hummer of folk tunes, and loved the sound of the guitar. As a child, he listened with ecstatic rapture to the organ in the local chapel.39 When the family moved to Granada, the adolescent Federico explored the

Sacramonte caves, where gitanos had lived for centuries. There he met gitano musicians and dancers, and became intimately familiar with the cante jondo through these interactions.40 Lorca pursued classical piano training in his youth, but eventually turned to poetry as his preferred medium of expression. Music was never far from his art, and in cante jondo, he found a world that captured the essence of his spirit, and his connection to the ancient roots of his beloved Andalusia.

carry inside them.” From Gibson, as found in Obras Completas Vol II., 939, 1978. Lorca attributed this statement to his being a Granadino, but the suffering he speaks of in his poetry points to some deep wound in his psyche, possibly explained by his sexual preferences. 39 Gibson, Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life, 13. 40 Ibid,. 28.

17 The anti-flamenquismo of the preceding generation, Generación de '98, denounced gitano culture, tying it to the lack of progress in Spain, and the decline of Spanish hegemony internationally, particularly in Spanish America.41 The intellectuals of Generación de '27 embraced flamenquismo, seeing it as something authentic against the growing conformity and uniformity of popular culture. Lorca responded by returning to the world of cante jondo, the songs of his childhood, as a source of inspiration. This decision mirrors the growing interest in folk idioms amongst the intellectuals of Europe, including Bartók, Kodály, Grieg, Smetana, and

Vaughn Williams.

In 1922, Lorca, together with Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, organized the Concurso del Cante Jondo, a competition to showcase the best performers of the old styles of flamenco, in an attempt to save the music from the commercialization and dilution that occurred during the flamenco opera era. To promote the event, Lorca gave a now famous lecture on cante jondo. It was an impassioned plea, akin to the missionary zeal of the first ethnomusicologists in their quest to save dying folk idioms from what Alan Lomax would later call “cultural grey-out”42:

The intellectuals and enthusiastic friends backing the idea of this festival are only sounding an alarm. Gentlemen, the musical soul of our people is in great danger! The artistic treasure of an entire race is passing into oblivion, old men carry off to the grave priceless treasures of past generations, and a gross, stupid avalanche of cheap music clouds the delicious folk atmosphere of all Spain.43

The lecture not only argued for cante jondo’s pure and ancient roots, but also showed his new direction as a poet. In The Tragic Myth: Lorca and Cante Jondo, Edward Stanton explains how

Lorca found within cante jondo “the ideal of a composite art form for which he sought expression

41 Marta Carrasco Benitez, “Three Centuries of Flamenco: Some Brief Notes,” in Flamenco on the Global Stage: Historical, Critical, and Theoretical Perspectives, ed. K. Meira Goldberg, Ninotchka Devorah Bennahum, and Michelle Heffner Hayes (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2015), 23–32. 42 https://folklife.si.edu/legacy-honorees/alan-lomax/smithsonian. 43 Lorca and Maurer, Deep Song and Other Prose, 23.

18 all of his life.”44 For Lorca, the music of the gitano was a microcosm of a mythical world in which he could set his deeply personal, and thoroughly Andalusian poetry. Inhabiting this world were the gitanos, an ancient wandering race that embodied the tragic and millennial attitude of cante jondo.

Works such as Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballad, 1928), and Poema del Cante Jondo (Poem of the Deep Song, 1931) show the intimate link between Lorca and the music and lifeways of the

Spanish Roma.

Dentro de la fragua lloran, dando gritos, los gitanos. El aire la vela, vela. El aire la está velando. Inside the smithy they wail, loud are the sobs of the gitanos. The breeze wraps her [the moon] in a veil. It wraps and wraps her, does the breeze.45

Lorca’s reference to the gitanos in the smithy is an allusion both to the traditional occupation of blacksmithing among gitanos,46 and the folk origins of flamenco as deriving from songs sung round the anvil. The wails could be the interpreted as the quejío (keening singing style) of traditional cantes gitanos.

Lorca's poetry is visceral, and his engagement with language is one that speaks to the embodiment of subjective reality. Robert Havard says this about Lorca: “Rather than a poet of ideas, he is a poet of the five senses and the physical world...[His poetry] has the power to take us from the world of the senses into a darker, more mysterious realm...the human psyche.47 To explain the root of inspiration for artists in Andalusia, and his own in particular, Lorca turned to the gitano notion of duende.

44 Stanton, The Tragic Myth: Lorca and Cante Jondo, x. 45 From Romance de La Luna, Luna, found in Romancero Gitano. Translation by Robert Havard. 46 Peter Manuel, “Andalusian, Gypsy, and Class Identity in the Flamenco Complex.” Found in Ethnomusicology 33: 51. 47 Lorca, Gypsy Ballads, 1.

19 An Analysis of Juega y Teoria del Duende

On October 20th, 1933, Lorca delivered Juega y Teoria del Duende (Play and Theory of

Duende) as a lecture to the Friends of the Arts social group, simultaneously winning the hearts of

Buenos Aires’ intellectuals,48 and giving the world the most detailed look at duende to that point.

To call it a theory perhaps ascribes too empirical an approach to the lecture. Rather than attempting to scientize duende, Lorca cloaks his address in the same language found in his poetry. With his

Andalusian eloquence, he describes duende and the circumstances in which it appears, distinguishing its role in artistic inspiration from that of the religious angel and the classical muse.

Reading Lorca’s text is a sensorial experience. The visceral quality of the prose is exemplary in the following passage.

No. Yo no quisera que entrara en la sala ese terrible moscardón del aburrimiento que ensarta todas las cabezas por un hilo tenue de sueño y pone en los ojos de los oyentes unos grupos diminutos de puntas de alfiler. So, no, I don't want that terrible blowfly of boredom to enter this room, threading all your heads together on the slender thread of sleep, and setting a tiny cluster of sharp needles in your, my listeners', eyes.49

For Lorca, duende is ultimately an internal struggle with the forces of creation for self-expression.

The moment of duende is a surge of inspired creativity; a physiological reaction to what Carafoli calls the primum movens,50 the onset of the state of being inspired. “For every man, every artist called Nietzsche or Cézanne every step that he climbs in the tower of his perfection is at the expense of the struggle that he undergoes with his duende.”51 Optimum expression in Lorca’s art meant struggling with duende, not the effortlessness of the divine inspiration of the angel, or the classical inspiration embodied by the muses.

48 Gibson, Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life, 369. 49 All translations taken from Lorca and Maurer, Deep Song and Other Prose. Maurer’s translation was checked against A.S. Kline’s translation found at the Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing Press, and the original Spanish for accuracy. I made choices for maximum impression between the two translations. 50 L. first cause. Ernesto Carafoli, “The Creativity Process: Freedom and Constraints,” Rindiconti Lincei 27, no. 3 (2016): 413–25. 51 Lorca and Maurer, Deep Song and Other Prose, 44.

20 In analyzing Juega y Teoria del Duende, I have identified several important concepts that are both corroborated in other literature about flamenco and duende, and are relevant to this thesis.

Duende is, 1) a phenomenon interpreted through the body, 2) laden with a transcendent and transportive power that is most easily accessed through music,52 3) communicative, and 4) universal to human experience, meaning not the exclusive domain of gitanos or flamenco. I will examine each of these ideas independently, within the context of Lorca’s lecture.

Just as his language is visceral, for Lorca, the onset of duende represents a bodily experience. Stating that it “must be roused from the furthest habitations of the blood,”53 Lorca is told by an old maestro that duende is a force that “surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.”54

He declares that in Spain, duende “has a limitless hold over the bodies of the dancers...”55 The phenomenon Lorca describes is one that is experienced and interpreted through the body, and one who’s nature is such that it requires a body through which it can act. “The living flesh is needed to interpret [duende].”56 Duende is inseparable from the bodies of those it inhabits, and can only be expressed through the body.

In Juega y Teoria, duende requires the creation of a temporality in which “a radical change to all the old forms” can occur,57 and music is the most suited medium to create this setting. Manuel

Torre (1878-1933), the famed gitano cantaor,58 is quoted by Lorca as saying “All that has black sounds has duende. Todo lo que tiene sonido negras tiene duende.”59 As the aural was as important

52 By transportive, I am referring to Gabrielsson’s description of transcendence wherein the narrator describes the experience of “glimpsing other worlds or existences.” Gabrielsson, Strong Experience in Music: Music Is Much More Than Just Music. 53 Lorca and Maurer, Deep Song and Other Prose, 44. 54 Ibid., 43. 55 Ibid., 50. 56 Ibid., 47. 57 Ibid., 46. 58 “Singer.” 59 Lorca and Maurer, Deep Song and Other Prose, 43.

21 a component of the sensorium as the visual for Lorca, these sonidos negros are important to his understanding of the manifestation of duende. Lorca’s belief in the power of music as both transportive and deeply expressive is evidenced in the following line: “Dark sounds, behind which in tender intimacy exist volcanoes, ants, zephyrs, and the vast night pressing its waist against the

Milky Way.”60 Sonidos negros are portals through which the inner life-world of the performer and the external world (the universe), collide. Framed within Victor Turner’s work on ritual,61 these black sounds act as a source object of liminality, creating a temporality in which duende can occur, and fostering an “evasion of the surrounding reality.”62 John Blacking wrote about similar ideas concerning music and time in his book How Musical Is Man?

It is because music can create a world of virtual time that Gustav Mahler said that it may lead to “the other world…the world in which things are no longer subject to time and space.” There is freedom from the restrictions of actual time and complete absorption in the…loss of self in being.63

Blacking moves from the Venda, to Mahler, to the Balinese concept of “the other mind,” as illustrative of the use of music as a common medium for intense emotional experience in many of the world’s cultures, one characterized by an elastic temporality. Within this “virtual time,”64 there is created a space for the ultimate purpose of duende, the expression of the inner self. This communication between the performer and the audience, (or Lorca might say between the duende and the audience) involves “…deep, human tender cries of communication with God through the

60 Ibid., 52. 61 Liminality is used here as an in-between state of being in which there is an extraordinary moment that separates everyday reality. The concept is detailed in Victor Turner, “Symbols in Ndemu Ritual,” in Anthropological Theory: An Introduction, ed. Jon McGee and Richard Warms, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2007), 536–53. 62 Lorca and Maurer, Deep Song and Other Prose, 51. I am not arguing here for a causality between music and trance, which was dispelled by Rouget, but I am speaking towards a causal chain between music and duende experience. Gilbert Rouget, “Music and Possession Trance,” in The Anthropology of the Body, ed. John Blacking (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 233–39. 63 John Blacking, How Musical Is Man? (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), 51-52. 64 John Blacking, “Towards an Anthropology of the Body,” in The Anthropology of the Body (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 1–28.

22 five senses, thanks to the duende that shakes the voice and body of the dancer, a real and poetic escape from this world.”65 Here, the intent of all art is to communicate, and Lorca finds his voice through the medium of duende.

According to Lorca, “every art and every country is capable of duende.”66 Here he implies that duende is a universal experience that can happen within any cultural context. In Juega y Teoria del Duende, Lorca points out several instances where a gitano has declared that a work of music, literature, or art from another culture has duende. Lorca speaks of the ability of aficionados or the initiated (here meaning those that are a part of flamenco gitano culture), to detect duende with “a fine instinct.”67 Even if duende is universal to the human condition, that does not mean that it is easily recognizable. One must cultivate a sensitivity to the experience. In broad strokes, if duende as described by Lorca is categorically a form of musical transcendence, then it is consistent with a universal human experience.

Lorca's writing elevated the folk idiom of duende to that of a mythic apparition, ancient and of the soil, that can overwhelm the senses and lead to a perfection of style. Lorca's poetry attempts to distill duende, to embed something which normally unfolds temporally in music into the experience of reading poetry.

The magic power of a poem consists in it always being filled with duende, in its baptizing all who gaze at it with dark water, since with duende it is easier to love, to understand, and be certain of being loved, and being understood, and this struggle for expression in poetry sometimes acquires a fatal character.68

Though he explores it through the music of the gitanos, Lorca’s concept of duende is the lens through which he sees himself vis-à-vis his life and its relationship to art. It is the duende of the

65 Lorca and Maurer, Deep Song and Other Prose, 46. 66 Ibid., 47. 67 Ibid., 43. 68 Ibid., 50.

23 poet. In considering Lorquian duende, it becomes relevant to address the context within which he first found it. In the folk traditions of flamenco found in gitano communities throughout Spain, duende has been described by scholars as synonymous with entrancement.

Duende, Juergas, and Trance

Maria Assumma bifurcates flamenco performances into two categories: those for entertainment and those for social ritual. It is under the second type that she explores duende. In her description of duende in situ in the juergas69 of Andalusia, she identifies flamenco as serving a non-religious ritualistic function under which duende can possess the body of a dancer. Private flamenco performances in gitano culture are ritualistic, consisting of a tripartite structure that she describes as:

a) expressive: the exorcism of a store of emotions linked to the social condition of the Gypsy; b) communicative: the sharing of a collective mood: c) symbolic: the symbolic assertion of ethnic identity, the fruit of the participation in a ceremony endowed with an exclusive and shared language.70

Assumma describes duende as a trance state within this flamenco ritual, usually undergone by the dancer, who loses control in the tensions and releases that continue to charge a performance as climactic moments build upon one another.71 Under the auspices of her ecstastic dance, a catharsis linked to the years of suffering connected to the gitanos throughout history is attained by the group, and the ritual structure described by Assumma is fulfilled.

69 Juergas are informal gatherings where flamenco is performed. It can be a family or two, or the whole neighborhood. These are the social scenes in which flamenco was developed. Once secretive and exclusive to gitanos, today it is the word for any party where flamenco music is performed. The social context of the juerga, which translates to “spree,” exemplifies “the ideal and archetypical flamenco performance context.” (Peter Manuel, Popular Musics in the Non- Western World: An Introductory Survey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). A detailed description of the setting and composition of traditional juerga can be found in Pohren’s The Art of Flamenco, 27-29. 70 Maria Assumma, “Garcia Lorca and the Duende.” In Performing Ecstasies: Music, Dance, and Ritual in the Mediterranean (Ottawa, 2005), 210. 71 Ibid, 213.

24 Marion Papenbrok has a similar take on the juerga, that focuses on the cantaor.72 The gitano singing style, with its forced chest voice and keening melismas, ties into these concepts of cante jondo as an expression of the impoverished existence that the gitanos have endured in their years of persecution. Through the tension embodied by this very physical singing, a shared release is experienced, creating a strong sense of communitas, the feeling of oneness with and deep empathy for your group.73 The juerga as described by Assumma and Papenbrok, fits into Paul

Connerton’s ideas about the creation and sustenance of social memory.74 He explains social memory as being a result of both commemoration and bodily experience. In the ritual of commemoration, a society symbolically performs the narrative that binds them as a society.

Through habits of the body, societies reify culture and reinforce the power dynamics within a group. Through ritualistic flamenco performance, gitanos maintain their social memory through the embodiment of flamenco. This bodily engagement allow moments of duende to be shared among the participants, an idea important to Lorca’s understanding of duende. It would be simple to stop my investigation here, as this provides a satisfactory description of duende. However, viewing duende only in the context of the juerga, ignores the voices of flamenco performers around the world, including those interviewed for this thesis, who experience duende in the context of entertainment.

Important to Assumma’s interpretation is the connection it makes between duende and trance. Trance has long been associated with religious tradition. From the bodily possession of the

Second Great Awakening in the United States, to the lucumí rites of the Afro-Caribbeans of the

Antilles that Lorca references,75 to the bissu tradition among the transvestite priests of Sulawesi

72 Papenbrok, “The Spiritual World of Flamenco.” 210. 73 Edith Turner, Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy (New York: Palgrave, 2012). 74 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (London: Cambridge, 1989). 75 Lorca and Maurer, Deep Song and Other Prose, 46.

25 (Becker).76 In these contexts, the entranced is in a state of possession, through which some form of communication with the spirit world is enacted. Assumma’s description of dancers possessed by duende during a non-religious flamenco ritual does not correspond with the medium role of the entranced in the other examples. Physiologically, duende does share some characteristics with trance, as described by Judith Becker in Deep Listeners. Traits such as emotional arousal, loss of self, and the cessation of inner language, what Becker calls “limited universals,”77 are all found in the duende experience. One important distinction between the two is the lack of trancing amnesia

(when the trancer loses all memory of the trance state) in the duende experiences of performers.

German flamencologist Claus Schreiner states that “duende has been called the demon that puts flamencos in a trance. But the very nature of cante jondo contradicts trance theories.” His reasoning that the “intellectual-emotional exertion of body and soul required by cante jondo” would not be possible in a trance state,78 is corroborated by the experiences of musicians in their description of duende as found in this thesis. Though the claim that the duende “takes over” (Fonta,

P., 2017) is a common descriptor of the phenomenon, the possession aspect of duende correlates more to a state of effortless playing and creativity than to the total loss of self-awareness and self- possession of trance. From the point of view of the performer, duende is a kind of ecstatic playing, one that finds a corollary in the tarab tradition of Arabic music.

76 Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing, 11. 77 Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing, 29. 78 Schreiner, Claus, and Pauly, Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia.

26 Duende and Tarab

In Juega y Teoria del Duende, Lorca connects duende to the tarab tradition of Arabic music.79 Papenbrok also make this comparison.80 There appears to be a strong correlation between the duende experiences of flamenco musicians and the ecstatic performance (and listening) of tarab as described by Ali Jihad Racy in “Creativity and Ambience.” In the two models that Racy lays out, duende and tarab share the commonality of being social-aesthetic complexes as opposed to the European aesthetic model that values the worth of the work itself, separate from its performance life. For flamenco and Arabic musicians and listeners, the focus is on live performance, and the culturally encoded interactions between the participants. The gitano and

Arab complexes derive their value from their “immediate physical and temporal contexts.”81 These ecstatic listening experiences are deeply by the close physical proximity to the source of the music as it unfolds in performance, and not by means of mediated renditions, such as recorded music.

Tarab is a result of a feedback loop between the performer and audience.

Tarab tradition as outlined by Racy in his book Making Music in the Arab World,82 portrays a complex system of ecstatic listening and performing that encompasses these experiences in much the same way the word duende is used. However, there is another associated term that describes more specifically the experience of the performer. As in a flamenco experience with duende, “the performer [of tarab] also must be in a state of ecstasy in order to perform in the most inspired fashion.”83 Called saltanah, it describes the state of the performer who feels that “nobody can

79 “In all Arab music, the arrival of the duende is greeted with energetic cries of Allah! Allah!, which is so close to the Olé of the bullfight that who knows if it’s not the same thing?” Lorca and Maurer, Deep Song and Other Prose, 46. 80 Papenbrok, “The Spiritual World of Flamenco,” 54. 81 Racy, “Creativity and Ambience: An Ecstatic Feedback Model from Arab Music,”, 9. 82 AJ Racy, Making Music in the Arab World: the Culture and artistry of Tarab (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 83 Racy, “Creativity and Ambience: An Ecstatic Feedback Model from Arab Music,” 8.

27 conquer you.”84 This sentiment is nearly identical to what the singer El Lebrijano told Lorca: “on days when I sing with duende no one can touch me.”85 Additionally, players in the throes of saltanah say that musical ideas “impose themselves in ways that appear too mystifying and compelling” to the musician.”86 This situation aligns with the notion of duende “taking over” that is found in the ethnography.

Racy parses out the distinctions succinctly, showing a well-devised system of concepts far beyond the ambiguity of duende, which identifies similar concepts of interest to this thesis.

Unlike the concept of tarab, which assumes a rather broad meaning as it describes the overall transformative experience connected with the music, saltanah and other related concepts usually suggest specific music-related condition. In a saltanah state, the performer becomes musically self-absorbed, and experiences well-focused and intense musical sensations...Saltanah typically applies to the musicians, specifically in connection with performing. Saltanah is the condition that inspires affective music making. Although musically and emotionally part of the overall tarab experience, it is the “magic” that momentarily lifts the artist to a higher ecstatic plateau and empowers him or her to engender tarab most effectively. In this sense, saltanah is creative ecstasy.87

The connection between saltanah and improvisation also exists in duende. Through the subtle manipulations of a set of cultural codes, the Arab player can improvise music that is effective at creating ecstatic experience. Part of the duende experience is the creation of new musical moments of expression through manipulating the codal structure of flamenco. As “duende loves the edge,”88 it involves some amount of risk on the performer, the risk of failure, of non-communication. This risk is generally most closely engaged through improvisation, a spontaneous declaration of the performer’s state-of-mind.

84 Ibid., 14. 85 Maurer, Deep Song and Other Prose, 43. 86 Racy, “Creativity and Ambience: An Ecstatic Feedback Model from Arab Music,” 13. 87 Ibid., 120. 88 Lorca and Maurer, Deep Song and Other Prose, 50.

28 Tarab maps well onto duende, and saltanah describes a mindset in the performer that differentiates itself from more mundane playing experiences; the side of duende I am most interested in. Whereas saltanah is generated by the ecstatic feedback model between performer and listener, duende can occur with or without an audience, among a group of musicians or a solo musician alone. Tarab relies on the communication between a performer and an indoctrinated audience, cued into the ways that Arabic musicians manipulate the music to induce tarab. Where this is true for the juergas as described by Assumma, it does not describe the duende of flamenco performers outside of that context, where the relationship between the performers is more important than the one between performers and audience.

No doubt related through the soil of Andalusia and the famed Baghdadi musician Ziryāb, who established a singing school in Cordóba in the middle of the ninth century,89 the concepts of duende and tarab represent an almost oral/literal binary. The Arabs developed their theories of ecstatic listening over the course of centuries, devising a lexicon that encompasses the myriad experiences of music, while duende lived on the edge of society, illiterate and ignored by the majority culture, and transmitted through the generations through embodied commemoration.

Conclusions

For Lorca, duende is both a bodily and transcendent experience, and a creative force that inspires all artists. The Romantic movement in European music was striving for a similar aesthetic to Lorca in their embrace of transcendent musical experience. Lorca's romanticization of the gitano lifestyles extended to his theory of duende. Though duende is rooted in the suffering and social

89 Katz, “Flamenco.”

29 condition of the gitanos, Lorca recognized that it could occur elsewhere. In Flamenco Deep Song,

Timothy Mitchell’s take on Lorca’s duende implies that it was part of Lorca’s “avant-garde primitivist” aesthetic elevating the concept of duende from a tradition of alcohol-fueled showboating between singers.90 While I agree with Mitchell’s assessment that Lorca was cultivating a certain aesthetic, duende as a phenomenon goes well beyond Lorca. Beneath the poetic prose, there is a concrete embodied basis for Lorca’s interpretation of duende, one rooted in the social rituals of the juerga gitano. As Loren Chuse states: “Lorca’s concept of duende...has had far-reaching effects in flamenco…it continues to have cultural authority”91 How much cultural authority? How do current practitioners of flamenco engage with Lorca’s notions of duende?

Flamenco has left the juerga behind, and now there is duende among the uninitiated. What might we say about this duende?

90 Paul Mitchell, Flamenco Deep Song (London: Yale University Press, 1994), 175. 91 Loren Chuse, The Cantaoras: Music, Gender, and Identity in Flamenco Song, 47.

30 CHAPTER 3

ESO TIENE MUCHO DUENDE: THE AUTHOR’S EXPERIENCE

Historic Interlude: Nuevo Flamenco

From Lorca’s time in the 1930s until the end of the Franco regime, flamenco was stuck in arrested development. The use of flamenco as nationalist propaganda ensured that it was commercialized and sterilized of all its original social meaning. It was not until the flamenco revival that took place in the tablaos of the 1950s and 1960s that a new generation of flamenco performers went back to the puro styles, presenting them to a public that had widely forgotten.92

Serious popular interest in the traditional styles of flamenco, resulted in the reinstatement of the

Concurso del Cante Jondo in Cordóba, and other cities throughout Andalusia.93 Out of this generation emerged a cadre of exceptionally skilled musicians incorporating music from outside of Spain. These were not purists trying to recreate the flamenco of the past; they were forging ahead with a new style, Nuevo Flamenco.94

Paco de Lucía, an enormous influence on many flamenco guitarists, had a well-documented discographic history of collaborations with musicians from other genres, including the guitar trio de Lucía/Di Meola/McLaughlin, and his work with Larry Coryell. Jazz influenced Lucía’s harmonic and melodic language, while the music of Latin America influenced his rhythmic language. Lucía modernized the flamenco cuadro with the additions of the electric bass and the cajón, and re-popularized rumba flamenco with his song “Entre Dos Aguas.”95 Flamenco had

92 Loren Chuse, “Flamenco,” ed. Timothy Rice, Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (New York & London: Routledge, 2000). 93 Katz, “Flamenco.” 94 Chuse, “Flamenco.” 599. 95 Paco de Lucia, Entre Dos Aguas, CD (Polygram Iberica, 1973). This track is among the first flamenco recordings to include electric bass, and featured Cuban percussion instruments like congas and bongos.

31 arrived in the United States in the 1930s with Spanish émigrés who, like Lorca, fled the civil war for the Americas. Though the surge in popularity of flamenco in the US that followed allowed artists like Carmen Amaya to break into Hollywood, its popularity waned until the 1990s.96

Through his international and cross-cultural collaborations ,and emotional and cerebral interpretations of Andalusian music, Lucía helped make inroads in the American market, providing inspiration for American musicians to create their own Nuevo Flamenco. One such group is the

Maharajah Flamenco Trio. My participation in this group has led to many duende experiences, one of which is sketched out below.

Field Note: 6/6/2017

Event: 6-4-2017, MFT @ New Posh in Crawfordville, FL, Potluck and concert

Written: 6-6-2017

New Posh lies on the side of the Crawfordville Highway, the main artery linking

Tallahassee to the Gulf Coast beaches. Just past the center of this small town is a cabin quite out of place on the roadside. The wood is gray and well-weathered, and there is a porch on the front, covered by the tin that roofs the cabin. It appears as if it were taken off of some backcountry homestead and dropped here. The building currently houses New Posh, a community center that houses yoga classes, African drumming, massage therapy, and concerts. It is part of the remnants of the once thriving, now aging, hippie community in North Florida, the sort that lived in communes that began in the 1960s and 1970s. New Posh is the place to go for sound healing and other New Age experiences. The interior is cozy, with couches and locally crafted goods for sale.

96 Yuko Aoyama, “The Role of Consumption and Globalization in a Cultural Industry: The Case of Flamenco,” Geoforum 38 (2007): 103–13, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2006.07.004, 108.

32 In the back is a room that has been added to the original cabin. On this night, the space is lined with rows of folding chairs, all facing the “stage,” more of a mind space than a physically differentiated one.

The potluck began at 5:30, but it was closer to 6:30 when we arrive to set our stage. Many of the chairs were already occupied when we walk in with our first load of gear. It was somewhat unusual to have the audience present during our set up, which Ramin remarked upon to them, saying that they got “to see the whole process.” The crowd was older, of the generation of Debbie

Dix, the owner. Most are white, but there is one woman of Hispanic origin and another that looked

Eastern European. The band banters with the audience, answering questions about our instruments as we finish setting up.

I had not wanted to play the gig earlier in the day. It seemed too far to go for such little pay (New Posh pays their artists from the donations of the audience, so no guarantee we’ll even make gas money), but mainly because I wasn't in the giving mindset necessary for good performance. We had rehearsed a few days ago, a rare occurrence for us, and so this provided a good opportunity to hone our set in preparation for the Southern Guitar Festival the next weekend.

The last concert we had here was well-received, and once we arrived, the band calls for wine, and someone actually runs to the store and gets a few bottles of red (paid for by a donation from an audience member, a gesture that adds to the conviviality in the room.). The entire audience is treated to wine, and as we toast them there is warmth in the room between us. I am in a better mindset.

Our concerts involve a lot of talking, as we explain who we are and what we do. Silviu has a repertoire of stage shtick that he uses to keep the mood light, even when some of the music retains the gitano melancholia and harmonic tensions of flamenco. Not only does this banter inform, but

33 it also helps draw the audience in. They feel like they know us, and invest themselves emotionally in what they are experiencing. The establishment of this rapport is the first lines of communication between the trio and the audience. It helps both sides relax and enjoy the concert.

Given my prior mood, I was not expecting a duende experience, but a few minutes into

“Nueva Vida,”97 and I began feeling it. It was a swell of energy; a rising tide that lifted me up, placed me on a pedestal above the mundane world. I was on a journey through the music, but not lost in it. I was part of it. I was deeply aware of the audience as I performed, and deeply happy for them, as if to say: “you are witnessing the deepest moment of human expression.” I felt it was an unexpected privilege for them. And yet, I suspect that they were unaware the event even transpired.

I asked my compadres if they had noticed anything, and they thought we had played well and the audience had enjoyed it, but there was no sense of a group duende experience, only my own.

Field Note: 6/16/2017

Follow up on two concerts: Southern Guitar Festival, Columbia, S.C. on 6/11/2017, and “Dariya” video premiere, Proof Brewing Company, Tallahassee, FL on 6/15/2017.

The following two performances did not summon the duende for me. One was our concert for the Southern Guitar Festival. When thinking through the circumstances surrounding the performance, I feel it was the strangeness of the room (it was held in the Richland County Public

Library), and the big stage set-up, resulting in a wide separation between us and the audience that prevented the kind of communication necessary for us to feel duende. In my estimation, performance anxiety created a divide between me and the intimacy of duende. The stage set up,

97 Maharajah Flamenco Trio, Encuentro, CD, 2013.

34 sound and lights were not conducive to the environment where communication between the band is strong.

The next performance was our video premiere. Here the crowd was rowdier, and the constant conversations in the back of the audience provided a hum of distraction. Proof Brewing

Company is not the kind of venue where everyone sits down and quietly enjoys the music. With the anticipation of premiering the video and the less engaged audience, there were too many barriers to the kind of mindset needed for duende. It seems that setting and psychology matter in fostering the kind of free-flowing detachment of duende.

These two field notes describe some of the baseline characteristics of duende experience as a kind of musical transcendence. The experience is unpredictable and heavily dependent on the mindset of the performer, which is determined by a wide set of situational qualities, including the stage set up, and the rapports between the individual performers, and the ensemble and the audience. With this baseline established, I turn to the literature on flamenco for its definition of duende.

A Textual Investigation of Duende

The writings of those with first-hand knowledge hold a myriad of descriptions that all vaguely hint at my experiences. Juan Serrano, an internationally known flamenco guitarist of gitano origins, holds a sentimental view that mirrors Lorca’s in some ways. He describes duende as the “indefinable lifeforce that surges through the deepest part of the self”98 and “strips singer

98 Serrano and Elgorriaga, Flamenco Body and Soul: An Aficionado’s Introduction.

35 and audience alike of all human foibles, laying bare their souls.”99 Looking past this poetic description, these observations speak to the dichotomy of duende: the experience of the actor and the experience of the observer. Serrano’s interpretations posits that duende experience only applies to those where the audience and the performer(s) are united in the common emotion of a shared experience, making the audience indispensable to duende.

Donn E. Pohren, widely regarded as an American aficionado of traditional flamenco,100 describes scenes in his book The Art of Flamenco, that have become typical of the portrayal of juergas in gitano culture, the kind that last all night and conjure the duende only through sustained, communal effort, and copious alcohol. While traveling donkey-back through the countryside to a gitano wedding, Pohren describes accompanying a gitano poet by the campfire. After many songs,

Pohren describes the duende he felt the poet was creating.

Moments such as these incite the jondo in men, and the miracle of the duende occurs; for the duendeis the exposure of one’s soul, its misery and suffering, love and hate, offered without embarrassment or resentment. It is a cry of despair, a release of tortured emotions, to be found in its true profundity only in real life situations, not in the make-believe world of theatres and night clubs, and commercial caves as a product that can be bought and sold and produced at will.101

Both Serrano and Pohren’s descriptions strongly show the emotive communication common to duende. Pohren holds the view of the strict purist that cannot separate flamenco from it indigenous setting, and cannot be attained in commercial endeavors, reminiscent of Assumma’s bifurcation of flamenco performance into entertainment or rite. Pohren’s understanding is that duende cannot be formulaically replicated for commerical uses, a sentiment shared by Lorca who stressed that “the duende never repeats itself.”102 Pohren’s stance is for the inseparability of duende from gitano

99 Ibid., 56. 100 Pohren is frequently cited in English-language writings on flamenco (Schreiner, 1990; Hecht, 1994; Chuse, 2013; and Goldberg, Bennahum, Hayes, 2015). 101 Donn E. Pohren, The Art of Flamenco, 4th ed. (Westport, CT: The Bold Strummer, Ltd, 2014), 23. 102 Lorca and Maurer, Deep Song and Other Prose, 51.

36 lifeways, and those outsiders that have been baptized in it, as he claims to be. His stance is a matter of elevating the taste and pride of the aficionado, and in ways, he is as guilty of essentializing and romanticizing gitano culture just as Lorca. What Pohren was attempting to capture is the magical feeling of duende, one to which every human that has experienced musical transcendence can relate, and one that I have experienced in the concert hall.

Paul Hecht’s The Wind Cried, includes a definition for duende in the glossary, that is a direct summation of Lorca.103 Like Pohren, Hecht is a foreigner seeking to understanding flamenco and gitano culture through cultural submersion. These testimonies are useful in that they are interpretations of individual experiences of duende. However, they are highly subjective by nature, and do not provide a theoretical context for describing duende.

Hoping to find a more solid foundation for understanding duende, I turned to the field of ethnomusicology. Some scholars gave terse replies, as was the case with Peter Manuel in The

Cambridge Companion to Guitar, where he glossed over the subject as “soulful expression,” undoubtedly because of the number of lines he would need to explain it thoroughly. Florida State

University alumnus Roman Ferrer, who wrote his Master’s thesis on rumba flamenca in Miami, gave the concept short shrift, describing duende as “an intangible feeling that acts to unite the performers and audiences in a series of climactic episodes.”104 Loren Chuse described it in The

Cantaoras: Music, Gender, and Identity in Flamenco Song as “the transcendent, emotional communication between singer and audience.”105 Chuse recognizes the transcendent aspect, as does Ferrer, but neither delve deeply into what those feelings are for the listener, much less the performer.

103 Paul Hecht, The Wind Cried: An American’s Discovery of the World of Flamenco (New: Dial Press, 1968), 178. 104 Roman Ferrer, “The Rumba-Flamenca Complex: Intersections of North American, Latin, and Spanish Music and Culture in South Beach, Miami” (Florida State University, 2001), 13. 105 Chuse, The Cantaoras: Music, Gender, and Identity in Flamenco Song, 32.

37 Marion Papenbrok offered perhaps the best explanation I have uncovered in the scholarly literature on flamenco, which I quote here at length.

When the intensity of expression goes beyond the limits of time and the personal experience of the artist, then one hears the word duende used with great reverence and awe. It is said to be an irresistible power, which possesses an artist only at very special moments, and which leads the participants…to such a state of ecstasy that they are led to rip their clothing, seem indifferent to fatigue or hunger, and are given to unrestrained crying or even aggressive actions…Such communication is irrational and produces genuine physical responses, blood pressure, heartbeat, and sensitivity to pain can and do change, and consciousness is not infrequently altered. Flamenco is an hypnotic art, and its means and effects, achieving ecstasy, a gnostic process.106

Here I found a convergence of ideas that shared some parallels with my experience and research.

The expressive and emotional experience of the artist, the alteration of the perception of time, some registry in the catalog of physiological responses, and gnostic processes, all resonated with me. Unlike the other authors, Papenbrok focuses attention on the physiological responses of duende. Though Papenbrok’s description of the state of the listener resembles that of someone entranced, it provides a clue to methodologies for exploring duende as an embodied experience through the description of the physical aspects of ecstatic playing. Following this line of thought, notions of duende as “ephemeral,” could be dismissed. Duende is felt with the whole body; it is visceral if nothing else. To interpret my own biological response to duende, I looked to the ethnomusicological concept of the body as a field site.

106 Papenbrok, “The Spiritual World of Flamenco,” 54.

38 Music and the Performer’s Body

“The motion of music alone seems to awaken in our bodies all kinds of responses.” ¾ John Blacking, How Musical Is Man?

It is the Fall of 2010. After performing together on a Cinco de Mayo gig, I finally follow up with Silviu Ciulei,107 and we have our first session. The atmosphere is relaxed as we sit down and tune up, conversing about what he wants to accomplish that night. I learn about the compás, like a time cycle, more than a time signature, with specific accents to differentiate the different compás that are in the same count. The first compás I learn is bulerías, one of the most difficult polos, or styles, of flamenco. It derives from the word burlarse, meaning “to joke around.” I later learned that if one guitarist wants to gauge another guitarist’s skill he will tell him “toca un pequito bulería,” or “play a little bulerías.” It is a challenge of sorts, as it is generally played at an extremely fast tempo. In hindsight, this was Silviu’s way of accessing my musicianship. Not just whether I can play a bunch of fancy licks, but how well I learn something new and difficult.

Like Indian tala, the cycles of bulerías generally end with a heavy accent on the “one.”

Unfortunately, bulerías, is counted a little differently.

Silviu: “It’s in twelve, and it starts on twelve.”

I have no response to this, other than to remark that it doesn’t make sense. I have yet to learn why it starts on twelve, but that is the consensus in flamenco, so I live with it. In the end, it was easier to rely on my ability to pick up the feel of the accents and ignore the counting.

As illustrated in this anecdote about my first flamenco lesson with Silviu, musicians have a unique relationship to music and the way they interact with it through the medium of their bodies.

107 SIL-view CHOO-lay.

39 By musicians, I am specifically referring to those whose experience can include, but goes beyond the formal performance of Western art music, i.e. those that play textless music. When we play with others, we are always learning, finding, and maintaining the groove. Learning to feel the groove is a bodily process. You must internalize the beat, move to it, and embody it. Each musical encounter grooves in its own way, depending on who is involved, regardless of genre. Each of these grooves can be found and felt through listening and feeling the beat. Understanding how someone else interprets the groove can be discerned through observation and mimesis, or learning by doing. For many years, I have known and worked with Danny Bedrosian, an Armenian-

American musician, musicologist, and keyboardist, music director, and de facto band historian for music icon, George Clinton. Danny’s perception of the groove is fine-tuned, and from him I learned about the elasticity of the beat, particularly in funk. The downbeat of one, the rhythmic focal point, always lands a little later than expected, almost as if the music is slowing down, but it never actually does. He said that he himself didn’t really understand the funk feel until he worked with Clinton. By watching where Clinton placed his heel on the downbeat of one, he could embody

Clinton’s interpretation of where the beat is, and feel it the way that Clinton feels it.

The different ways that the same beat can be interpreted differently by different players, even those that are playing together, has been called “participatory discrepancies” by ethnomusicologist Charles Keil, who claims that these discrepancies are crucial to the way groove is created.108 John Blacking outlined in his essay “Towards an Anthropology of the Body” his

108 Charles Keil and Steven Feld, Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 96.

40 concept of “bodily resonance” as “the experience of ‘falling into phase’ that players shared.”109

What both authors describe is now commonly referred to as entrainment.110

Entrainment describes a processual phenomenon in which “two rhythmic processes [within independent systems] interact with each other in such a way that they adjust towards and eventually

‘lock-in’ to a common phase and/or periodicity.”111 This lengthy description is found in the yearbook European Meetings in Ethnomusicology, which details how the concept of entrainment moved from Huygens’ explanation of the interaction between two independent mechanical systems (pendulum clocks) to de Mairan’s 1729 study of the synchronization to light and dark cycles in plants that extended it to biological systems as well. Music-based studies of physiological entrainment did not begin until the 1970s.112 For our purposes, it is sufficient to understand that when two or more musicians play together they are entraining not only their musical output, but through the synchronization of internal rhythmic perception, their physical bodies.

Groove is often used synonymously with feel. One’s ability to feel the music is directly tied to their perception of the groove, to the way they adjust expectations of when the next beat will fall. However, musical feel goes beyond that single perception. Feel can also describe a musician’s ability to sense when it has been seven cycles through an ostinato, or, if music is building, to intuit when the climax is happening, or to feel when a soloist is about to about to end their improvisation. It is a feel for the individual rhythm cycles, but a real-time sense of the overall organicity and trajectory of the piece. An extreme example would be Mustafa Raza’s recording of

Raag Ahiri. In one hour, three minutes, and twenty-two seconds (the running time of the album),

109 Blacking, “Towards an Anthropology of the Body.” 57. 110 Martin Clayton, Rebecca Seeger, and Will Udo, “The Concept of Entrainment and Its Significance for Ethnomusicology,” European Meetings in Ethnomusicology 11, ESEM Counterpoint 1 (2005): 3–82, 34. 111 Ibid., 9-10. 112 Ibid., 30.

41 Dr. Raza presents a traditional reading of ahiri, expressing it through the various sections from alap to drut gat. Raza’s feel for the music allowed him to construct in a single performance, a long form raga, mediated through the vichitra vina,113 that satisfies the aesthetic strictures of Indian classical music. That level of concentration demonstrates a well-developed feel for the music.

Ali Jihad Racy adds another interpretation of feel, speaking of the ability of a tarab player to properly “feel” the music, in order to have ihsās “feeling, namely, the emotional power and talent to musically affect, or engage the listener ecstatically.”114

Those who play flamenco have their own word for feel. They call it aire, air. When Paco

Fonta explained it to me, I got a sense that it was similar to the old musician’s adage about knowing when (and what) not to play, and the importance of space in your musical phrasing. Without the proper aire, a flamenco performance is not right. During an interview, Paco related it to an

American style of music.

I come back to the example, because probably you are more familiar with other music like in blues or jazz. You go to see these jazz people, they are playing, they are doing unbelievable things with the music (scats fast passage), but you start getting bored…It doesn’t have any aire. There’s no aire. Then you see this guy doing, bah…do-dee, bee, bah. Just three notes, and you say, oh, beautiful. I like it, the feeling of it. He’s doing three notes, very easy stuff, a baby can do it, it’s so easy to play, but you like it, then you feel like listening to them. (P. Fonta, 2017)

Aire isn’t just the responsibility and result of the performers, but also the audience. Flamenco in traditional settings is a collaborative effort, where the listeners perform jaleo, which translates as

“commotion.” Listeners clap along to the compás, and when the performance excites them physically, either through emotional or technical wizardry, they will call out. “Eso es (that’s the way), así se toca (that’s how you play),” and the most common, olé. This relates to the ecstatic

113 A 22-string instruments played in the style of an American lap steel guitar, where the body and strings are horizontal to the performer, supported on either end by two large gourd resonators. The strings are plucked with one hand and manipulated through the use of a glass ball slide held in the other hand. 114 Racy, “Creativity and Ambience: An Ecstatic Feedback Model from Arab Music.” 11.

42 feedback loop described by Racy in tarab. Jaleo is also a part of the flamenco cuadro, and a soloist’s bandmates will support his efforts using the same expressions.

In my duende experiences, embodying the groove and feeling the music physically have been necessary precursors. With these things engaged, the ability to go to a deeper level of playing occurs and the body responds physiologically through affect. Humans have has been interested in the ways in which music can alter emotions in people as far back as Plato’s The Republic if not further, and not just among the Greeks or the European inheritors of Western civilization. The idea of aesthetics is part of many musical cultures around the world. Arab tarab and Indian rasa being two fully developed non-Western theories. These systems describe what is commonly translated as musical aesthetics. In a parallel that recalls Racy, Judith Becker makes an important distinction between Western notions of aesthetics as an evaluative interpretive action for determining the artistic merit of a work-object, and the Tantric teachings in India, defined as a process of perception situated in the present moment, devoid of preconceptions.115 The doctrine of the affections developed in Europe during the Baroque era as a branch of aesthetics, is similar to the Indian notion. Based on Cartesian affects, it recognized the kinship between music and emotion, and resembles the Classical Greek and Persian links between musical modes and emotional response.

Musicologists have searched for musical structures that would cause these responses since the establishment of the field, but the interest in affect is not limited to musicological studies.

Psychologist Silvan Tomkins took an interest in affects as bodily responses to external stimuli, identifying them as the “primary human motives,” distinct from the more culturally complicated term emotion.116 Tomkins categorizes affect as “the primary innate biological motivating

115 Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing, 57. 116 Silvan S. Tomkins, “Affects and Drives,” in Approaches to Emotion, ed. Klaus R. Sherer and Paul Ekman (New York: Psychology Press, 2009).

43 mechanism, more urgent than drive, deprivation, and pleasure.117 Affect is the biological precedent to emotion, and can be measured through outward physiological signs in the face and voice.118

Facial expressions are something that humans are socially adapted to notice and respond to. I suggest it is one of the ways that emotions originating from a performer transmit and resonate sympathetically in the observer.

Neuroscientists have provided further insights into the chemistry related to the physical reaction to music-based arousal. Salimpoor et al. published an article in the journal Nature

Neuroscience,119 which provides a rich insight into the ways the body reacts to peak emotional experiences while listening to music. They observed endogenous dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional arousal during music listening. This chemical neurotransmitter is crucial to our biological reward system, and how the body experiences pleasure.

Dopamine is pivotal for establishing and maintaining behavior. If music-induced emotional states can lead to dopamine release, as our findings indicate, it may begin to explain why musical experiences are so valued. These results further speak to why music can be effectively used in rituals, marketing, or film to manipulate hedonic states. Our findings provide neurochemical evidence that intense emotional responses to music involve ancient reward circuitry and serve as a starting point for more detailed investigations of the biological substrates that underlie abstract forms of pleasure.120

Salimpoor et al. also discovered a physiological reflexive correlation between the release of dopamine in these moments of intense listening, and the appearance of “chills,” involuntary muscle spasms.

Chills are not necessarily pleasurable per se, as they can be unpleasant in other contexts (for example, as a result of intense fear). Instead, chills are physiological markers of intense ANS (autonomic nervous system) arousal, which in turn is believed to underlie peak

117 Ibid., 163. 118 Ibid., 188. 119 Valorie N. Salimpoor et al., “Anatomically Disctinct Dopamine Release During Anticipation and Experience of Peak Emotion to Music,” Nature Neuroscience 14, no. 2 (2011): 257–64. 120 Ibid., 262.

44 pleasure during music listening…As such, chills are byproducts, and not a cause of the emotional responses.121

Salimpoor et al., make a connection between peak pleasure in musical listening and the perceptions of time that resembles duende. “The emotions induced by music are evoked…by temporal phenomenon, such as expectations, delay, tension, resolution, prediction, surprise and anticipation.”122 I partitioned this list into two categories: 1) what the performer is doing, and 2) the listener’s response (expectations vs reality), as these are characteristics common to flamenco performance. In most styles of flamenco, there is a strong sense of tonic, the one note that holds the rest of them together. The harmonic structures of flamenco pull against this tonic, creating tensions that are resolved at the cadence of a phrase. These tensions and resolutions are enhanced by manipulation of the expectations of active (fellow performers) and passive (audience) listeners.

For example, by playing a falseta one cycle longer or shorter than expected, the performer is manipulating expectations, and creating tension. The dynamic use of rhythmic and harmonic tension to create an emotive performance is quite common in Nuevo Flamenco.

Furthermore, Salimpoor et al., describe another discovery. “Indeed, we found a temporal dissociation between distinct regions of the striatum while listening to pleasurable music.”123 The striatum, a “mass of striped white and gray matter, connected to the somatosensory and primary motor cortices,”124 is a critical component in the rewards system, movement planning and control, and habit formation. This region demonstrated a perception of musical time in a way that resembled Keil’s “participatory discrepancies” on a micro-level. This empirical data strengthens the idea of music-induced atemporality.

121 Ibid., 261. 122 Ibid., 123 Ibid., . 124 Andrew Colman, ed., “Striatum,” Dictionary of Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 734.

45 Judith Becker’s Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing taps into the neuroscience research in studying the physiological responses to music in trancers and deep listeners. She derives a way in which “one can integrate richly humanistic, first-person descriptions of musical trancing with biological and neurological theories concerning consciousness.”125 Becker cast a wide net in her review of literature on what she calls deep listening (evident in trancing as well as other ecstatic listening cultures), and found evidence in neuroscience and indigenous knowledge.

Understanding emotion as the precognitive ANS response to external musical stimuli,126 Becker explores ANS arousal to music, and the physiological responses that result, such as “chills, goosebumps, changes in breathing or heart rate, tears, [and] changes in skin temperature.”127 She identifies musical emotion as being equivalent to musical arousal.

The “happiness” of listening to music, however one construes “happiness,” is in part the simple result of musical arousal. We tend to feel good when we are musically aroused and excited.128

In addition to dopamine release in Salimpoor et al., the studies Becker examined also found a corresponding release of oxytocin, and engagement of the opioid system, important in social bonding.129

In the ethnographic testimonies of phenomena caused by musical arousal that Becker examines, there is a concrete connection between the engagement of the ANS, and the subsequent physiological response. That the existence of musical transcendence is supported by biological metrics, lends support to the existence of these events, ones that had only been described in text and not chemistry. Her research shows that experiences described as magical or ephemeral cannot

125 Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing, 23. 126 Ibid., 47. 127 Ibid., 49. 128 Ibid., 52. 129 Ibid., 53.

46 be dismissed as the fancy of romantic people. Becker helps establish a theoretical position for the investigation of musical phenomenon using the body and its environs as the field site.

Whereas the physiology of entrainment and the induction of chemicals into various precognitive systems explains the bodily aspects of duende, an experience in which feel and aire are necessary components, the question remains as to how the psychology of this phenomenon can be explained. What sort of automatic systems are in place to allow consciousness the freedom from its mechanical duties of performance to fully experience the musical arousal that might arise? What cognitive traits describe the state of mind of the performer in the throes of duende? It is here in the investigation that the concept of optimal experience, or flow, entered my thinking. Flow could help determine which processes were underway in the musician who transmits what Blacking called

“music that enhances human consciousness.”130

130 Blacking, How Musical Is Man?, 50.

47 CHAPTER 4

FLOW

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the Psychology of Optimal Experience

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (b. 1934) was born to Hungarian parents in what is now Croatia

(Rijeka), but was at the time of his birth, the Italian city of Fiume. He moved to the United States in 1956 to pursue studies at the University of Chicago, and his career has focused on the study of positive psychology, accomplishing a significant breakthrough in happiness research with his study of optimal experience called flow. Now Distinguished Professor of Psychology and

Management at Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, Csikszentmihalyi has retired from teaching, but continues to co-direct the Quality of Life Research Center with Jeanne

Nakamura, which he founded in 1999. The history of how Csikszentmihalyi came upon this revolutionary idea is retold in a paper he co-authored with Nakamura. The following is a summary of that history.

Csikszentmihalyi was a doctoral student at the University of Chicago while working on his dissertation in 1963. As part of his research, he was observing a group of artists at work. His intention was to understand their process from blank canvas to finished artwork. One thing that stuck out to him as he observed them, was their intense focus on the work they were doing, to the point of not eating or sleeping. This focus dissipated immediately when the artists were finished with one work, then reapplied to the next canvas. What Csikszentmihalyi was trying to understand was their motives. They were not creating art because they wanted to sell it, or even admire the finished product. Their motivation was in the creative act itself. Csikszentmihalyi had discovered a new motivation that he called autotelicity. An activity can be described as autotelic if it is

48 undertaken for its own sake. Sports and music have been described as autotelic, and many studies using flow have focused on these activities. Csikszentmihalyi’s work is based on several realizations about the nature of consciousness, defined here as “intentionally ordered information.”131 Our minds are bombarded by information by our senses. Consciousness is the ability to order this information in a way that makes sense of the world. Psychic entropy, described as chaotic consciousness made up of disordered thoughts, is the enemy of happiness. The opposite of psychic entropy is optimal experience.

When the information that keeps coming into awareness is congruent with goals, psychic energy flows effortlessly. There is no need to worry, no reason to questions one’s adequacy…The positive feedback strengthens the self, and more attention is freed to deal with the outer and the inner environment.132

By marshaling our psychic energy towards a goal, we are ordering our minds and controlling consciousness, inducing a flow state. Flow states lead to complexity of self and to a sense of fulfillment. Complexity of self is the combination of two processes: differentiation and integration.

Differentiation is our sense of uniqueness, that we are one-of-a-kind. Integration is our sense of belonging, that we are part of something bigger. In finding balance between these polarities, selfishness and conformity, a complex self is possible.133 Flow helps develop complexity, which

Csikszentmihalyi vaguely defines as growth of self. What he means by this is that when we achieve higher levels of complexity, our ability to enjoy experiences increases, resulting in happiness and contentment.

The emergence of flow contradicted the evolutionary theory of an economy of physical and psychic resources. Why would human expend these resources in a task that grants them no

131 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Kiyoshi Nakamura, “Universal and Cultural Dimensions of Optimal Experiences,” Japanese Psychological Research 58, no. 1 (2016): 4–13, https://doi.org/10.1111/jpr.12104. 132 Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 39. 133 Ibid., 41.

49 survival advantages? Csikszentmihalyi and Nakamura state that flow played a crucial role in human evolution. “By developing an accidental neuro-physiological connection between pleasure and effort, our ancestors have learned to seek out ever-increasing challenges, a continuous expanding of the boundaries of our engagement with the world.”134 This ties into what

Csikszentmihalyi describes as an increased “complexity of self.”135 Their paper addressing the universality of flow as a part of the human condition compared the flow experience among

Westerners, who hold strong notions of individuality, with those of Japanese participants, who feel a stronger cultural pull to put the group first. Specifically, it is tied to the Japanese notion of jujitsu- kan, “the feeling that they are fully and effectively functioning to the limits of their existing skills.”136 It is a balance between their feeling of accomplishment vis-à-vis society. Their conclusion is that flow is a universal human experience.

Characteristics of Flow

The following is Csikszentmihalyi’s summary of the characteristics of flow,137 accompanied by an explanation of their relationship to musical performance.

1) Goals are clear. The goal is to play the composition correctly, with the right balance of

technicality and emotion.

2) Feedback is immediate. When playing, it is obvious when you are not doing well and when

you are.

134 Ibid., 7. 135 Ibid., 41. 136 Csikszentmihalyi and Nakamura, “Universal and Cultural Dimensions of Optimal Experiences,” 8. 137 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Nina Gilbert, “Singing and the Self: Choral Music as ‘Active Leisure,’” The Choral Journal 35, no. 7 (February 1995): 13–19.

50 3) Skills match challenges. Performing a composition requires the development of the

appropriate techniques to execute it effectively. More challenging music has a higher

likelihood of error and thus presents an engaging activity.

4) Concentration is deep. The more challenging a piece of music, the more psychic energy is

required, leading to deeper levels of concentration.

5) Problems are forgotten. As performance entails a serious of moments linked together by

the “virtual time” of the music, the music becomes the only concern.

6) Control is possible. Even during moments of deep improvisation, the player is always in

control of the instrument.

7) Self-consciousness disappears. The kind of ecstatic performance I have experienced with

Maharajah Flamenco Trio has led to a loss of self.

8) The sense of time is altered. As discussed earlier, musical time is apart from the clock, as

the rhythms of the music entrain the bodies of the performer.

9) The experience becomes autotelic. Music’s autotelicity is one of the main reasons for the

proliferation of music in all cultures of the world.

These traits not only map onto music performance in general but the duende experience specifically. Flow contains an understanding of the psychological state of the performer that warranted further investigation.

Flow Methodology

What Csikszentmihalyi theorized about optimal experience is based in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, whose concern was focused on how things are experienced and not why they

51 happen.138 For Husserl, all that could be known is distilled into one category, that which can be experienced. Recognizing the difficulty in measuring subjective experience, Csikszentmihalyi spent thirty years developing the ESM (Experience Sampling Method), a methodology of systematic phenomenology.139 The ESM was designed as a way to gauge flow states within the context of everyday life, and thus the participants were directed at random times throughout the day to rate their experience through key criteria developed to capture experience. As duende is a moment in time, when one cannot respond to such prompting, i.e., they are in the middle of performance, the ESM was not an appropriate methodology for this thesis. Instead, I had to resort on the memories of participants. My interviews relied on the words and memories of those recalling events that may or may not have happened recently; something hard to describe and interpreted sensorially. As the main drive is to “study experience in the naturally occurring contexts of everyday life,”140 the ESM as a methodology does not align well with the particulars of this duende study. Not only is the immediacy of relaying a real-time experience infeasible to this project, everyday life is only important in that it is what the participants are contrasting the duende experience with.

ESM has applications across multiple fields, but represents a world of standard deviations and chi-squares antithetical to my training in the humanities. What seemed more applicable to my purposes is the concept of flow and how its characteristics might intersect with those of duende.

The research on flow is extensive, and published in a variety of journals, dominated by the field of psychology, and provides a range of methodological applications. In examining this literature, several studies proved important to my understanding of duende.

138 Joel M. Hektner, Jennifer A. Schmidt, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, eds., Experience Sampling Method (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc, 2011), 3. 139 Ibid., 4. 140 Ibid., 2.

52 Flow and Music

“The value of music is, I believe, to be found in terms of the human experiences involved in its creation.” ¾ John Blacking, How Musical Is Man?

Flow has been used to study autotelic activities in many areas, including sports and game play. It has proven to be a popular and effective tool for studying music, and has been applied with a variety of goals. I provide here a brief review of the some of the studies relevant to this thesis.

In searching the literature on flow, I was interested in aspects that could be used to measure and describe duende, including methodologies and cognitive metrics for understanding flow, and descriptions of experiential evidence of flow.

Wrigley and Emmerson’s “The Experience of the Flow State in Live Music Performance.” was the first study to provide empirical evidence of the validity of the flow model in live music performance (Wrigley and Emmerson, 2011).141 It describes the methodology, the use of the FSS-

2 Form (Flow State Scale-2 developed for measuring flow in sports performance), and the results of the experiment. Wrigley and Emmerson’s test subjects were undergraduate students in an

Australian music academy, and the performances were mid- and end-of-term assessments; times of high stress for music students and not optimal for flow research. The main success of this study was to confirm the accuracy of the FSS-2 for measuring Flow states in musical performance. Many of the interview questions I developed for this thesis are based on the FSS-2 form.

Hart and Di Blasi’s “Combined Flow in Musical Jam Sessions,” put forth the concept of combined flow in a study of musical improvisation. Rather than flow as an individual experience, these researchers were interested in a communal, or as they say combined, version of flow. This

141 William J. Wrigley and Stephen B. Emerson, “The Experience of Flow State in Live Music Performance,” Psychology of Music 41, no. 3 (2011): 292–305, https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735611425903.

53 permutation of flow considers the group nature of music performance, which corresponds to the interests of this thesis. There was evidence to support the position that combined flow induced feelings of communitas among the players, post-performance. Hart and Di Blasi provide a methodology for interpreting the data using grounded theory, wherein the theory is based on the evidence, and derived post hoc. Grounded theory is an approach suitable for analyzing duende through the phenomenology of flow, where the results of the ethnography will determine the theory of duende, not the other way around. Like Hart and Di Blasi, I am basing my interpretations on ethnographic interviews rather than the ESM.142

Diaz’s “Mindfulness, Attention, and Flow during Music Listening: An Empirical

Investigation” uses verbal accounts, structured questionnaires, and the ESM to study the effects of mindfulness on musical attention. The results showed a correlation between mindfulness and increase in listening enjoyment. It also speculates that flow and aesthetic response are each unique types of “heightened and positively valenced affective experiences.”143 Manzano et al., in “The

Psychophysiology of Flow During Piano Playing,” tracked piano playing-induced flow, recording the physiological responses of the players. They found a correspondence between the pianist playing in a flow state and the heart period blood pressure, heart rate variability, activity of the zygomaticus major muscle (smiling muscles), and respiratory depth. They conclude that flow is a state of “effortless attention” resulting from the combination of high attention and positive affect.144

142 Emma Hart and Zelda Di Blasi, “Combined Flow in Musical Jam Sessions: A Pilot Qualitative Study,” Psychology of Music 42, no. 2 (2013): 275–90, https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735613502374. 143 Frank Diaz, “Mindfulness, Attention, and Flow During Music Listening: An Empirical Investigation,” Psychology of Music 41, no. 1 (2011): 42–58, https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735611415144. 144 Orjan de Manzano et al., “The Psychophysiology of Flow During Piano Playing,” Emotion 10, no. 3 (2010): 301– 11, https://doi.org/dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0018432.

54 I soon realized that there were more correlations between duende and flow than what is outlined in the nine characteristics laid out by Csikszentmihalyi. In Marin and Bhattacharya’s study “Getting into the Musical Zone: Trait Emotional Intelligence and Amount of Practice

Predicts Flow in Pianists,”145 the authors explore the similarities between flow and being “in the zone,” a state synonymous with being in the groove. Their practice-oriented studies evidenced a strong corollary between the strength of flow experience, and trait emotional intelligence, defined as the character quality of having the ability to process emotion-laden information.146 The study found that the participants acknowledged the role of emotions in inducing flow, and that emotional intelligence shows a predisposition for flow. Of interest to this thesis is their summation connecting musical flow and emotion,

The experience of flow during musical activities may depend on at least two “affective factors:” first, on the musical piece and its emotional characteristics, and second, on the performer’s personality and his or her emotional intelligence.147

Chirico et al., reported similar findings in a survey of flow literature,148 stating that affects play an important role in the flow found in musical contexts. They suggest the link between flow and emotions is not limited to the emotive components of performance, but includes the emotions induced through music.149

In “Assessing Creativity in Musical Compositions: Flow as an Assessment Tool,” Byrne et al., found a correlation between flow states and quality of compositions based on creativity

145 Manuela M. Marin and Joydeep Bhattacharya, “Getting into the Musical Zone: Trait Emotional Intelligence and Amount of Practice Predicts Flow in Pianists,” Frontiers in Psychology 4, no. 22 (2013): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00853. 146 Ibid., 3. 147 Ibid., 3. 148 Alice Chirico et al., “When Music ‘Flows.’ State and Trait in Musical Performance, Composition and Listening: A Systematic Review,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00906. 149 Ibid., 11.

55 ratings, suggesting a connection between flow and creativity.150 Bernard’s “Making music,

Transcendence, Flow, and Education” discovered a similarity between flow and transcendent music making, which she describes as those that involve peak performance from the players, combined with a sense of fulfillment from being a part of something more than themselves.151

The literature suggests flow is a more dynamic process, interrelated to other systems, than what was encapsulated in Csikszentmihalyi’s nine traits. Not only does it correlate with physiological demonstrations, but flow intersects with other autotelic aspects of music performance; affect and emotion, transcendence, aesthetics, combined flow, and communitas.

Each of these components applies to duende experience.

150 Charles Byrne, Raymond McDonald, and Lana Carlton, “Assessing Creativity in Musical Compositions: Flow as an Assessment Tool,” British Journal of Music Education 20, no. 3 (November 2003): 277–90, https://doi.org/doi.org/10.1017/S0265051703005448. 151 Rhoda Bernard, “Music Making, Transcendence, Flow, and Music Education,” International Journal of Education & the Arts 10, no. 14 (2009), http://www.ijea.org/v10n14/.

56 CHAPTER 5

AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF DUENDE

Duende con mis Hermanos

Silviu Ciulei

The Maharajah Flamenco Trio began in the fall of 2010 through the efforts of Silviu Ciulei.

Ciulei had recently come to FSU to pursue his Master’s degree in guitar performance, after graduating from Middle Tennessee State University. Born to an Italian mother and a Bulgarian father, Ciulei grew up in Constanta, Romania, a resort town on the shores of the Black Sea. He began classical guitar training at the age of six. It was while on a family vacation in Spain that a then twelve-year-old Ciulei, witnessed gitanos playing flamenco in the streets, and was instantly enchanted by the music and the guitar technique. Ciulei spent several years in Cadiz, Spain as a student of Ricardo Muñez. He also went to Seville to study with Oscar Guzman, and in California with Adam del Monte, a fellow Romanian flamenco. It was from Ciulei that Yazdanapanah and I, the other member of Maharajah, learned to play flamenco.

Ciulei is a prize-winning classical guitarist, who has been able to incorporate flamenco into his classical performances, as well as adding elements of Western art music in his flamenco. In addition to his performance engagements, Ciulei is Assistant Professor of Guitar at Furman

University in Greenville, SC. Our conversation over lunch one day yielded some insightful perspectives on the way Ciulei interprets duende.

Everybody, at least in the circles that I was [in], kind of thinks about duende the same way. It’s nothing you really do for it, it’s just something that happens. I feel duende when I play a classical concert. Sometimes when I sing in flamenco, that piece at the end of “A Tu Vera,”152 sometimes I do it a little more intricate than other times, that’s when I feel the

152 “A Tu Vera,” a song by Gipsy Kings, is frequently covered at Maharajah Flamenco Trio performances. Found on the album Gipsy Kings, The Best of the Gipsy Kings, CD (Nonesuch, 1995).

57 duende. That’s what pushes me to do something different, it’s a thing in the moment. You’re just in there, and I feel like it’s basically…I don’t know how to describe it, I don’t think there are really words. Even duende doesn’t mean anything other than what it means. I’d say, just the passion. You’re not going to play every piece as passionate as some other. If you really like a piece or a passage, or you’re really getting into your [improvised] solo, and people are really digging it and they’re cheering you on, I feel like that’s when the duende comes out. And in flamenco, they want that duende all the time, that’s why the whole time someone’s dancing or playing or whatever, people are cheering them on, “olé! I think it is, because you’re in the moment, you get lost in the moment. That’s what it is. You don’t care about time, you can’t really think about anything else, you’re just having fun and its great. I feel like also if it’s a community of people on stage, the duende is more easily achievable. Especially if the relationship between those people is so close like ours. We’re all brothers and we support each other, and when someone does something nice we’re like “uh, that’s good.” Just seeing that support, it helps you push when the guy goes, olé! (Ciulei, 2017)

Ciulei’s statement affirms the usual comments about duende. It’s “just something that happens,” resulting in passionate playing in a communal setting. His comments “they want that duende all the time,” and “you don’t care about time,” points to an autotelicity inherent in duende that demonstrates some flow-type process. Ciulei also presents a very clear picture of the importance of jaleo in creating the conditions for the performer to feel duende. The encouragement of jaleo helps push him towards greater expression. This is another correlation between duende and tarab, as illustrated by Racy’s interlocutor in “Creativity and Ambience.”

I like the light in the performance hall to remain on so that I can see the listeners and interact with them. If they respond I become inspired to give more. (Sabāh Fakhrī, 1991)153

There is a positive feedback loop between the performer and the jaleo that spurs duende, and the relationship between performer and audience that encourages tarab,154 both of which suggest the positive feedback of flow. Later in the interview, Ciulei’s comments turn to the relationship between duende and inspiration, linking those things to the act of improvisation and composition.

It is really inspiration, I feel like that’s a good word. You have to be inspired to do something, to get out of the ordinary with what you do. But you know there’s many interpretations of duende. I like to think of it as being in the moment. Really doing

153 Ibid., 8. 154 Racy, “Creativity and Ambience: An Ecstatic Feedback Model from Arab Music,” 1.

58 something different with the music that you have played…So duende, I say inspiration, passion, expressivity…To me it happens a lot when I come up with a piece, or work on a piece. When I have a new idea that I’m passionate about. (Ciulei, 2017)

The idea of risk taking, in this case being inspired to do something out of the ordinary, is reflected in Lorca’s description of a performance by Niña de los Peines found in Juega y Teoria. In order for her to achieve duende in her performance “she had to rob herself of skill and safety.”155

There is something about the psychological response to risk that lends itself to duende experience. Neuroscience has proven a link between risk-taking behaviors and dopamine reception,156 pointing to a connection between music and pleasure in the brain similar to Salimpoor et al.’s dopamine release in connection to peak emotion during listening. Ciulei’s response when asked about the flow characteristic of effortless playing, linked back to work as flow.157

I feel like it’s not quite the same thing [as duende]. You can achieve that after playing for a long time. For example, if I stay up late and practice for a long, long time, or come up with a piece or something like that, some of that will happen. It will be four in the morning and my fingers are so going that it’s just…effortless. Wherever my brain wants to go. It just does it. (Ciulei, 2017)

Being in the moment, inspired risk-taking, and striking the right balance between artistry and technique, were all important in the way Silviu interprets and expresses duende. Of note is his distinction in the difference in neuro-motor engagement between playing guitar and singing or dancing. Ciulei’s need to control the instrument necessitates a certain level of concentration and consciousness that precludes trance.

With the guitar, I don’t think you can fully let go, because there are many motor thing that need to happen. I’ve certainly let go fully and fucked it up. (Ciulei, 2017)

155 Lorca and Maurer, Deep Song and Other Prose, 46. 156 David H. Zald et al., “Midbrain Dopamine Receptor Availability Is Inversely Associated with Novelty-Seeking Traits in Humans,” The Journal of Neuroscience 28, no. 53 (2008): 14372–78, https://doi.org/DOI:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2423-08.2008. 157 Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Ch. 7.

59 Ramin Yazdanpanah

Ramin Yazdanpanah was born in Tehran the year before the Iranian Revolution. His parents,

American-educated professionals, fled to Miami in 1979, where members of his Cuban mother’s family helped them resettle. He grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, and recently received a Ph.D. in

International and Comparative Education from Florida State University. Yazdanpanah is the percussionist for Maharajah Flamenco Trio, which also showcases his masterful playing of the

Australian yidaki (digeridoo). Being a percussionist and a didge player, Yazdanpanah has had many moments of ecstatic playing, with Maharajah and other musicians. The digeridoo, an aerophone from the Aborigines of Australia, requires an intensely embodied playing technique.

Circular breathing, where the player simultaneously squeezes air out of the body with muscle constriction, while engaging the diaphragm to intake air, is a necessary technique of this instrument. These exchanges are brief, but the necessity of maintaining constant air pressure makes the entire process a complicated choreography of muscle groups. Yazdanpanah description of the effects of playing the didge for an extended period (3-5 minutes) is that “it gets you high.” The controlled breathing of yogic traditions is not unlike playing digeridoo, and Yazdanpanah actively participates in “sound healing” sessions, where listeners are encouraged to entire a deep listening state, where the constant low hum of the digeridoo is accented by the sounds of gongs and crystal bowls. Given Yazdanpanah’s proclivity to spirituality and music, I knew he was sensitive to the sorts of ecstatic experiences that characterize duende.

In musical ensembles, the percussionist must have a deeply embodied sense of musical time in order to provide the foundation for the groove. This idea is found in flamenco in the writings of

Marion Papenbrok: “…As long as the beat, which undergirds the emotional message, is right, the

60 performance will be correct and expressive.”158 There is a meme circulating on social media of

Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed running towards each other and embracing, knee-deep in a body of water. The scene is from Rocky III, when Rocky and Apollo have put aside their enmity and become best friends. The meme, from Mark Marxon’s Bass Channel, has captioned it “when you find the perfect drummer.” This humorous bit of pop culture expresses the musical relationship between bassists and the drummers, including the one shared between Yazdanpanah and me. Of all the interviews that I conducted for this project, the one with Yazdanpanah yielded the most similar descriptions of duende to my own.

David Cobb: Let me ask you to think about some of those more puro concerts that you attended, and talk to me a little about how the audience reacted and responded to what they were witnessing. Ramin Yazdanpanah: I think you go in, and you know you’re going in to this kind of like, almost like a sacred ritual. It’s a concert, but it’s something more than that. It feels like a lot of these tabernas, these places where you go see flamenco traditionally, they are kind of like a cave, a cave-feel. DC: No windows… RY: No windows, it’s dark, smoke-filled, like you’re going into another dimension. And I think everyone feels the same way. They are totally taken away, enchanted by it. It’s something where I felt people could identify with, especially the Spaniards…Even if you weren’t Spaniard, you can relate to it, connect… DC: How? RY: It just hits you in a place that’s very, I want to say, passionate, it’s a deep feeling. I guess because a lot of the singing is very heart-felt, very emotional, allows people to express those emotions in public, where generally those emotions are kept private. But then it has a very uplifting…it’s a lot of emotions in one. DC: Like a catharsis. They feel that emotion that they’re having, it resonates in the audience and you feel better afterward, because you let it out. RY: Absolutely. I think everyone feels lighter when they’re coming out, definitely impressed, blown away…And you feel transported to, because the clothing is very traditional, so it feels like you’re transported…

Yazdanpanah’s description of a cante jondo performance he attended in Spain tracks well with those found in the literature. It seems to have all the mysterious gnosis of Lorca, with the socio-cultural implications of Assumma and Papenbrok. There is a clear communication of

158 Papenbrok, “The Spiritual World of Flamenco,” 55.

61 emotion transpiring, being universally received, and up to this point, the word duende had not even entered the conversation. The importance of ambiance is illustrated here, adding to the effect of the performance. The settings of our performances are commercial, but the atmosphere is important in that context as well.

DC: The intimate, me too, I feel like you just connect easier, it’s not so formal. RY: I think there’s something to be said, when we’re playing a nice stage, I feel it elevates our level, technically. DC: There have definitely been big stage experiences where you can hear each other really well, the sound is good, and I’ve gotten to that state. Like Matt Palmer’s festival159, I feel like that was a really good space, we could hear each other, and the audience is far, but they were close enough and you could see them. RY: I feel like with those, we’re building that experience on our own performance, rather than the audience participating in it.

This interview confirmed for me that I needed to focus more on the performer’s perspective, and not the listener. The idea that the performers can build duende off each other negates the necessity or the audience in this case. Once we did discuss duende, his understanding was based on experiences in music beyond flamenco.

RY: It [duende]was explained like, just that feeling that its created by the musicians. It’s not like all flamenco has duende, but it’s something that’s a moment that you arrive to this point and maybe just goosebumps…it’s a feeling like, “man this is something special right here.” DC: Something special is happening. RY: Yeah, I’m getting transported to that place, all the musicians are just in sync with each other, not just technically but, it’s hard to explain, because it’s a feeling…But the musicians, there’s a point where I almost feel it’s a rhythmic thing too, like you’re in the pocket, some kind of groove or pocket that you’ve hit where everyone is communicating and its together, and all those different things I was talking about with the cognitive, the emotional, the meta- cognitive, and even maybe when the audience is pulled in as well. Everyone is on the same page, everyone’s in the same moment of time and space or something, you know? And it creates this special sensation.

159 Maharajah Flamenco Trio performance at the 2016 Eastern Shore Guitar Festival, October 23rd, 2016, Washington College, Chestertown, MD.

62 When asked about the effortlessness of flow as part of duende experience, Yazdanpanah brought in the concept of automaticity to distinguish between effortless and automatic playing.

According to the Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science,

Automaticity refers to the way we perform some mental tasks quickly and effortlessly, with little thought or conscious intention. Automatic processes are contrasted with deliberate, attention-demanding, conscious controlled aspects of cognition.160

Automaticity presents a paradox for casting duende as a flow process. Flow describes effortless motion, but also total concentration, the “conscious controlled aspects of cognition,” referred to above. Parsing out the distinction, Csikszentmihalyi describes the concentration of flow as a state of mind where the entirety of psychic energy (focus) is directed in a single direction, towards the task at hand.161 Given that the concentration of performing music involves more than the motor skills involved, automaticity could describe the compartmentalizing of the motor tasks, while the rest of the mind is involved in processing the internalization of the groove and actively listening and responding to the music. Yazdanpanah’s interpretation of duende entails the emotional and transcendent aspects, while introducing the concept of automaticity to explain the effortless playing of duende and flow.

Yazdanpanah’s musical experiences are varied, and when he first heard about duende, he recognized it as something familiar to other moments of musical transcendence.

RY: Yeah, that’s something I’ve experienced, that’s interesting, like a term given. And that’s how people describe flamenco, does it have duende, or does it not? DC: If you had to put that into words, what do you think they mean when they’re asking that? RY: Does it… DC: Hard to put into words. RY: Well, I would think, does it suck you in? Does it bring you in and do you feel this emotion, this internal feeling of a spiritual type of experience? Did you have a spiritual

160 Thomas J. Palmieri, “Automaticity,” ed. L. Nadel, Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (Hoboken: Wiley, 2005), Credo Reference. 161 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 58.

63 experience with whatever is happening at that moment. Is it very authentic, meaning are the musicians being authentic in their expression of the music?

Paco Fernandez and Siempre Flamenco

Its 106 miles to Chicago. We got a full tank of gas, half a pack of smokes, its dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses. -Elwood Blues.162

Its 483 miles to Miami. I got a full tank of gas, and its only dark out because the sun hasn’t yet risen. I’ve got about 30 hours to get to Miami, do some fieldwork, and get back. My first stop is

South Beach, where I will be reconnecting with my fellow flamenconeers, Paco and Celia Fonta.

We met and performed together a year ago as part of their Florida Folk Heritage Award residency.

The Center for Music in the Americas helped present the concert at Mission San Luis, and our mutual friend Derek Jones facilitated a collaboration between the Fontas and the Maharajahs.

We played a rumba medley together as the finale, and Celia soloed. It was really fun, but the best part was talking to them. Paco is Spanish, and grew up in flamenco. His perspective and relationship to flamenco is far more intimate than mine, and I appreciated his insights.

When I arrive at the Fontas home on South Beach, they are in the kitchen with a guest,

Paco Fernandez. With the concert canceled due to the rain, they have decided to spend the day making bread, and they are working dough when I enter the kitchen. The homely smell of baking bread emanates from the stove. Eventually, we got to the interviews, followed by dinner and more interviews.

162 John Landis (director). Blues Brothers (Universal Pictures, 1980).

64 Paco Fernandez

Duende esta en el aire. –Paco Fernandez

I interview their guest Paco Fernandez first. Paco has come to the United States to perform with the Fontas at the Siempre Flamenco Summer Dance Band Night, a weekly flamenco party held at the North Beach Bandshell in Miami, FL, supported by the National Endowment, Miami

Beach Cultural Arts Council, and Miami Dade Department of Cultural Affairs. Paco is a guitarist from a well-known gitano musical family in Seville, in the interior of western Andalusia. Born in

Triana, the gitano quarter, Paco has performed with his family, La Familia Fernandez, a puro-style cuadro of international renown, as well as with other flamencos and as a soloist. He is a warm and welcoming man, with touches of gray in his beard and hair. His mother tells him he was playing guitar at the age of three, and his flamenco ability reflects this early start. Paco doesn’t speak

English, so our interview is mediated by Celia, who is fluent in Spanish. After a few introductory questions about his background, I ask him about duende.

Celia Fonta: Duende is in the air. It could come when you’re in a hammock on the beach. For him, maybe he’s on a hammock and all of a sudden, he hears this incredible phrase of music, that’s his duende…So, he’s saying duende is something made up, but duende is made up because you can feel it anywhere. So, for him the duende entered in him, and inspired him to write this new song…. So, what does it feel like? Whatever he feels. He says, what I’m feeling, but if I’m lucky enough, if I’m able to give that feeling to other people, transmit that feeling, what I’m feeling. If I’m able to transmit what I’m feeling, and make you feel the same thing I’m feeling, then that is important to him….He doesn’t believe in the idea…He doesn’t believe in the idea of duende. So, it’s like a myth. Duende is a myth. It’s a myth and he hasn’t ever experienced duende. So that’s Paco Fernandez. He says you play, or don’t play. You transmit to the audience, or you don’t transmit. If you transmit what you’re feeling, I say to you, olé! Well, that’s duende. If you’re playing, and you get someone to say olé to what you’re doing… DC: Then the duende is there. CF: Then the duende is there. DC: Well, I wonder, have you ever experienced the kind of stuff we were talking about, suspension of time… CF: Tu a …[Have you ever experienced in music the sensation…]? He never, no, because for him it’s his day-by-day life, for him, it’s like something so average, like daily life in growing up, so it’s not anything special. It’s not duende, it’s not romantic, it’s not anything.

65 He says, maybe waking up one morning, at Christmas, and there’s like a family party, it’s an orchestra because you have so many people, it’s an orchestra…So, he’s saying so in his family there would be a lot of people, they would get together, and there might have been like twenty to thirty people in the family… DC: An orchestra of the palmas, and the cante. CF: Right. And so, for him, that’s like his best moments, when the family gets together, and they’re singing like what you saw in the movie. The word duende for them is something that’s been made up in the eyes of the media. He hasn’t ever studied anywhere, his schooling was with his family learning flamenco…More or less, for his greatest moments are when the family get together. For us it would be a moment of duende, for him… DC: It’s normal. CF: It’s normal.

Paco’s attitudes about duende are deeply situated within the intersectionality of his identity both as a professional flamenco musician and a gitano from Spain. While we were together, I played for him Maharajah Flamenco Trio’s video for “Dariya,” a Nuevo Flamenco composition based on the rumba, with the unusual (to flamenco) addition of the didjeridoo. His main comments were on the high production value of the video, and not on this new version of flamenco, so far removed from the cante jondo. He showed much more enthusiasm when he shared a documentary film he had made about La Familia Fernandez. I could tell that he saw himself as a keeper of the old ways, the flamenco gitano, not the new hybridizations happening outside of the small enclave of the purists.

When pressed about his notions on the physicality of duende, he pushed back with a firm position that duende itself was not real, that it was a romantic notion. This hinted at the same struggle for authenticity against commercialization, for the preservation of the cante jondo, that haunted Lorca, inspiring him to put on the Concurso. I could imagine that Paco Fernandez felt duende was just another misconception about his people. Gitanismo, gipsy-ness, was used to propel figures like Carmen Amaya into the spotlight,163 and became a hot commodity in the

163 Carmen Amaya was hailed in the Spanish press as the “gipsy queen, with all the marvelous duendes of her soulful dance,” upon her return to Spain in 1947. Found in K. Meira Goldberg, Ninotchka Devorah Bennahum, and Michelle

66 commercialization of Lorca’s time and beyond. Yazdanpanah speaks to this, based on his experiences living in Spain.

As far as identity, I think gypsies and gypsy culture, gitano culture, is still separate from the mainstream. And I think Spaniards have a weird struggle between accepting gypsy culture, embracing it as Spanish identity, during Franco that was really utilized, to establish this Spanish identity, but at the same time they’ve grown up with a lot of discrimination against gypsies. There’s a lot of poverty among the gypsies. You go through certain projects and ghettos and you see certain gypsies, whether they be from Spain or other parts of Europe, and they have a bad name, you know? It’s probably similar to African Americans here, where you have these poor areas, those tend to be kind of dangerous and separate from mainstream…Economically depressed and culturally different. And then you have so much of it in the culture, too. Its admired. So, it’s a similar dynamic, I would say. (Yazdanapanah, 2017)

Essentializing and profiting from the cultural commodities of an oppressed class problematizes the international popularity of non-Spanish flamenco as a textbook example of cultural appropriation.164 As a professional performer of flamenco, Paco Fernandez walks a fine line between the fidelity to his gitano traditions and the need to profit from them. The opposition between professionalism and purity has its roots in Lorca’s Concurso, where the strict prohibition of professionals cast their flamenco as too refined and impure. Thinking that professionalism equates to commercialization and a corruption of style, the idea that professionals are not playing puro flamenco is an old debate among aficionados.165

Regardless of what Paco Fernandez was reacting to with my interest in explaining duende,

Celia and Paco Fonta’s interviews were conducted in light of having heard his opinion, and responded to his statements as much as to my questions.

Heffner Hayes, eds., Flamenco on the Global Stage: Historical, Critical, and Theoretical Perspectives (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2015), 179. 164 Margaret Drabble, Jenny Stringer, and Daniel Hahn, eds., “Cultural Appropriation,” The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature (Oxford: Oxford Music Online, 2007). 165 John C. Moore, “Purity and Commercialization: The View from Two Working Artists, Pericon de Cadiz and Chato de La Isla,” in Flamenco on the Global Stage: Historical, Critical, and Theoretical Perspectives, ed. K. Meira Goldberg, Ninotchka Devorah Bennahum, and Michelle Heffner Hayes (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2015), 166–77, 166-167.

67 Celia Fonta

Celia Fonta is a Jewish-American flamenco dancer raised in Chicago, IL. The daughter of a classical pianist, Celia first encountered flamenco while taking guitar lessons. As soon as she heard it, she wanted to learn more. A Spanish literature major in college, Celia went to Spain to study both Spanish and flamenco guitar. It was here that she first learned that flamenco was more than just music. Up until that point, she was completely unaware of flamenco dance, but once exposed, she set down the guitar and dedicated herself to the baile. It was in Barcelona that she met Paco, who encouraged her to transition to dancing, where her background in folk dancing gave her a foundation in kinesthetics. Celia is both the only woman, and the only dancer that I interviewed. Her background in guitar gives her a similar perspective to the instrumental performers that I was focusing on. Trimmed for concision, below is the sum of her experience with duende.

Celia Fonta: For me, the duende can happen in various ways. For example, sometimes if I’m dancing, and I’m performing, and I feel like I’m completely in the moment, so that I’m not thinking about what I’m doing, I’m not thinking, not analyzing, all of a sudden, I’m just doing it a hundred percent. Sometimes, not always that can happen, then for me, that’s like a moment of duende, for me as a performer. Or, if I’m a spectator, and it could be just hanging around the house, and all the sudden something will happen. Paco Fonta, or Paco Fernandez I guess, could do something, or a friend if we get together, and you can have a moment of duende. Or I could go to a concert, or get-together, when you have that moment of “wow,” and you were so lucky to see that extraordinary moment. Where your hair goes… DC: Right, goosebumps. CF: It doesn’t have to be flamenco, it could be anything. It could be an extraordinary moment…So, for performing, it’s the same thing, for me. It’s not very often, but every now and then. You are so inspired, the chemistry is so great among the performers, or, it could be it does it wherever it is, and you just are doing stuff, maybe that’s not choreographed, you know? DC: Right. CF: So, when you get out of your comfort zone… DC: A little improvisation CF: Improvisation, but you feel like really…confident and secure and tight about it…You just can do whatever you want.

68 DC: Right. You know you’re going to be able to do it, and you’re inspired to strive for that… CF: And also, you feel like, in a way you, lose sense of everything. You’re suspended in time in that moment, and you lose consciousness, except for what you’re doing.

Celia’s response to duende as a spectator includes physiological tells of ANS arousal, while as a performer, it hits all the marks for flow. Again, the word inspired is connected to improvisation, and chemistry between the performers is key. Most importantly, Celia recognizes duende as an extraordinary moment, separated from mundane experience through the medium of music. Her voice is heard again in the following interview.

Paco Fonta

Paco Fonta is a Spaniard from the town of Torreperogil, near Úbeda, in the province of

Jaén, Andalusia. His family are agriculturalist, and Paco grew up harvesting olives, maintaining a vineyard, and tending goats. His grandmother used to sing, which was not unusual, because

“everybody sing in Andaucía. she would only sing on her birthday. But she knew all the songs. she would sing it for us some pace inside the house, but she would never in public.” When he was around eighteen, he bought his first guitar with a friend. The friend had no talent for the instrument, but when Paco tried it, he found it suited him well. He bought out his friend share of the guitar, and has been playing ever since. Paco has become a successful flamenco artist of the old style, winning first prize in cante jondo at the 1985 Flamenco Festival in Jaén. After settling in Miami,

Paco and Celia started Siempre Flamenco, a not-for-profit company “dedicated to promoting awareness of flamenco music and dance, and to preserve its art and traditions.”166 A talkative and jocular fellow, Paco’s many opinions on duende provided a rich Andalusian context to this discussion, that warrants more space.

166 Siempre Flamenco, “Paco Fonta,” Siempre Flamenco Website, 2006, http://www.siempreflamenco.com/paco.html.

69 Paco Fonta: For each person, it’s a different thing. For me something else. It’s something that you call when you really feel you are doing art. Some people say it’s when you are playing, and there’s a moment, you’re not even thinking, and all of a sudden, your music are coming beautiful and wonderful, and transmitting, like he [Paco Fernandez] said. In some way, that could be duende. But duende is like a war. DC: A war? PFo167: Somebody say he had duende, he had feeling, have soul. But, it’s really a war. DC: I’ve heard that. PFo: Really duende is a little guy that go behind you, and is telling you what to do. DC: So when you’re having a really good night [on stage], and you’re playing, really, really well, and you get to that moment, and you feel like there’s duende in what you’re doing, what does that feel like for you? PFo: I never call it duende to start with. I say, “tonight I was inspired.” I was able to play with inspiration, with feeling, with… DC: Authenticity? PFo: Or I feel that I did a good job, it doesn’t matter if you make mistake or not, you felt that you play how you like to play. You like to play in a certain way, but you don’t always get it, but, all of a sudden one night you get it. And you feel like it’s not you playing. It’s what you want to play, but nobody can play it like that. And then you call that duende. Now, there is other consider the duende. The singer, they say that when they are singing they are out of their mind, and there is a spirit that went into you. That depend on if you believe in the spirit and you believe in all these things. It’s a myth, like he [Paco Fernandez] said, it’s a myth. You are scientific, you are a person that really…a doctor, or something like that, you really don’t believe in these things. You don’t believe in ghosts or these things. PFo: To play with duende, it means to play with soul, with feeling. DC: Have you ever felt you were playing and time just stood still, and there was only that moment, and nothing else in the world meant anything, but that moment you were playing? PFo: Well, could be, could be, yeah. You are into the music, and into the music…It happens almost always. DC: Yeah. PFo: You’re not thinking about what you’re going to do tomorrow. If you do that, the music is awful. You are there, you are enjoying what you are playing. And then you have to force it more, or force it less. If you are forcing it, it is harder to get a feeling from it, because you are forcing it. You need to do it, and you try to do always the best, and sometime it come out, by itself. Duende mean that it’s good, it have feeling. Other people say that is not duende. They say duende is the little guy that go here [motions to his shoulder], and get into you, and now you are not singing, it’s the little guy. DC: Like you’re possessed. CF: I don’t believe you’re possessed. PFo: I have seen people that looked like they were possessed. I’ve seen it. He’s not any more the guy. You can think, the duende got into him. CF: Sometimes we do feel like were being possessed, in a way. PFo: Yeah, I think I’ve felt one time when I was singing, and I say, wow, it’s like I’m not singing, and everything is coming beautifully. I’m really scientific, and I don’t believe in

167 Paco Fonta’s name is abbreviated as PFo, to distinguish him from Paco Fernandez (PF).

70 the spiritism, and I don’t like to believe in ghosts, and all these thing. And this moment is something that you cannot really explain. It’s in your mind. You maybe relax some part of the brain, and something on your brain open, and only concentrate on this, and you feel channeling, and that how it works, something you block in your brain, who knows? The only thing I can tell you is one thing. Sometimes I believe in things that there is a spirit or something like that, and sometime I don’t. If you do good, you’ll receive good, and if you do bad, you receive bad. Logical. DC: Karma. PFo: That’s it. It’s the belief of each person. They believe in the duende so they can get it. But for him [Paco Fernandez], it’s a stupid question. Duende you play good or you play bad. If there is duende, everybody should be able to have duende, because it’s there.You can be a musician, or dancer with feeling, or you can be an artist without feeling, because duende apply to any kind of art. CF: You can have a moment where you’re more than 100% inspired than you usually play. So maybe you were possessed to have that great inspiration. Anyways, I’m a romantic, so I believe in duende. I think you can be possessed and have an incredible moment of inspiration, and lose yourself in time and place. That’s my opinion.

Between the two of them, Paco and Celia touch upon everything about duende present in the literature. Duende is a struggle (a war in Paco’s words), duende is inspiration, duende is possession, duende is a special moment of optimal performance, during which the transmission of emotion occurs. Celia explains how the individual also made a difference in how duende is conceptualized.

CF: But, as he said, as Paco Fernandez said, it depends on where you’re coming from. If you have a romantic inclination about the way you see things, then you’re going to believe in duende, and if you’re just a realist, an intellectual in the way you look at things in the moment, day-to-day, they say they don’t believe in duende, but I personally don’t think that’s true. I think they just don’t like the word, because I’m convinced of the fact that both of them have experienced a moment of, “wow, that was amazing.”

71 Elementos

Field note: Event: 8-24-2017, Elementos @ Tapas y Tintos in South Beach, Miami, FL, dinner performance.

Written: 8-27-2017

Española Way is a thriving nightlife district in South Beach. Closed to vehicular traffic in the evenings, this warm August night finds the promenade bustling with foot traffic. On a tip from

Paco, I am heading for Tapas y Tintos168 to catch his friend Israel Heredia’s set. I am expecting something of quality, but Paco gave no indication of what the performance would be like, just that

Israel was a good player, and someone to hear. The building is on the corner, and the interior of

Tapas y Tintos is L-shaped, with a bar area occupying the smaller portion and the main dining room taking up the rest. The stage is against the outside wall, where the two wings come together, and it faces the dining room. As that section is closed except for diners, I find a seat at the bar, where I can at least hear the band, even if I cannot see them very well. There is a screen in the upper corner above the bar, where video of the performance is being live-streamed. Every inch of wall space is taken up by framed pictures or murals of Spanish-flavored themes. They are clearly trying to offer a unique Spanish experience in the heart of South Beach. The lighting is appropriate for the moment, and the stage spots cast blues and reds on the performers.

There are six members of Elementos this night; two bailaores (both women), two cantaores

(a man and a woman), a tocaor, and a percussionist on cajón. The group is fantastic. As this is one of the first flamenco performances that I’ve been to with dancers, I was really fascinated by their performance. The lead, who I later found out is Miguel’s wife, is a powerful dancer. The

168 Tapas is used to describe finger foods in Spanish, anything from jamon, to olives. These are usually served with wines, to which tintos (reds) refers.

72 deliberateness of each gesture, the intensity of her gaze, the thud of her zapateados169 against the black tablao, the paint worn down in the section of the stage for dancing.

Was I looking for the duende? No, it’s difficult to wear the hat of observer and that of participant. I was focused on the details, not wanting to miss the interaction between the performers. But I did enjoy the music and the dancing. The male singer, Samir, was quite impressive in his cante. They were all very talented, but more importantly, I could tell by the communication that this was a cuadro that could connect to each other musically, and had the emotive performance that welcomes moments of duende. I was determined to catch them at their break.

During the band’s set break, they left the stage, dispersing among the tables as they found their way outside. After I went outside, I found the three men in the group off together having a cigarette away from the crowds. Because of the limited time they had to talk to me before returning to the tablao, I was not able to interview the women of the group, and the interviews I did conduct were relatively brief. The men were half a block down Drexel Avenue, not part of the Española

Way nightlife. With no open businesses and no foot traffic, I knew that whatever they said in this location would have a good chance of coming out clearly on the recording. When I reached them,

I commented on how well they performed and explained that Paco Fonta had recommended them to me. Friendliness is a characteristic that all three shared, and they grew excited when they found out that my research was on duende experience.

169 Flamenco footwork.

73 Samir Osorio

The singer, a Cuban named Samir Osorio, has been performing flamenco for fifteen years.

He is slight in stature, but sings with a powerful baritone. A native of Guantánamo, Cuba, Samir learned to sing in professional companies, including Ballet Español de Cuba, and Compañía

Flamenca Ecos, before coming to Miami. Our conversation yielded a very intimate appreciation of duende.

Samir Osorio: That’s special, the duende is just really special, because you don’t really know what it is, but you can feel it. And it doesn’t come every night. Yes, it’s a special moment, but you can feel, of course, you cannot see it. You cannot see the duende. DC: And you can’t make it. SO: It’s something spiritual, it’s something that you can feel. And when you feel it, everybody feel it at the same time. So, after a performance, immediately after we finish, everybody say to each other, the duende was here. SO: But you depend on the others, the other partners, to feel it. DC: So, you all have to be connected. SO: Yes. It’s not something about one person alone. It just happens. And flamenco depend a lot about feelings, because inside flamenco, there are a lot of different rhythms, but there are a lot of different feelings as well. And something like death, or something like joy, or something about love, it’s the same. So, you can feel it, I think many times the audience can notice. Yes, that feeling because you transmit that feeling. And people can recognize that. I think dancer, they can transport themself to somewhere. Some space, or…Sometime I think they are out of conscious, yes, but at the same time they are inside the moment. I am not sure about the musician, I don’t know. We can hear, we can be focused what’s happening. But I think, especially with dancers, they can be in ecstasies, I think.

Extrapolating from his observations, the characteristics of a universally embodied, anomalous moment, where the transmission of emotion, emotive playing, is accomplished between a group of performers. By conjuring the emotions of love and death, Osorio’s duende demands intense emotional engagement. Like Ciulei, Osorio also voices hesitation as to what degree a musician can completely let go in a moment of duende. The dancers being able to slip this last mental bond to reach ecstasy holds echoes of Lorca. Interestingly, Osorio says that duende is not something achieved alone.

74 Miguel de la Rua

Miguel de la Rua, the cajonero and director of Elementos, is another Cuban performing flamenco in Miami. Originally from Havana, Rua is a healthcare professional working at a local clinic. His wife, Ania Diaz, is the lead dancer in Elementos.

Miguel de la Rua: We have a lot of energy together, we understand each other. Music is that, but flamenco is, you got to be in touch with the people you’re playing with. Its emotional, it’s an impression of the emotion we are receiving at the moment. DC: Yeah, you got to lock in with them rhythmically, and have everyone on the same page… MR: It’s not just the rhythm, but the intensity as well. Actually, some kind of similar idea is when they say you got the feeling, but it’s more than the feeling, you know? Flamenco is more than playing, it is a way of life. It is all the many, many, many years of experiences, suffering, partying, meeting, loving. So basically, all those emotions you express in flamenco in your life, those emotions. So basically, if duende is when you have the art, you have the touch on your soul and you can understand that feeling. DC: Understand it… MR: And reproduce. DC: Express it and share it, and bring others into it. MR: Yeah, yeah! You understand the concepts of these feelings expressed in the flamenco, and you can reproduce it. Then, you got duende. You got the chance to catch the music faster, you got the chance to learn different kind of rhythms faster. So, when you have duende, it’s not that you have duende, and you have duende. You have duende and you express it with your skills, and your way of being as a flamenco liver [one who lives flamenco]. Duende is pretty much the same. When you see the people how they express in the flamenco lifestyle and you see that they are great. Duende, I would say, is a universal language that everyone understands. It comes from a little bit of technique applied to the feeling of the duende. When you feel more duende, you feel more connected. DC: Do you think other people in other styles can get a similar, can get to a similar place? If you’re into it, you’re into it, it doesn’t matter what you play? MR: When you see jazz, and you see people who are playing jazz, they are having the same feeling. They know what they’re doing, but they got to create a collection of the moment that’s between them, you know? DC: Yeah. MR: They receive the feedback of the energy you’re doing, but it doesn’t matter that much, because what I’m feeling here, come on. Sometimes I’m like really tired, and I start playing, I’ve been having a hard day… DC: Yeah MR: When I get there and I start playing, it’s like, you’re very charged. Because I’m expressing a lot of tension, and I’m receiving a lot of energy from that tension, and I have the feeling. So, it’s like I’m brand new.

75 Miguel sees a strong connection between duende and the intimate connection between the performers in order to create duende. He also recognizes its appearance in other styles of music like jazz.

Israel Heredia

Like Lorca, Israel Heredia is a Granadino. He grew up in the Sacramonte area, the same place Lorca went to learn gitano flamenco. guitarist He has lived in the US for one year in Miami, making a living as a musician. My time with Israel was brief. Though he stood with the rest when

I initially approached, his lack of English and my lack of Spanish caused him to step back while the others talked. Because he is a guitarist, I was intent on getting his take. When I did get to speak with him, it was through Samir’s translations. With Samir and Miguel both present, and wanting to contribute, I was only able to get a brief statement from Israel, but it was profound.

It’s a kind of state of mind the gypsy get when there is a fluidity of thinking. It’s easier for them to think and express flamenco. When the musicians forget about the specific things about music, like compás, or the time. When you get together, everything flows by itself, it moves by itself. It comes out easily. (Israel Heredia, 2017)

Heredia’s statement is the most concise one among the interviews pointing to duende as a state of optimal experience. His characterization of duende as a fluidity in thinking, and effortless with which this allow for expression point to flow. “Expressing flamenco” in this instance means expressing the passion and emotion inherent in this idiom.

There is a consensus among the members of Elementos in the singular importance of expressing emotion in their interpretations of duende. Osorio and Rua’s Cuban background suggest their ideas about duende derive from the professional world of Cuban flamenco, but this seems to be a widely held connection among flamenco palyers. What they said about duende reminds me

76 of something Lorca wrote: “The great artists of Southern Spain, gypsy or flamenco, know that emotion is impossible without the duende.”170

Conclusion

To close out the ethnography on duende, I want to include excerpts from two interviews found during my online research. The first is from “The Blog,” found on Huffpost.171 In an interview conducted by Andrew Blackmore-Dobbyn, Soledad Barrio, one of the most accomplished flamenco dancers working in the genre today, and her husband, Martín Santangelo, director of their company, Noche Flamenco, present a humorous take on duende.

I don’t really know what duende is. (laughs) It doesn’t really have any particular meaning just for flamenco. It is inspiration. It applies to all art. The most important thing is the work. Inspiration can only come to you if you work for it. You have to work hard and the duende will come and go. I saw a dance school in Madrid that had put up a sign advertising that they taught duende. (really laughing now) They were charging a lot of money to foreigners as though it was something that could be taught. You have to have something to say and you have to need to express it (Soledad Barrio, 2012).

Barrio thinks of duende as something instinctual; something that cannot be taught, but can be cultivated. Santangelo represents a more intellectual conception of duende in line with Paco

Fernandez.

Federico García Lorca came up with that whole idea after being drunk, and not sleeping for three days. He wrote a long chatty essay about duende, but Lorca abused the word. Picasso said that you have it when you have it. It comes from working. When you work and work and work, then sometimes everything lines up and comes together. Maybe you had it last night but not tonight. It can happen in the studio when you are alone or on stage with the whole company. You can’t control it. All of the elements have to line up at that same time and that only happens rarely. Lorca abused the word. Einstein said the best thing about what we think of as duende: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a

170 Lorca and Maurer, Deep Song and Other Prose, 45. 171 Andrew Blackmore-Dobbyn, “Soledad Barrio: Duende Is Hard Work,” The Blog-Huffpost (blog), September 26, 2012, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-blackmore-Dobbyn/soledad-barrio-dances_b_1915937.html.

77 stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed (Santangelo, 2012).

Barrio and Santangelo’s connection between work process and duende reflects the total concentration that results from engaging in flow activities, and the image of Ciulei at four in the morning exploring new sonic territory with the nimblest of fingers. Intense moments of focused practice are hallmarks of the Indian classical music concept of the chilla, an extreme practice regimen undertaken by serious tabla students involving forty consecutive days of solo practice cloistered somewhere devoid of distractions. This can lead to stretches of intense focus that further separate the player from the outside world. Chilla experiences can alter the way players think. A dedication to developing skills was found in many sources, including this one from the blog, The

View From the Pier:

Duende is something you are born with or not. It’s an intangible part of flamenco that can’t be explained, that either happens or it doesn’t. You have it, or you don’t have it. In some performances, the magic of duende may appear, or not, depending on the venue, the atmosphere, the people, the small details…But duende is not only a moment, or improvisation. Flamenco is a very defined art. You must train for many years to develop the skills–singing, dancing, or playing the guitar. And once you have mastered these facets, you can improvise. The duende may appear. But if you don’t have the skills, if you don’t have the technique, duende is not possible. (Maria Angeles Carrasco, 2011)172

The ethnography on duende conducted and collected for this thesis shows a wide range of interpretations. The fact that every participant had some opinion on the subject points to its ubiquitous nature in flamenco discourse, and more importantly, the recognition of its existence as a part of flamenco performance. Emotive playing, intimate communication, and flow characteristics appeared across the board either specifically or through inference. The voices

172 From an interview with Maria Angeles Carrasco found in Meg Pier, “Flamenco: Duende,” View From the Pier (blog), 2011, http://www.viewfromthepier.com/compass-rose/flamenco-part-2/.

78 express the need to possess a level of technique that allows security against anxiety and correlates with the ability to express emotion through playing.

A divergence exists in the ethnography about duende concerning those who emphasize ecstatic experience as central to duende. This is expressed in the dichotomies of rational/passionate and cognitive/intuitive that seems to be at the heart of artistic endeavors.

Silviu Ciulei: There’s more cerebral people and there’s more melancholic people. DC: Romantic people. SC: Exactly. I feel like I’m in between those. I can be one or the other, depending on what it is, because I’m a teacher as well, you know? And a student, so I feel like I’m like a priest, but I’m also a scientist. You know what I mean? DC: Yeah. That kind of perfectly describes what a good musician is. They’re equal parts brain and heart, and they can turn that dial one way or the other when they need to.

As Celia Fonta said, “I’m a romantic person, so I believe in duende” (C. Fonta, 2017), and therefore she is more sensitive to musical gnosis. Turning the cerebral/romantic dial is like Becker’s deep listeners, who are capable of opening themselves to those experiences, and the inverse, closing themselves off to them. By engaging with the emotional aspects of performing, and shedding whatever psychic walls one builds against society, as Pohren says, “offered without embarrassment or resentment,”173 a player can allow duende to happen.

173 Pohren, The Art of Flamenco, 23.

79 CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSIONS

I did not set out in this project to come up with the definition of duende, but rather a functional definition for the ethnomusicologist, aficionado, or the merely curious. In understanding its meaning, and how it entered flamenco discourse, I turned to Lorca. In explaining the physiology of my duende experience, I followed threads through neuroscience and Becker. To explain what the mind experiences, I explored the psychology of optimal experience. These lenses, combined with testimonies of flamenco performers, provide a new way of viewing duende.

In explaining the results of my research, it is important to realize that no singular concept could possibly describe the range of responses about duende. As Paco Fonta said: “For each person, it’s a different thing” (P. Fonta, 2017). Duende is intimate, it is communicative, it can be communal between the performers, or between the audience, touching the humanity in all of us. It can fulfill its cultural obligation as a rite within the gitano tradition, or it can serve as a rite between three people playing music together. It is described as being in the flow, or the groove, and as being deeply connected to the audience through emotive performance. Duende is also contradictory. It can inspire, and it can offend. It is unpredictable, but can be cultivated. It coexists with a certain amount of automaticity, but never mindlessness.

Lorquian Duende

It is easy to dismiss Lorquian duende as romantic mysticism, a love letter to the fading peasant-nobility of the gitanos, but that would be overlooking the germs of ethnographic truth that lay embedded beneath the petal and thorn of his roses. Lorca did not get drunk one night and create

80 this is out of the ether. His first-hand familiarity with the ritual setting of cante jondo and the folk wisdom he gathered are as valuable to us today as they were to him then. Lorca understood duende to be an embodied phenomenon that connects humans in deeply emotional ways. He fit it to his aesthetic ideas about art and inspiration.

Inspiration and being inspired are separated by Carafoli as the initial illumination, the moment one feels inspired, and the creative phase that follows it.”174 The two types of inspiration that appear in the ethnography fit into these categories, though neither portrays itself as Lorca’s struggle. The primum movens in Fernandez’s hammock on the beach is a moment of inspiration, and the socially buttressed musical risks in Ciulei’s moment of courage, is a state that Paco Fonta would call “inspired playing.”

Along with inspiration, the four concepts drawn from Juega y Teoria, physical experience, transcendence, communication, and universality, can all be tracked into the present through the ethnography presented here.

The Physiology and Psychology of Duende

Given the wide reporting of physiological response to what was thought to be duende experience, the idea that duende is an embodied experience resonates across the various sources.

ANS arousal in the form of piloerection, goosebumps, and changes in breathing, and ecstatic moments are inferred to be chemically induced. These affects are demonstrations of emotional experience and align with the ethnography about duende.

Automaticity proves a useful concept when considering the mechanical and attentional demands of performance. Yazdanpanah referred to this as “meta-cognition,” being able to play the

174 Carafoli, “The Creativity Process: Freedom and Constraints,” 1.

81 music, connect with the trio, observe the audience’s reactions, and maintain an awareness of the overall process. Even while maintaining this meta-cognition, Yazdanpanah is able to engage emotionally with the music, and emote through his playing, bodily movements, expressions, and mannerisms.

Duende represents a specific psychology of performance, with multiple physical and mental properties involved. The mindset of the performer has as much to do with duende as the atmosphere and the people in the ensemble. Flow represents a model that provides a phenomenological foundation for understanding duende. It can explain the meta-cognitive aspects of performance that Yazdanpanah outlined.

Sensorimotor-coupling is not only a mechanism that underlines the relationship between flow and presence, but it is also the core of flow itself and of its relationship with music. Overcoming the dichotomy between cognition and emotions, it is possible to posit that there are interactions among these poles and environment that bring forth the relationship between flow and music.175

Not only does flow research address the inner-workings of performance, its characteristics were nearly unanimously described or inferred during the interviews. In addition to the nine characteristics of flow identified in traditional definitions, duende moments were also described as a communal effort resulting in growing empathy, as in Hart’s combined flow. Manzano’s effortless attention was reminiscent of the ideas of automaticity that Yazdanpanah expresses as part of his duende experience (Yazdanpanah, 2017). Byrne’s flow and creativity describes the inspirational states that both Fernandez and Ciulei experience when working on a composition

(Fernandez, Ciulei, 2017). This also resonates with Barrio and Santangelo say about working and working until the duende comes to you. In analyzing the flow studies selected for this thesis, it becomes clear that the extra-flow experiences described as transcendence, creativity, and

175 Chirico et al., “When Music ‘Flows.’ State and Trait in Musical Performance, Composition and Listening: A Systematic Review,” 10.

82 communitas are phenomenon in which flow has a role, but does not wholly describe the experience. Duende has components that are not endemic to flow. Yazdanpanah makes a fine distinction between the two. “Duende is also something that others can feel, based on your performance…Flow seems like a personal thing that you intrinsically feel” (Yazdanpanah, 2017).

This statement presents an interesting proposition as to whether deep listening as Becker describes it is a kind of flow state. In light of the evidence, optimal experience describes duende, but duende does not fall solely in the category of optimal experience.

Duende as Emotive Performance

Duende’s relation to emotional communication was one characteristic universal to both the literature and the ethnography. Transmission of that emotion was one way that Paco Fernandez admitted to the existence of duende experience, and seemed to serve as a demarcation from mundane performance to duende. Just as Lorca wanted to express himself and connect to his audience,176 the members of Elementos all mentioned the importance of this. While the expression of emotion is not limited to flamenco, or any particular mode of “musicking,”177 the importance of it in the voices of this ethnography make it an essential component to “having” duende and deep playing.

176 Lorca is noted for his powerful oratory in reciting his poetry and lectures in Gibson, Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life. 177 Small’s verb form of music. Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998), 9.

83 A Theory of Deep Playing

Over the course of the research for this thesis, I have uncovered a phenomenon that mirrors

Becker’s concept of deep listening, but from the perspective of the performer. Ecstatic playing is not a new concept. Duende and tarab, represent two cultural models that capture this idea to some degree, but both engage with the experience on both sides of the dichotomy, listener and performer.

Similar to saltanah, Deep playing privileges the experience of the performer, and describes a processual phenomenon with specific conditions and variables. Borrowing from Becker, the site of this phenomenon is the body, with the key indicators expressed through ANS arousal, and the climax of the experience through the flood of chemical neurotransmitters that washes over consciousness.

I will describe deep playing through a hypothetical Maharajah Flamenco Trio performance, constructed as an amalgamation of past performance experiences. I will explore the minute details that stand out as important to deep playing. Incidentally, this description is also applicable to what

I would describe as a duende experience.

Deep playing starts with the players as individuals, and as an ensemble, and the personal and professional relationships that go into playing music with others. As a professional music trio, each musician needs to have a fluency in technique that allows for automaticity. The player needs to be so familiar with their instrument, that the amount of cognitive resources needed for the mechanical operation of the instrument is minimal, down to the most nuanced motion. Important to any musician is the need for mechanical maintenance prior to taking the stage. Each member of

Maharajah spends at least twenty minutes or longer warming up before a concert. For Ciulei that involves several exercises that take into account each playing technique he will use in the performance. There are scalar patterns that move chromatically, short figures of eight bars that

84 move up by half steps, and rasgueado warmups that use all four fingers of the right hand in continuous quick succession, resulting in a snare roll-like sound. My warmup is similar, covering the different playing techniques that I will use. Whereas the two string players are concerned with preparing the hands, Yazdanpanah’s warmup involves full body movement. He warms up his whole body through stretches, shaking his arms and making little hops, as if skipping rope. He also warms up his embouchure for the didgeridoo. Warming up not only prepares the body for performance, but knowing that the body is ready acts as buffer against performance anxiety.

It is our connection to each other musically and emotionally that this experience is built upon. As Ciulei stated. “If there’s a bunch of people rather than one, I feel like the duende is more easily achievable. Especially if the relationship between those people is so close like ours” (Ciulei,

2017). We share a close personal relationship, fostered by our history as an ensemble. One way we reestablish that emotional connection for performances is through the social bonding of toasting. Before most performances, we make a toast with whiskey. We say that it is taken to loosen us up (lower inhibitions) and mitigate performance anxiety, but by partaking in this ritualistic act, sharing the same spirits from the same bottle, we are strengthening our bond, and connecting emotionally.

The next essential component is an appropriate physical space. This can be different for each performer, and for each playing context. The context I am speaking of is a concert performance, in a hall where there is space on stage for intimacy between the performers. Not only must the performers be able to communicate visually, but they must be able to hear each other clearly. Yazdanpanah reinforces this in his interview.

When we’re playing a nice stage, I feel it elevates our level, technically…If you have good monitoring, oh my God, you’re getting that, you’re hearing everything, I can hear you, I can hear Silviu, I can hear myself, that’s the best, it’s night and day. (Yazdanpanah, 2017)

85 These may seem obvious, but it is necessary to control to the greatest degree possible, any variable that might cause distraction, or worse anxiety. Anxiety is concordant with the release of cortisol and associated with muscular tensions and reduced concentration, neither of which is conducive to fluid playing.

The performers must be in tune with each other’s bodies, and thoroughly familiar with the music. This would even apply to improvised music, provided the structure on which the music is to be built, i.e., harmonic scheme, key signature, time signature or rhythmic pattern, and general shape of the music, is generally decided beforehand. Improvisation in Maharajah is generally done within the parameters of flamenco compás, and the only truly improvised music is found within individual solos and the changes in accompaniment that might occur in support of that solo.

Improvisation means different things to different people. It can be completely precognitive, flowing out of the “inspired” player, like when the duende or saltana takes over. In my estimation, it is not in improvisation that deep playing (or duende) is found, simply because of the active focus in planning, executing, and responding to an improvisation as it unfolds. This doesn’t mean that I don’t feel moments of intense pleasure when the solo is going well, but I would not describe them as deep playing. It is in the moments of complete predictability that automaticity is engaged, and the mind can enter a state of deep playing. Consequently, playing from text would make it difficult to attain this state.

After the performance begins, and everyone’s continuous perceptions of the beat align, demonstrated by the embodiment of the groove (toe or heel tapping, head and torso movement, which the players read like a text), entrainment occurs. As the trio locks into the rhythm and begins a positive feedback loop with the music and each other (everything sounds right, and the facial expressions exhibit pleasure), the players enter a state of optimal performance with all of the

86 characteristics of flow. In Israel Heredia’s language, we have attained a “fluidity of thinking,” where “it’s easier…to think and express flamenco” (Heredia, 2017).

With the complete mental absorption in the music, thinking in music as one might a second language, and the internalization of the rhythms, the ensemble’s entrainment, the emotionality of the music can emerge. By emotionality, I mean the emotion of the group expressed through the music, and the emotion that the music-as-object evokes in the listener. In the case of “Nueva

Vida,”178 the composition that inspired the duende experience detailed in the field note above, it is an alegrías in a major key, and generally feels happy. The contrasting section, in the parallel minor,

I would describe as poignant and mysterious. The trio attempts to express these emotions, to express duende, and transmit it to the audience, to arouse this emotional response. The extended recapitulation of the major section feels like a triumphant resolution to the tensions created by the musical contrasts, and it is usually during this section that I feel duende most strongly. It is a feeling of transcendence, of oneness with something beyond myself, of another layer of reality that we cannot readily access. There is also the feeling that “no one can touch me,”179 in the way that I am performing, a triumph that mirrors the one expressed by the music. This is the climax of the deep playing experience, and it results in feelings of elation and uplift, but also communitas, where the social bonds between the players is strengthened. If the concert progresses well, with the trio riding the crest of the experience, there may be more deep playing experiences.

Deep playing is one side of duende, and arguably the most important side, for without the musicians, there would be no deep listening, no musical transcendence or ecstasy. Like Lorca’s duende, deep playing is a bodily experienced phenomenon, that communicates emotion through music, and is universally applicable to ecstatic playing in any social context, whether it’s the highly

178 Maharajah Flamenco Trio, Encuentro. 179 Lorca and Maurer, Deep Song and Other Prose, 43.

87 developed tarab of Arabic music, or the extended jam of a drum circle. It is humanity’s access to these alternate realities that make deep playing autotelic, and strengthens the bonds between us.

88 APPENDIX A

HUMAN SUBJECTS COMMITTEE APPROVAL

Human Subjects Application - For Full IRB and Expedited Exempt Review

PI Name: David Williams Cobb

Project Title: Duende and Flow: Illuminating the Untranslatable

HSC Number: 2017.22684

Your application has been received by our office. Upon review, it has been determined that your protocol is an oral history, which in general, does not fit the definition of “research” pursuant to the federal regulations governing the protection of research subjects. Please be mindful that there may be other requirements such as releases, copyright issues, etc. that may impact your oral history endeavor, but are beyond the purview of this office.

89 APPENDIX B

LIST OF JALEO EXPRESSIONS

Así se toca: That is the way to play

Eso es: That is it.

Olé: The most common interjection, it is thought to derive from “Allah,” and is often

pronounced “ah-LAY.” It is used to expressed support and pleasure.

(Que) bueno: (So) nice

puro: (So) pure

rico: (So) rich

90 APPENDIX C

INTERVIEWS

Dr. Silviu Ciulei, Canopy Roads Café, Tallahassee, FL, August 27th, 2017

Paco Fernandez, Fonta Residence, Miami, FL, August 24th, 2017

Celia Fonta, Fonta Residence, Miami, FL, August 24th, 2017

Paco Fonta, Fonta Residence Miami, FL, August 24th, 2017

Israel Heredia, Tapas y Tintos, Miami, FL, August 24th, 2017

Samir Osorio, Tapas y Tintos, Miami, FL, August 24th, 2017

Miguel de la Rua, Tapas y Tintos, Miami, FL, August 24th, 2017

Dr. Ramin Yazdanpanah, Yazdanpanah Residence, Tallahassee, FL, August 9th, 2017

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96 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

David Cobb first began playing music as a member of his junior high’s wind band. His love of music found him branching out into other instruments and styles, and he quickly became enamored with the guitar and electric bass. Having studied composition and classical guitar during his undergraduate work, David spent the next fifteen years performing, composing, recording, and teaching music. Always intrigued by the music of other cultures, David entered graduate studies in ethnomusicology at Florida State University, and his currently finishing his Master’s in

Musicology. His research interests beyond flamenco involve music and the evolution of humankind.

97