What Is Flamenco? Song First, and Everything Else Follows

A performance is built from cante, baile and toque, meaning song, dance and guitar, and their ranking is not what an outsider expects. Cante is primary and the oldest layer: the earliest flamenco was sung unaccompanied or with only hand clapping and a stick struck on the floor. The voice is deliberately rough, strained and unpolished, valued for emotional weight rather than for beauty, and a trained operatic tone would be regarded as wrong. Toque, the guitar, developed as accompaniment and became a solo tradition in its own right during the twentieth century, using techniques including rasgueado, a rolling strum with the back of the fingernails, picado, rapid alternating single notes, and golpe, tapping the body of the instrument, all of which are specific to the style. Baile, the dance, is the most exported and the least central historically: it is percussive, uses the whole body, and the footwork functions as another rhythmic instrument rather than as decoration.

Flamenco is not one style but a family of around fifty forms called palos, each with its own rhythmic cycle, harmonic tendency and emotional register, and knowing which is being performed is the basic literacy of the audience:

• •Solea, slow and grave, in a twelve-beat cycle with accents in a fixed pattern, regarded as one of the deepest forms
• •Siguiriya, the most tragic, with an irregular cycle and subjects of death and loss
• •Bulerias, fast, in twelve beats, festive and the form most used for improvisation and for ending a session
• •Alegrias, bright and in twelve, from Cadiz, and the form most often used for a virtuoso dance solo
• •Fandangos, in a free or three-beat pattern, with regional variants across Andalusia
• •Tangos and rumbas, in four, lighter and more popular, and the route by which flamenco most often enters mainstream music
• •The twelve-beat cycle, the compas, is not counted as three groups of four but with accents on specific beats, which is why clapping along incorrectly is immediately audible to anyone who knows it

The origins are genuinely obscure, because the people who created it left almost no written record. Andalusia had been under Muslim rule for nearly eight centuries until 1492, and its population included Moriscos, Jews and, from the fifteenth century, Roma arriving from the east, all of whom faced expulsion, forced conversion or persecution in the centuries that followed. Flamenco emerges from that population, most closely associated with Roma communities in Seville, Cadiz and Jerez, and it carries traces of Arabic melodic ornamentation, of Jewish liturgical melody, of Andalusian folk song and of African rhythmic influence from the Atlantic ports. The word itself has no agreed etymology. It surfaces as a named practice in the late eighteenth century, moves into commercial cafes cantantes in the mid-nineteenth, and was subsequently promoted, sanitised and packaged for tourists under the Franco regime, which made it a symbol of Spanish national identity while suppressing the regional cultures it actually came from.

The concept that outsiders reach for most often is duende, and it is worth stating carefully because it is usually romanticised into meaninglessness. The poet Federico Garcia Lorca gave a lecture on it in 1933, distinguishing it from the muse and the angel: the muse dictates, the angel dazzles, and the duende has to be fought for and arrives only through struggle, involving the body, and carrying an awareness of death. In practice it names a quality of performance that participants recognise and cannot predict, in which technical control is subordinated to something rawer, and it is why a cracked note or a broken voice can be valued above a clean one. The audience's role is participatory rather than passive, with shouts of encouragement, rhythmic clapping and knowledgeable comment forming part of the event, and a silent seated audience is regarded as a sign that something is wrong.

Two figures dominate the twentieth century. The singer Camaron de la Isla, from a Roma family in San Fernando, brought a rawness and an intensity that redefined what cante could be and made him a mass figure before his death at forty-one in 1992. The guitarist Paco de Lucia turned the instrument into a solo voice of extraordinary technical range, collaborated with jazz musicians including John McLaughlin and Chick Corea, introduced the cajon from Peru into the ensemble, where it is now standard, and drew furious criticism from traditionalists for each of these. The argument between preservation and fusion has continued since, producing flamenco jazz, flamenco with electronica, and a contemporary dance tradition that has moved into theatres. The form was inscribed by Unesco as intangible cultural heritage in 2010, which is a recognition and also a sign of the tension: a living tradition sustained by families and neighbourhoods is now also a heritage object and a tourist product, and the performances that participants regard as the real thing mostly take place late at night in rooms where nobody has bought a ticket.

Flamenco puts the singer first, with the guitar developing as accompaniment and the dance, which is what the world exports, historically the least central. It is organised into around fifty forms, each with its own rhythmic cycle and emotional register, of which the twelve-beat cycle with accents on specific beats is the defining structure. It emerged from persecuted Roma, Moorish, Jewish and Andalusian communities in southern Spain, leaves almost no early written record, and values a performance that breaks under pressure over one that is merely accurate.