The Flamenco Effect

Authenticity, Community and Tradition in the South of Spain
1. Auflage 2027
ISBN: 978-1-138-57200-3
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 272 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Uncovering the turbulent history of flamenco’s volatile Golden Age (circa 1870-1930), The Flamenco Effect reveals how a marginalised community of performers transformed their craft into a vital space for critical thought, political resistance, and cultural survival.

The book bears witness to the complex practical and intellectual labour behind the emergence of flamenco. Biddle recovers the creative agency of singers, dancers, and guitarists as they enlarged rural traditions into an intricate network of song forms, modal structures, and rhythmic cycles, establishing a rigorous musical language that directly challenged elite assumptions about working-class culture. Rather than standing outside or opposing the market, they operated directly within the commercial world of the cafés cantantes, turning commodification into an engine of professional renewal and communal solidarity. Crucially, performers did not simply submit to the gaze of early photography or the technical limits of wax cylinders and shellac discs; they actively staged, adapted, and asserted control over their recorded sound and visual presence, establishing their own aesthetic authority over the very technologies that sought to document and manage them.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of musicology, ethnomusicology, Spanish music and culture, and European music studies.

Zielgruppe

Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Biddle, Ian

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikwissenschaft Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Examples

List of Tables

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Preface: From the House of the Dead Letter

Introduction: Abjected Flamenco

What This Book is Not

What This Book Is

The Palos: Flamenco as a System of Microforms

Approaching Academy-Mediated Flamenco

Chapter 1: The Music (or el cante)

Introduction: Song Work

Toward a Theory of the Cante

Components of the Cante

Introducing the Palos

Cantes a voz sola

Cantes libres con guitarra

Cantes de Levante

Grupo de los fandangos

Cantes métricos con guitarra

The Tangos

The Palo System Elaborated

Listening to the Palos: Three Case Studies

The Musical Design of the Cante

Chapter 2: Flamenco, Gender, Sexuality and “Tradition”

Prologue

Flamenco’s Theory of Identity

Registers of Identity in Flamenco

Racialised Flamenco

Flamenco, “Tradition” and Sexuality

How Flamenco Negotiates Gender and “Tradition”

Flamenco Masculinities

Flamenco Femininities

“Tradition” and The Dream of Plenitude: Estrella Morente’s Mujeres (2006)

Flamenco and Sexuality: A first intermedio

Flamenco’s Queernesses, Flamenco’s Utopias

Flamenco’s Queer Modernities

Flamenco Urbanities

Staging Flamenco, Staging Sexuality

Chapter 3: Toward a Media Archaeology of Flamenco (I): Flamenco in/as Visual Culture

On Visuality in Flamenco Culture

Flamenco in Nineteenth-Century Photography

Photography in the “Golden Age” of Flamenco

Interrupting the Avant-Garde: Man Ray’s Flamenco Photographs from the 1930s

Dmitri Kessel’s Images of Sacromonte for LIFE Magazine, 1949.

Photography and the Witness: Flamenco and its Media Regimes

What Flamenco Can Tell Us about the Documentary Film

Flamenco, Realism and Documentary Film: Theoretical Starting Points

The First Flamenco Documentaries: Flamenco Looks Back

Chapter 4: Toward a Media Archaeology of Flamenco (II): Flamenco on Record

Prologue: The Mechanical City in the Desert

Theoretical Starting Points

Flamenco’s Struggles with, and Accommodations to, Epistemological Modernity

The Hermetic Defence as Political Strategy

Early Sound Reproduction Technologies in Spain: el invento admirable de Mr. Edisson

Flamenco and the Pharmakon of Tin and Wax: Remedy, Poison, and the Agency of the Machine

The Era of the Gabinetes

The Gramophone and Industrialisation (from 1903)

The Electric Turn and the “Microsurgery” of the Voice (1925 - 1930)

Conclusion: The pharmakon of the Archive and the Paradox of Preservation

Conclusion: The Great Phrygian Defiance

Flamenco in the Global North

The Foreclosed Vernacular

What Was Taken from Flamenco

The Journey from There to Here

Flamenco Form as Process

Glossary

Discography

Filmography

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Ian Biddle is Professor of Music History at Newcastle University, UK. His research examines how sound, noise, and listening practices mediate power, gender, and communal identity across nineteenth- and twentieth-century European musical cultures, bringing a range of critical methodologies (critical archive studies, epistemic justice, media archaeology) to bear on historical soundscapes. He is the author of Music, Masculinity and the Claims of History: The Austro-German Tradition from Hegel to Freud (2011), editor of Music and Identity Politics (2012), and co-editor of Masculinity and Western Musical Practice (with Kirsten Gibson, 2009), Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (2013), Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300-1918 (with Kirsten Gibson, 2016), and the forthcoming collection In the Shadow of the Phonograph: Ritual, Remembrance and Recorded Sound (with Nanette de Jong, 2027).