Contraponientes, Three Spanish Poets, and How I Learned to Sing ‘Cante Jondo’ (part 1)

In September of 2003, my wife, Patricia, our two young children (ages three and a teething, salivary, one) and I boarded a flight to Madrid, Spain for a nine-month Fulbright Fellowship. We were adventure seekers, never ones to turn down an opportunity for travel just because, you know, children needed a predictably reliable sleep schedule and all. After all, I was barely 30, with the parental stamina and energy of three 41-year olds. Besides, Patricia was a seasoned, inveterate traveler, having traversed Europe from Portugal to the Czech Republic by the time she was in her early 20s. Mounds of luggage, strollers and port-a-cribs notwithstanding, we took our seats, buckled our seat belts, and jetted into the Atlantic night.

From the sky, the central plateau of Castilla y Leon is a sea of gold and brown in the late summer heat. Descending, one notes the pattern of town squares and bullrings that disclose an old civilization persisting despite its dry and obvious thirst. A California boy, I had never seen anything standing that was so old. If California enticed with the promise of renewal and opportunity, Spain sultrily whispered of seductive spirits and ghost stories. Its rolling hills, Mediterranean coasts, abandoned fortresses, windmills, tiles and olive groves all ancient props that have outgrown tragedy generations over. Hardly did I know that, even from the clouds, the Iberian siren had sung to me the first strains of the ‘deep song.’

García Lorca described ‘deep song,’ or ‘cante jondo’ this way: 

Like the primitive Indian musical systems, deep song is a stammer, a wavering emission of the voice, a marvelous buccal undulation that smashes the resonant cells of our tempered scale, eludes the cold, rigid staves of modern music, and makes the tightly closed flowers of the semitones blossom into a thousand petals.

Of course, this description calls to mind the gypsy singing emanating from the caves of Grenada, in García Lorca’s native Andalucía. Eluding, as it does, those “rigid staves” it bespeaks of impassioned serendipity, an inflamed spontaneity untempered by the syntax of measured music notation. Where noteheads and barlines suggest artifice, the symbols of sounds, cante jondo emerges only from authenticity--a most intimate, soulful truth without which it cannot exist. Just as semitones and equal temperament effectively fib and mislead by concealing the notes between the cracks, deep song exposes all, hides nothing, eradicates the boundaries between sounds and renders them counterfeit. In the summer of 2003 I walked out of the conservatory for the last time as a student, terminal degree in hand. Yet, after years, I left in search of a new mentor--someone or something that would rescue me (if temporarily) from the circus of festivals and competitions and resume builders. I left in search of a new voice, a true voice, an honest voice. Scarcely could I have anticipated the tutoring of cante jondo, and its lessons that would transcend sound itself.