Composers; Music -- 20th century -- History and criticism
The names of the modern Spanish dances are often confused in the
descriptions offered by observing travellers, for the reasons already
noted. Hundreds of these descriptions exist, and it is difficult to
choose the most telling of them. Gertrude Stein, who has spent the last
two years in Spain, has noted the rhythm of several of these dances
by the mingling of her original use of words with the ingratiating
medium of _vers libre_. She has succeeded, I think, better than some
musicians in suggesting the intricacies of the rhythm. I should like to
transcribe one of these attempts here, but that I have not the right to
do as I have only seen them in manuscript; they have not yet appeared
in print. These pieces are in a sense the thing itself--I shall have
to fall back on descriptions of the thing. The tirana, a dance common
to the province of Andalusia, is accompanied by song. It has a decided
rhythm, affording opportunities for grace and gesture, the women toying
with their aprons, the men flourishing hats and handkerchiefs. The
polo, or olè, is now a gipsy dance. Mr. Ellis asserts that it is a
corruption of the sarabande! He goes on to say, “The so-called gipsy
dances of Spain are Spanish dances which the Spaniards are tending to
relinquish but which the gipsies have taken up with energy and skill.”
(This theory might be warmly contested.) The bolero, a comparatively
modern dance, came to Spain through Italy. Mr. Philip Hale points out
the fact that the bolero and the cachucha (which, by the way, one
seldom hears of nowadays) were the popular Spanish dances when Mesdames
Faviani and Dolores Tesrai, and their followers, Mlle. Noblet and Fanny
Elssler, visited Paris. Fanny Elssler indeed is most frequently seen
pictured in Spanish costume, and the cachucha was danced by her as
often, I fancy, as Mme. Pavlowa dances _Le Cygne_ of Saint-Saëns. Anna
de Camargo, who acquired great fame as a dancer in France in the early
eighteenth century, was born in Brussels but was of Spanish descent.
She relied, however, on the Italian classic style for her success
rather than on national Spanish dances. The seguidilla is a gipsy
dance which has the same rhythm as the bolero but is more animated and
stirring. Examples of these dances, and of the jota, fandango, and
the sevillana, are to be met with in the compositions listed in the
first section of this article, in the appendices of Soriano Fuertes’s
“History of Spanish Music,” in Grove’s Dictionary, in the numbers of
“S. I. M.” in which the letters of Emmanuel Chabrier occur, and in
collections made by P. Lacome, published in Paris.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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