A new book just came out verse, an integral part of the popular Spanish song that Libertad Digital has devoted years of dedication and dissemination to, even from the melody of Suspiros de España itself. [1]that identifies the morning program Federico Jimenez Losantos. His name: verse. A fertile cultural footprint of a timeless genre (2021) and was active and Andalusian edition of Almuzar the one who took over the edition prepared by the professor and researcher Jose Miguel Gutierrez Manjon Cabeza and teacher Amaya Ortiz de Zarate.
This volume includes some selected articles about this very Spanish musical genre, which were presented at the X International Congress of Text Analysis, which was held in Cordoba from 6 to 9 February 2019. The event was organized by Cultural Association Trama y Fondoaffiliated with the Faculty of Information Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid and bearing the name As in the song the desires of women are glorified.
The prologue of the book, written by the leader of the congregation, the aforementioned Professor Gutierrez Manjon-Cabeza, emotionally emphasizes that one of the texts, “coming out of the congress itself,” was written by the former mayor of Cordoba and the leader of Andalusian and Spanish communism, Julio Angita, whom he considers “a passionate connoisseur of the song”, although his name did not appear in any events and sessions this meeting in 2019.
It literally says: “Julio Angita, politician and professor, was our mayor for many years and was passionate and understanding of the song. He attended Congress and left us to publish his wonderful text, Calico radio, in which we can recognize his protection and more than his commitment to this form of popular and artistic expression. We want to express here our deepest gratitude to the authors and pay special tribute to Professor Anguita in memory: “Angita passed away on May 16, 2020, shortly after he presented his short report.
Posthumous message about. Julio Angita He seems to want to make calico radio the main distribution source for post-war Spanish song, although he also has in mind wandering copleros and artistic troupes. He forgets about the tobacco shops, colmao and family celebrations, where they regularly celebrated. It is also true that she and flamenco have been passed down from generation to generation, heavily contaminated with ballads, zarzuelas and paso dobles, through oral transmission since the early years of the 20th century.
See for example Reliquary, the very famous Paso Doble of 1914, whose lyrics were written by two Catalan liberal journalists, Armando Oliveros and Jose Maria Castelvi, and a musician from Almera Jose Padilla (author of other titles of the time, such as La Violetra, Valencia and hundreds of other works, including Anthem of Almeria)… Few people know that his “Reliquary” was the music used in the election campaign Dwight D. Eisenhower as President of the United States from 1952 until his election victory.
Anguita’s reflections are correct, but they do not penetrate the essential tragic vein of the couplet emphasized in Joyful reason” [2] as a basis Kopla movie, and a basic reference to a Spanish song, but he insists on a hasty classification by theme (e.g. copla Walnut water groups it into two different categories), namely:
– Coplas of love and grief, lived as a sentence … it is a tragedy, taken with serenity, and sometimes with pride.
– Colts of grief, repetition, jealousy, remorse, revenge and alleged rejection.
“Coplas del amor,” he repeats again, completely surrendering even to his memory.
– Poems of joyful love.
– Coplas of loneliness before fate.
– Kopla on the topic of bullfighting in its tragic and glorious aspect and against its background of exclusion and social upsurge.
– Coplas de vis comic and / or mannerisms, at times with some bitterness.
– Copla, referring to historical events, characters, places and customs in Spain, viewed through the prism of patriotic ballads.
– Kopla about legendary and generic animals, from jack to bull or horse.
– Coplas of condolences, ridicule and criticism, repeats.
– Coplas, which he does not know how to classify as “Campanera”, “His first communion” or “I am a miner”, but which refer to family, social rites of passage, crafts …
Julio Angita testifies to the popular character of the couplet, although he does not specify in what sense, if in lyrics, if in music, in representation and internalization, in whole or in part, in origin or in his performance. … See: “Kopla is art, popular in its origin and cult in its musical and artistic manifestation. Suffice it to recall the great beauty of the poems performed by the symphony orchestra. And add to that the many poets and lyricists who have turned popular history into a cultural heritage that everyone enjoys. “
But his thesis, clearly inaccurate, does not take into account the fact that, as he pointed out a century and a half ago Marcelino Menendez Pelayo, popular poetry and scientific poetry maintain strange and fluid correlations and fruitful communicating vessels. So he summarized his position Juan Valera in his Introduction to Odes, messages and tragedies from Cantabria:
The antagonism that most critics today see between popular and scientific poetry never existed. In a sense, there is not even a difference between these two poems. Popular is the erudite who pleases or excites people by becoming popular. And the scientist, if he does not become popular, maybe because he does not deserve the applause and enthusiasm of the crowd, maybe also because the poet lives in a poor poetry age or because people die because of the terrible literary taste, which makes him choose bad over good.
Moreover, even vulgar poetry, known and composed by the common people, which in all countries is usually expressed in couplets, has the same close relationship with cultural poetry. “Perhaps the best of these poems were composed by learned poets who guessed the taste and won the favor of the common people.” This is what happens in our song.
It is a relationship between popular artists and erudite poets and musicians that can be traced back to cople, Spanish song in general, and even flamenco, the subject they debated about. Antonio Machado Alvarez, Francisco Rodriguez Marin and others, who wanted and want to see in flamenco an exceptional vulgo-popular origin (“the least popular of all cante, called folk”, – he said Demophilus).
If the popular is understood as something isolated from any scientific influence, then this thesis is unconvincing due to the intense participation of learned poets and popular poetry in the formation of his lyrics. Remember Juan Ramon Jimenez [3], many poems Becker in fact, they were peténeres, saltarias, malagenyas, or older Sevillians.
The verse shows this influence of scientific poetry, which is appreciated and accepted by the people. There is a figure Raphael de Leon, a Sevillian aristocrat and poet of generation 27, an absurdly ignored Franco and a homosexual whose intellectual and aesthetic fame is still far behind García Lorca’s fame among the “culturally correct”. However, he was fortunate enough to sing, recite, remember and introduce the city and its artists into Vienna. From Maria de la O D Tattoo To Green eyes There is a whole popular and lyrical universe in which the people of Spain recognize and feel. Antonio Burgos fixed its relevance.
Manuel Machado He caught: “Until the people sing them, / poems, they are not poems, / and when the people sing them, / no one knows the author.” But the last verse hides the mess. Yes, the author is known, but he is not exposed, superimposed or highlighted. Kiko Venom was the author of the book “I fly, I go” Shrimp. Paco and Pepe de Lucia, many others. It would be curious and worthy to investigate how many verses are of purely folk origin, that is, anonymous, oral and family transmission, and how many are written by cultural and dedicated poets. See the following example:
watch taught me
so i don’t count hours
when you are next to me.
The words were written by the great poet Porto, friend and accomplice of the cante grande. Jose Luis Tejadathat should have been National Poetry Award in the 60s .. Of many others, the author is unknown, or they come from romancers (“Roman contamination” called him Luis Suarez Avila) or collections of popular songs made in the 19th century. As for the copla, of the 20 most famous and most valuable, the vast majority were written by Perello, Mostazo, Naranjo, Murillo, Montreal, Valerio, Quintero, Raphael de Leon, Quiroga and other educated writers and composers. … There is room for discussion and clarification. Nevertheless, the respect that Julio Angita has always shown for the Spanish intellectual and artistic tradition should be appreciated, which did not take root in National Communism, constitutionally stateless, if not antipatria or antimatria.
[1] It was Antonio Alvarez Alonso who composed the Paso Doble in 1902, it is said in the cafeteria in Cartagena. The name comes from some of the cakes known as sighs.
[2] Agapito Maestre’s book on cinema by Gonzalo García Pelayo, chapter VII.
[3] So says in the article Doctor of Philology at the University of Madrid Complutense and professor of Spanish literature at the University of Seville Rogelio Reyes. Becker and the world of flamenco