Flamenco and Byzantine Music - Deep Song by Federico García Lorca

Flamenco Show at an Old Monastary

Flamenco and Byzantine Music by Chryssanthi

Most of us know the flamenco music. As it is otherwise called, the "cante jondo" - the "deep song"- is Andalucia's "national" music and it is principally the jypsies of Spain who have cultivated it.

As I was listening to it one day, it appeared to me that there are some similarities between it and the byzantine music, as far as the musical scales are concerned. Later on I did a research on the Internet and to my surprise, my intuition proved to be right. There are several musicians and musicologists, like Pedre, Manuel de Falla, Turina and even the poet Federico Garcia Lorca who have maintained the idea that one of the factors that have influenced the spanish "cante jondo" was the ecclesiastical music of Byzancium.

I was utterly surprised by reading this, because, apparently these two sorts of music do not seem to have many things in common. The cante jondo is a secular kind of music, whereas the byzantine chant is purely religious.

In this lens I am presenting you a piece of my discoveries and giving you some food for thought.

A COMPARISON BETWEEN TWO APPARENTLY CONTROVERSARY MUSIC GENERS 

In order to satisfy my intellectual curiosity I compared two apparently opposing sorts of music. A piece of religious music with a secular one. I uploaded two pieces that sounded to me as having some sonorous similarities. The first one is a byzantine chant and the spanish one is of the gener of the"seguiriya", the most ancient one in the cante jondo. Then I played both of them at the same time and the result was quite amazing, especially at the places where the musical base coincides.

Since I am not a musicologist, it may be an arbitrary comparison. I leave it up to you to listen to the following two videos and draw your own conclusions...( Taken from Source: )

Deep Song by Federico García Lorca

                                  

"...The historical events which Manuel de Falla refers to, of a magnitude to disproportionately influence our songs, are threefold: the Spanish Church’s adoption of liturgical chant, the Saracen invasion, and the arrival in Spain of numerous bands of Gypsies. They are the mysterious migrant folk who gave cante jondo its definitive form.
The great master Felipe Pedrell, one of the first Spaniards to treat questions of folklore scientifically, writes, in his magnificent Cancionero popular español: ‘Musical orientalism survives in various popular songs and is deeply rooted in our nation through the influence of ancient Byzantine civilization on the ritual used in the Spanish Church, from the conversion of our country to Christianity until the eleventh century when the Roman liturgy can be said to have been fully introduced.’
Manuel de Falla adds to this statement of his old master, specifying the elements of Byzantine liturgical chant revealed in the siguiriya, which are: the tonal modes of primitive systems (not be confused with those known as Greek modes), the enharmony inherent in those modes, and the lack of metric rhythm in the melodic line. ‘These same properties characterize certain Andalusian songs which appeared long after the Spanish Church’s adoption of Byzantine liturgical music, songs which have a close affinity with the music which in Morocco, Algiers and Tunis is still called in a manner that stirs the hearts of all true Granadans, “the music of the Moors of Granada....."

  

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