Can an outsider have duende?
A flamenco guitar blog for non-Spanish guitarists.
This question has been with me ever since my aunt, who lived in Spain, gave me my first Flamenco CD. I remember listening to the visceral voice of La Paquera de Jerez singing “Qué Dolor De Madre Mía” feeling spellbound and amazed, and rushing to a fellow guitar student in the conservatory saying, “Hey! You gotta listen to this.”
But all I got was a strange stare when he heard her sing.
As for me, however, I fell for flamenco from the very beginning.
"I love flamenco, but it doesn't love me back."
Since then, I committed myself to learning flamenco guitar. But I soon realized that love for something doesn’t easily translate into natural talent. My classically-trained hands made my first attempts at flamenco guitar sound too clean and “studied.”
I asked myself why wasn’t I given the genes that are useful to my interests when I was given abilities I had no interest in. For example, people say I’m good at math. But I don’t have any passion for it. And if I could trade my ability with numbers with a bit of gitano blood in me, I would do so at once.
Alas, we don’t get to choose the hand we have. For whoever assembled my genetic makeup before I was born had lacked the foresight that I would make flamenco my career.
In other words, I had zero talent for flamenco.
Yes, an outsider can have duende.
I started to believe that duende – that mysterious, intangible quality, which loosely translates to having that “flamenco soul” – is something you are either born with or not. By and by, however, that limiting belief started to sound like a myth.
Although I can’t claim that I have duende as much as those I idolize, I can claim that I’m sounding better and better as I practice and immerse myself more in flamenco.
And if that isn’t a step towards the direction of having duende, then what else out there would be?
The goal of this blog, then, is to demystify this myth. I want to show that it’s possible for an extranjero (foreigner) to play and, most importantly, sound flamenco.