September 2009 Archives

Written in 1933, Bodas de Sangre is set several decades earlier, in a rural region in the south of Spain. Some of the intertwined thematics throughout the play include:

1) violence, desire, and the unconscious
2) gender roles, masculinity and femininity
3) tradition and modernity
4) names, inheritance, blood
5) home, domestic space, and land

The play was inspired by news accounts of the actual Crime of Najar.

Reading the First Act

Act I.1

The dramatic situation of Bridegroom and Mother is established. What do we learn about the future and history of the family?  Who are the Felixes? What is the worry about the bride? How do the symbols of knives and fruit, along with the mother's pronouncements convey the values of an agrarian life ... or those of a widowed mother in a patriarchal community?

Act I.2Consider how Leonardo's violent entry into the domestic space of his own home underscores what's socially expected and how his character violates the space. How do the surreal lullaby and meditation on horses contribute to the tone of this scene?

• Lullaby My Baby - (41-42)

• "Carnation, sleep and dream / the horse won't drink from the stream..."

• "And then you didn't come to eat..." (44)

Video 32:26 - Lullaby, 34:55 - Entry of Leonardo

Act I.3 / EngagementWhat do we learn about traditional ideas of marriage, the needs of individuals and the larger social functions as the betrothal takes place? In particular, how is the Bride exposed as a character struggling with her own subject position?

• "Do you know what it is to be married child?" (51)

ACT II.1 / Preparing for the Wedding DayHow do we come to appreciate the Leonardo and the Bride's past history? Is the bride simply ambivalent because she loves another man? Do their stories reconcile with each other? Does either seem certain even of his or her own story?

• Leonardo and the Bride "A man with a horse knows a lot of things and can do a lot to ride roughshod over a girl stuck out in the desert.... my breast rots with longing..." (60)

• Welcoming the guests: "Awake O Bride Awaken

Video 39:20 - Leonardo and the Bride, apart, dreaming)45:40 - Awake O Bride; 47:20 - The Wreath.

• Leonardo and Wife: "I'm not the kind of man to ride in a cart" (66)

ACT II.2 / The WeddingHow does Garcia Lorca compose the sense of inevitable tragedy? Who chooses what? What forces are at play? How do others react? What cna you infer from their reactions?

• Worrying about Leonardo: "That one's looking for trouble. He's not of good blood. (68)

• Parents' hopes: ""Always in my breast there's a shriek ... that's my hope: Grandchildren" and: "This land needs hands that aren't tired ...." (69)

• Mother to Groom: "Try to be loving to your wife, and if you see she's acting foolishly..." (76).

/ The DIscovery

"She isn't there..." 77-78.

"Perhaps she's thrown herself into the well..." (78)

"The hour of blood has come again." 78

Video 20:40 - at the reception

50:00 - Photographs, Pepe Blanco singing "Ay mi Sombrero" (pasodoble?)

50:54 - Typical dance (Sevillana?)56:46 - Wife discovers the flight

ACT III.1 / Woodcutters

This scene begins with undescriminated woodcutters wondering through el campo; then appear the moon and an ethereal beggar-woman. How do they frame the action? Why not cut to the chase? Does Saura's film emphasize individual motivation, society, or mythic forces?

• Woodcutters - "O lonely Moon / moon among the great leaves" (79-81

• Moon - "The Moon sets a knife/ abandoned in the air .../ Open roofs, open breasts / where I may warm myself..." p. 81

• Beggar woman and groom - "This way.." (85)

• Leonardo and the Bride - "Who was it first / went down the stairway?" ; "But I was riding a horse / and the horse went straight to your door" (86-87)

VIDEO Chase sequence - 01:01:00
Knife sequence - 01:02:10 & 1:06:30-1:08:00

ACT III.2

• Mother - "I want to be here ... They're all dead non: and at midnight I'll sleep, sleep without terror of knives or guns./. . . ./ And these four walls. Ay-y-y! Ay-y-y!" (95)

• Bride - "You would have gone too. I was a woman burning ... and your son was a little bit of water..." (96)

• Mother and Bride: "And this is the knife,/ a tiny knife..." (99)

VIDEO:Awake, Bride, Awake ... - 1:08:25

Duende - Death, tragedy, music, passion, Spanish "national character" ..

All music students are invited to attend a Demonstration/Lecture on Tibetan Ritual Music that will take place this week on Thursday, October 1 at 7:00 p.m. in McVitty Auditorium in Sprouwls Hall. This is a great opportunity to discover another musical tradition, and I hope you will attend. 

Special guests, Tom Schmidt and Lama Tashi Topgyal will present a demonstration of Tibetan instruments (including long horns, double reed horns, drums, cymbals, hand bells, hand trumpets and conch) and discuss the significance of music in Tibetan liturgical traditions.

 Mr. Schmidt and Lama Topgyal are associated with KTD, Karma Triyana Dharmachakra, the North American monastic seat of His Holiness the 17th Gyalwa Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje, the spiritual head of the Karma Kagyu Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, as well as Kunzang Palchen Ling, a Tibetan center in Redhook, NY.

In our first class discussing Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding, I laid out five threads that underlay the play.  To help us continue this discussion, please identify a passage from your reading of acts two or three that corresponds to one of them.  Begin your post with a quotation of the the relevant dialogue and then compose a few paragraphs reflecting upon how the passage treats the theme.

1) violence, desire, and the unconscious
2) gender roles, masculinity and femininity
3) tradition and modernity
4) names, inheritance, blood
5) home, domestic space, and land

The Author


Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) is the most important writer of 20th-century Spain; celebrated for his poetry and plays, he was also an artist and pianist. He went to school with the painter Salvador Dali, the film maker Luis Bunel, and befriended musicians, composers such as Manuel de Falla, and the bullfighter Ignacio Sanchez Mejilla.

His writing is celebrated by turns for its immersion in folk culture and its modern, surreal qualities.Lorca celebrated aspects of tradition at the same time as he recognized the limitations of the provincial. It was composed at a time of significant change in Spain, during the five-year period between the dictatorships of Primo de Rivera and Francisco Franco, whose fascist henchmen executed Lorca in 1936 at the outset of the Civil War. The 1931 Constitution established such modern rights as freedom of speech, separation of church and state, and suffrage for women.  While not himself an activist, Lorca directed the traveling theater company (La Barraca) which was funded by the new government and toured rural areas. Franco's fascist henchmen abducted Lorca from his home and executed him in 1936 at the outset of the Civil War for reasons still debated: ideological vendetta, homophobia, anti-intellectualism. . . ?

____________________________________________

The Duende
One important and distinctive concept for Lorca's writing is the idea of "Duende" -- adopted by Lorca to explain his poetics, emphasizing passion, death, and grounded in rural Andalusian folklore. It associates flamenco song, dance, and the bullfight. Excerpt in English


Poems
The poems eventually published in the book Poema del Cante Jondo, were largely composed between August and November of 1921, several read in public for the festival with Manuel De Falla of traditional Flamenco folk music 1922.


• Three Cities: Dance
∘ Romance: 8 syllable lines; assonant rhyme on even lines.
∘ ? How is the power of the ghostly Carmen's dance figured?

• Flamenco Vignettes: Cafe Cantante
∘ Dolores la Parrala (1845-1915), was a singer from Jerez, celebrated by Lorca and others; born in the province of Huelva, region of Andalucia in the South of Spain.
∘ ? How is la Parrala's expressiveness conveyed?
∘ ? How is audience attentiveness figured?
∘ ? What are some images that partake of dream logic?

• Memento
∘ Triana is the "gypsy" barrio of Sevilla
∘ What is the attitude towards death?

• La Cogida y la Muerte / Llanto Por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1934)
∘ From a longer poem on the death of famous bullfighter, killed in the ring after a return to bullfighting at age 43.  Meji'as was a patron of the arts, intellectual and aspiring dramatist; Lorca introduced his guest lecture on the Bullfight at Columbia University in 1930.   The poem laments his death but simultaneously ennobles him.
∘ alternates 8 and 11 syllable lines (octosyllable and hendecasyllabic)
∘ Lola Flores recites "Llanto por..."
∘ ? What are some of the most visceral images?
∘ ? What are the effects of the estribillo of "five in the afternoon" ?


Other Youtube Links:
Lola Flores y Carmen Flores - Sevillanas Video
Lola FLores Dances with Manolo Caracol - video
Flores y Caracol - video
Nacho Blanco, contemporary Flamenco dancer - video

____________________________________________

The Play

(source)
Written in 1933, Bodas de Sangre is set several decades earlier, in a rural region in the south of Spain. Some of the intertwined thematics throughout the play include:

1) violence, desire, and the unconscious
2) gender roles, masculinity and femininity
3) tradition and modernity
4) names, inheritance, blood
5) home, domestic space, and land

The play was inspired by news accounts of the actual Crime of Najar.


Reading the First Act

Act I.1

The dramatic situation of Bridegroom and Mother is established. What do we learn about the future and history of the family?  Who are the Felixes? What is the worry about the bride? How do the symbols of knives and fruit, along with the mother's pronouncements convey the values of an agrarian life ... or those of a widowed mother in a patriarchal community?

Act I.2

Look at how Leonardo's violent entry into the domestic space of his own home underscore what's socially expected and how his character violates the space. How does the surreal lullaby contribute to the tone of this scene?

Act I.3
What do we learn about traditional ideas of marriage, the needs of individuals and the larger social functions as the betrothal takes place? In particular, how is the Bride exposed as a character struggling with her own subject position?f

Read the poems and ACT 1 of the play Blood Wedding by Gabriel Garcia Lorca. 
Think about:

• Realism + Surrealism / dreams /unconscious /Freud
  

• Flamenco music
  

• Bullfight and rituals around death

• Tragedy

(Anglo) American literature as Context

• National literatures draw upon, revise, or invent originary traditions
• From the 19th century, Anglo American writers experience the lack of a distinctive American literary past as a crisis
• Early 20th century paradox of modernism and interest in the primitive; see
  
• The "spirit" of Indian song attracts; Romantic noble savage; are the works taken on their own terms?

Mary Austin pp. 49-51

Native American Sources 

• Study began with the colonial period (1600s)
  
• Many "sources" are informational documents, generated for non-aesthetic purposes - Missionaries and government agencies sponsor language study and "collection" in the 19th century (Bureau of Indian Affairs, early ethnography, linguistics, and anthropology)
  
• Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (geologist, ethnographer, Indian Agent) documented and translated oral texts (1820s-1860) in the upper midwest; Jane Johnston, his wife, learned the language from her Ojibwe mother. (Personal Memoirs of a Residence of Thirty Years with the Indian Tribes on the American Frontiers) http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/11119
  
• Frances Densmore records and transcribes music.
  
• George Catlin paints
  
• George Cronyn's 1934 anthology is the first book-length collection of Native verbal work as literature

Catlin, "Ha Kon E Crase, The Eagle Dance p. 46 contrasted with Meda Songs p. 47

Contrast "Chants to the Deity" with the "Song of the Owl" p. 48*

Case Study: "A loon I though it was" (Sung by Mrs. Mary English)

Comparisons - spirit and attention to form

• Hoffman - "The Loon Upon the Lake"  p. 46,
• Cronyn/Austin - "Love Songs" p. 52,
• Densmore - No. 135 "My Love Has Departed" p. 63,
• Sherwood - a loon,  p. 53

More on the Ojbwe http://www.nativeusa.org/ojibwe.htm

Countervision: Native American Writers, After 1970

• Writers take up dominant forms of poetry and fiction, especially the novel
• Shift in AUTHORITY; Native writers claiming opportunities to represent themselves and their community, not to be spoken of or for.
• Incorporate some stylistic elements of oral tradition, sometimes use Native language; BUT increasingly conscious of the political problems of sharing performance traditions;
  
• often treat themes resonant within the community; but work within the framework of the modern novel, etc. while critiquing contemporary Anglo society and/or calling attention to alterior perspectives and experience

Sherman Alexie p. 54-55

• Three Poems

Scalp Dance, Paul Kane; Kane, Paul. Wandering As An Artist Among the Indians of North America

With the explosion of digital media and the internet, we now have the ability to discover and listen to music from practically any corner of the globe.  If you, living in Western Pennsylvania, wanted to devote yourself to Japanese jazz musicians, you could collect, without leaving your home, hoards of recordings, videos, and information, and also interact with other Japanese jazz fans from all around the world. However for most people, there are limits to how much "foreign" music they can absorb -- and I mean new music of all sorts, but especially new music that doesn't readily fit into one of the current playlists in our minds.  Based on your recent encounter with Mexican music, what are the pros and cons of discovering "foreign" music, music that comes from outside of your circle of experience?  Do people really need to "discover" new music, or is it perhaps better to focus on knowing a narrower swath of music really well?

Character of the Hero:
Gregorio Cortez epitomized the ideal type of hero of the Rio Grande people, the man who defends his right with his pistol in his hand, and who either escapes at the end or goes down before superior odds-in a sense a victor even in defeat. . . . It was as if the Border had dreamed Gregorio Cortez before producing him, and sung his life and deeds before he was born" (Paredes, 124-5)

The Border: Cultural Context
The late-19th century Texas/Mexico Border as a scene of past battles, ongoing struggles over land, rights, identity -- particularly between Anglo-Texans and Mexican-Texans-- a situation already polarized before the Gregorio Cortez incident. 1821 Map, 1845, Treat of Guadalupe Hidalgo cession

Oral Tradition:
Oral or folk texts help constitute the values of a culture and given its members a sense of belonging. The corrido plays such function in the American southwest, particularly along the Rio Grande border with Mexico. 

• Corrido's are always narratives -- that is, they tell a story.  But they are sung more often than written, and in the years before recording, would have been transmitted from one singer to another. 

• A typical corrido deals with factual incidents that one might today see in the newspaper, but obviously the events and perspectives are shaped specially by the singer/teller for a specific audience.

• It often includes formulaic elements (In such and such a place/ this thing happened; or Now with this I say farewell, under the shade of the cypress tree).

• Its poetic form derives from the European/Spanish "Romance" (11th-century narrative poems, 8-syllable lines, o/a assonant rhyme, indeterminate length)

Discussion: Describe the archetype of the border hero. (See esp. 147-149) 

Film Clips:
Incident: The Tellings Anglo/01 and Mexican/02; Defense, Prosecution;
The material for a heroic song: The chase; Helped by the community; Theater

Read Corrido Texts (packet) and Listen to the Music
http://www.corridos.org/

Discussion:
How does the variation among collected versions concentrate us on crucial elements of a corrido? (What's essential, what's dispensed with?)  How  are the historical events used in its telling (by the teller and its implied audience)? Are there moments where the song seems to be embellished or shaped to a specific purpose (that has little to do with actual events or a credible report)? What kind of author is implied? What kind of audience is implied?  What makes the "cultural space" and time from which the corrido comes distinctive? Discuss how this background would influence audience response. 

The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez 1901 - ?
What's achieved in the continued circulation of a 100 year-old song?

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQPcbWETuyQ
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj4-6ZCc7i4
• http://www.amazon.com/Gregorio-Cortez/dp/B001BV8D4M/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1252548901&sr=1-2
  
• http://www.amazon.com/Corrido-De-Gregorio-Cortez/dp/B0011GT166/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=dmusic&qid=1220502287&sr=8-6
• http://www.amazon.com/Gregorio-Cortez/dp/B0012QO0YS/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&s=dmusic&qid=1220502287&sr=8-12
• http://www.amazon.com/Gregorio-Cortez/dp/B0011USHN0/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&s=dmusic&qid=1220502287&sr=8-16

NOTES::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Oomissions: place names (omitted or changed)
scene setting (omitted)
narration of encounter, omitted
event sequence     
Key passages: defiant statement ("I am Gregorio Cortez")
contrast of courage and fear,
the driven man and mercenary
group affiliation (Mexicans / Americanos, Rinches)

Unlike the troubador songs, which we presume to have had singular "authors," texts in oral tradition are sometimes collectively composed. In the case of the Corrido of Gregorio Cortez, we cannot name a single author but instead attribute it to its various singers.  How does collective or anonymous authorship of a piece effect our relationship to it as an audience? Does it gain or lose in meaning and significance? Does it challenge or ease our job as interpreters? Is it significant that in traditions such as the corrido, early performers seem to have had the latitude to "edit" the text (that is, making deliberate changes to names, events, and images in their performances)? How important is it  that such oral texts must compel other performers to take them up ... or they are forgotten?

1. First Blog Posts -  Recent

• experiences
• problems
  

2. Overview
What is Courtly Love?
"Courtly Love is a stylized and idealized treatment of love widely employed during the middle ages....  Courtly love is a noble passion: the courtly love idealizes his beloved; she, his soverign lady, occupies an exalted position above him. His feelings for her ennoble him and make him more worthy; her beauty of body and soul makes him long for union with her, not for passion's sake but a a means of achieving the ultimate in moral excellence.  It is a striking paradox that love as presented by a few of the early troubadors in their noble love-songs (cansos) is adulterous and illicit and, at the same time, ennobling and conducive to virtue."

What is an Alba or Aubade?
"A dawn song, ordinarily expressing the regret of two lovers that day has come so soon to separate them....  It has no fixed metrical form, but in Occitan each stanza usually ends with the word 'alba'. The earliest examples in Occitan and Old French date from the end of the 12th century.  The alba probably grew out of the medieval watchman's cry, announcing from his tower the passing of the night hours and the return of day.  In one alba it is the night watchman who speaks, a friend of the lover's, who has been standing guard.  Others are dialogues between lover and beloved, with occasional comments from the author."

(Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Eds. Alex Permineger and T. V. F. Brogan.  Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. p. 245, 26)

3. Two Troubador Lyric Poems
Giraut de Bornelh "Reis Glorious"- an alba 

• Read part of Occitan; then see Ezra Pound translation: "I. Compleynt of a gentleman"

Guilhen de Peitu - "Ab la douzor del temps novel"

• Read part of Occitan
• Compare standard (facing) and Pound translation (II. Avril)
  

4. Group Discussion

Ezra Pound/ Alba

1.      When the nightingale to his mate
2.      Sings day-long and night late
3.      My love and I keep state
4.      In bower,
5.      In flower,
6.      'Till the watchman on the tower
7.      Cry:
8.              "Up! Thou rascal, Rise,
9.              I see the white
10.                    Light
11.                    And the night
12.                              Flies."
                                                                  (ca. 1918)


A. In this compressed poem, who is speaking? What is a bower? What does it mean to "keep state"? How do the connotations of words like bower and tower charge the poem with meaning? (Century Dictionary)  Are these subtleties of expression more accessible to a listener or a reader?

B. What aspects of courtly love are expressed? How does the poem convey the experience of desire and longing?  What effect does the parallel between birds and lovers produce? In terms of theme, does it seem to belong in the troubador tradition?

C. How do the sound patterns in the poem shape it? Does it have several "audible" sections? Do rhythmic patterns (of stressed and non-stressed syllables), rhyme, and line-length compliment the sense of the poem?

D.  Suppose that a critic wanted to argue that: "Ezra Pound's 'Alba'" represents what happens when an ancient, sung text is converted into a modern poem for silent reading on the page. What could one point to in order to support this claim? Or to call it into question? To what extent does it qualify as an "alba"?