GUGURUMBÉ
Las raíces negras
(concert version)
Fahmi Alqhai, viola da gamba & direction
Quiteria Muñoz, soprano
Rocío Márquez, flamenco singer
Dani de Morón, flamenco guitar
ACCADEMIA DEL PIACERE
Rami Alqhai and Johanna Rose, violas da gamba
Carles Blanch, baroque guitar
Francisco Javier Núñez, harpsichord
Agustín Diassera, percussion
Programme
“Florida estaba la rosa” (Ensalada La Negrina) & Alegrías de Córdoba & “San Sabeya, gugurumbé” (Ensalada La Negrina)
Mateo Flecha the Elder (1481-1553) & traditional & Agustín Diassera
Milonga
Traditional
La Negra Atilia
Pablo Camacaro (b. 1947). Arr. Fahmi Alqhai
Jácara & Bulería
Fahmi Alqhai & Dani de Morón
Fandangos
Santiago de Murcia (1673-1739) & Fahmi Alqhai
Canción de cuna para dormir a un negrito
Xavier Montsalvatge (1912-2002). Arr. Fahmi Alqhai
Cachua serranita & Tonada El congo
Códice Trujillo del Perú (c. 1782)
Arrangements and adaptations: Fahmi Alqhai
Summary
Accademia del Piacere performs a concert version of the music from Gugurumbé, a show about the influence of Africa and the Americas on Spanish Baroque music, whose choreographed version is staged by Antonio Ruz. With Fahmi Alqhai, Dani de Morón, Quiteria Muñoz and Rocío Márquez.
Gugurumbé. Las raíces negras was presented in Nuremberg, Germany, at a theatre equipped for concerts and multidisciplinary shows. The production fuses Baroque music, flamenco and contemporary dance, exploring the influence of African music on the dances of the Spanish Baroque.
Programme notes
Un lindo baile veréis
con que buen rato tengáis
(…)
Pero advierte que es guineo
enjerto en indio, que allá
todas estas mezclas veo
Lope de Vega, “Servir a señor discreto”
Gugurumbé is an artistic exploration of Hispanic popular dances from the 16th century onwards: a world strongly influenced by the Black music that arrived through exchanges with the Americas, and which forms the very roots of what is today called flamenco.
The influence of sub-Saharan Africa is one of the great unopened boxes of European Baroque music and dance. Whether out of racist and colonial disdain – as a woke postmodernist would say – or out of contempt for the music of the lower classes – as a classical Marxist would say – or because of the scarcity of written sources inherent in music of oral tradition, the fact is that until recently little attention has been paid to the purely musical influence of overseas folklore on European art music at that historical moment. And this despite its being technically quite evident, and historically entirely consistent with the known facts. Not only is there evidence of enslaved musicians of sub-Saharan origin from the time of the discovery of America (in the service of the Dukes of Medina Sidonia, for example), but there are also dozens of written references to how their dances reached the Peninsula. Many arrived by way of the Americas and of a Seville whose inhabitants “resembled chess pieces: as many dark as white”, and in whose squares we know enslaved Black people used to gather: for instance in the square of Santa María la Blanca, according to the entremés Los mirones, attributed to Cervantes.
In the harmonic and rhythmic revolution that shook the Iberian Peninsula around 1600, unmistakable traces of that music and its dances can be read, infiltrated into the metres and chord progressions that landed in Lisbon and Seville, such as zarabandas, folías and guineos. Some came from the African ports themselves, but many more from the American colonies: amid the ceaseless traffic of slaves, gold and goods arrived those dances and songs that globalised popular culture for ever and scandalised the moralists of the day with their sensuality. Lascivious dances that seem to have been brought out of hell by the devil, in the words of Rodrigo Caro (1626), jácaras, passacaglias, chaconas and a whole great troop of this kind soon passed from the streets into guitar books and theatrical interludes, and from there into the salons of the aristocracy, but also into the substratum of what we would later call flamenco.
We will start from the historical musical sources that have come down to us from that Spain, among them parodies such as the Spanish and American villancicos de negros (thus Gugurumbé from La negrina by Mateo Flecha, which gives the programme its title) and dances such as those chaconas, jácaras and guineos. We will connect them, through their very rhythmic and harmonic essence, with the dances of flamenco, such as fandangos, alegrías and bulerías, and take them right up to the shore of our own 21st century.
Juan Ramón Lara
