Los Romeros: Royal Family of the Spanish Guitar (Music in American Life) - Softcover

Clark, Walter Aaron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252083563 ISBN 13: 9780252083563

Verlag: UNIV OF ILLINOIS PR, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Spanish émigré guitarist Celedonio Romero gave his American debut performance on a June evening in 1958. In the sixty years since, the Romero Family-Celedonio, his wife Angelita, sons Celín, Pepe, and Angel, as well as grandsons Celino and Lito-have become preeminent in the world of Spanish flamenco and classical guitar in the United States. Walter Aaron Clark's in-depth research and unprecedented access to his subjects have produced the consummate biography of the Romero family. Clark examines the full story of their genius for making music, from their outsider's struggle to gain respect for the Spanish guitar to the ins and outs of making a living as musicians. As he shows, their concerts and recordings, behind-the-scenes musical careers, and teaching have reshaped their instrument's very history. At the same time, the Romeros have organized festivals and encouraged leading composers to write works for guitar as part of a tireless, lifelong effort to promote the guitar and expand its repertoire. Entertaining and intimate, Los Romeros opens up the personal world and unfettered artistry of one family and its tremendous influence on American musical culture.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Walter Aaron Clark is Distinguished Professor of Musicology and the founder/director of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music at the University of California, Riverside. His books include Isaac Albéniz: Portrait of a Romantic and Enrique Granados: Poet of the Piano. In 2016, King Felipe VI of Spain made him a Knight Commander of the Order of Isabel the Catholic.

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Los Romeros

Royal Family of the Spanish Guitar

By Walter Aaron Clark

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2018 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-252-08356-3

Contents

Foreword by Jesús López Cobos, Sir Neville Marriner,, 
Federico Moreno-Torroba Larregla, and Cecilia Rodrigo, 
Introduction, 
PART I. SOUTHERN SPAIN, 
From Málaga's Mountains, 
Cuba, qué linda es Cuba, 
The City of Paradise, Regained, 
Seville and Adiós, 
PART 2. SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 
Santa Barbara, 
Hollywood, 
Del Mar, 
The World, 
Intermission. Photo Gallery, 
PART 3. PROFILES, 
Chapter 9 Celedonio and Angelita, the Poet and His Muse, 
Chapter 10 Celin, the Romantic, 
Chapter 11 Pepe, the Philosopher, 
Chapter 12 Angel, the Proteus, 
PART 4. LEGACY, 
Chapter 13 The Romero Technique, 
Chapter 14 The Romero Repertoire, 
Chapter 15 Breakin' Up Is Hard to Do, 
Chapter 16 The Next Generations, 
Encore, 
Appendixes, 
1. Chronology, 
2. Romero Genealogy, 
3. List of Albums, 
4. Sources and Publications, 
Notes, 
Glossary of Names and Terms, 
Selected Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

FROM MÁLAGA'S MOUNTAINS

Standing alone on the mountainside, I quietly contemplate a lulling sensory counterpoint. Soon a favorite line from Clemens Brentano's poetry begins to echo in my consciousness, becoming a sort of mantra in this moment: "Silence, silence, let us listen intently!" All about me, bees hum in a unison drone while wood-pecking carpintero birds hammer out insistent rhythms on bark drums; a steady breeze stirs pine needles into undulations yielding both scent and sound; shimmering white clouds traverse the azure savannah overhead with a majestic gait, andante maestoso; great crescendos of warm North African air, laced with the vivifying fragrance and moisture of the Mediterranean, engulf the verdant earth; sea and sky blend seamlessly into a monochromatic canvas of blue, articulated in staccato fashion by brown, haze-shrouded islets off the Andalusian coast.

A hundred meters or so away, a chaotic chorus of bleating heralds the arrival of a herd of goats gamboling up the slopes of a dry wash and then threading its way through the local luxuriance of palo, pepper, pine, and palm trees, scrub oak, aloe, cactus, chaparral, wild grasses, yucca, oleander, as well as pomegranate, eucalyptus, mulberry, and olive trees. Here and there about me grow delicately fulsome rosemary plants, shyly adorned with pale-blue blossoms. Their celestial hue has made rosemary a popular emblem of religious devotees over the centuries, and the plant's Spanish name has thus become the same as that for a pilgrim, romero, or a pilgrimage, romería. I pluck a tender shoot to savor its pungent perfume.

Yet despite this Edenic nirvana, my mind wanders again and again to the place whence I have come this day and commands my eyes to trace the long, tortuous road that runs like a serpentine scar across the face of the mountain, to trace it down and away to the distant seaport of Málaga. Málaga, with its Roman amphitheater, its Moorish fortress, its cavernous cathedral, its tree-lined boulevards, and its timeless flamenco songs. Málaga, birthplace of Pablo Picasso and the twentieth-century surrealist poet and Nobel laureate Vicente Aleixandre, who dubbed it the "City of Paradise." But my restless thoughts remain unsatisfied with Málaga's paradisial enchantments and set sail ever farther, plus ultra, through the Pillars of Hercules and across the Atlantic to the margent of another world, to another ocean, other cities to discover, and other mountains to ascend.

This poetic scenario is both the beginning and the end of our saga. It is the saga itself, as we shall see. My companions on this outing include Pepe and Celin Romero, who are visiting their ancestral ground for the first time. Clambering over the tumbledown remains of a church that once formed the nucleus of a small farming village called Jotrón, they marvel at this place, hallowed by the memory of an earlier generation of Romeros and the first Spanish locale ever inhabited by their father, Celedonio. Spanish poet Antonio Machado seemed almost to have been speaking to them when, over a century earlier, he wrote, "Muy cerca está, romero, la tierra verde y santa y florecida de tus sueños" (Very close, pilgrim, is the green, sacred, and flowering land of your dreams). Indeed, it was from these extremely humble beginnings that their family's against-all-odds ascent to global fame (and relative fortune) began. Here it was that romero first became Romero.

Yet we would not even have known of this place without the remarkable memoirs of José Romero (henceforth Uncle Pepe, to distinguish him from Celedonio's renowned son, Pepe Romero), Celedonio's eldest brother, who recalled in photographic detail the early history of his family. The following account of Celedonio's ancestry and early life is greatly indebted to Uncle Pepe's recollections, which he expressed in lapidary Spanish prose. Indeed, a flair for language is just one of many talents that have characterized several generations of Romeros, as his grandson, José Francisco Romero, is a published poet.

MALAK

There are actually two Málagas: the city itself and the province of which it is the capital. Phoenicians colonized the area around the harbor already in the eighth century BCE and named it after their goddess of beauty, Malak. This commercially and militarily strategic locale changed hands over the ensuing centuries, yielding to Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Visigoths, Moors, and Arabs, in addition to welcoming many other groups of people, including Jews and Roma, as well as French and Italian settlers. Christian malagueños enthusiastically embraced the Blessed Virgin Mary, making the Virgen de la Victoria their patron saint, in honor of her undoubted succor in liberating the city from Muslim rule in 1487. But the city itself retained the name of that previous goddess, one whose images and places of worship had long since fallen to pieces. The entire region around the port city adopted this name as well and became one of fifty provinces in modern Spain.

Although Málaga's initial attraction was as a trading center along the southern coast of the Iberian Peninsula, conveniently situated near the Strait of Gibraltar and the North African coast, the historic mainstay of the region's economy has been fishing and agriculture, especially the cultivation of grains, grapes, citrus, and olives. The mountainsides to the north of the city and throughout the province have yielded a cornucopia of profitable produce ever since those ancient times, and certainly in the 1800s, when our story begins.

Yet the City of Paradise has not always been as hospitable as it might seem to the casual observer today. It has proven lamentably prone to floods, droughts, earthquakes, epidemics of plague, cholera, and typhus, as well as to naval and aerial bombardments, invasions, and economic ups and downs. It has experienced its fair share of political upheaval, too. Miserable conditions for workers prompted the rise of unionism and socialism in the 1880s and 1890s, and this laid the groundwork for continued unrest in the 1900s, especially leading up to the civil war of 1936–39, as communists and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF ILLINOIS PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0252083563
• ISBN 13: 9780252083563
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 376
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande