ABSTRACT
Flamenco, the music that originated in southern Spain over one hundred and fifty years ago, has long captured the hearts and imaginations of people the world over and has become a symbol of all that is Spanish. The present study is a musical, social and cultural investigation of flamenco music with a focus on cantaoras (female flamenco singers). I examine importance of women to the flamenco tradition both in the past and the present. My book explores the contributions of women to the flamenco tradition, their essential role in the transmission and preservation of culture, as well as their participation as active agents of creativity and change within flamenco performance. My study is situated in socio-political currents that have been reshaping Spanish society since the early twentieth century, in particular the changing conditions for women in post-Franco Spain. Flamenco is a complex of practices: musical, physical, verbal and social, that has served as a site for the creation and negotiation of complex, multi-layered and often conflicting identities of nation, region, ethnicity and gender. I am interested in the discourse about and the performance practice within contemporary flamenco as emblematic of the uneven processes that have characterized modernization in Spain, and as a metaphor for the impassioned and often contradictory cultural practices of Andalusia.
