Next Stop: Cordoba

Music excerpts from “Lamento Andaluz” and “Capricho Arabe,” Pepe Romero on guitar.

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The composer of “Lamento Andaluz'” is unknown, the song, nevertheless, typifies the Flamenco tradition. Francisco Tárrega composed “Capricho Arabe” in 1880 as an acknowledgment of the Moorish influence on Spanish music. Played here by the virtuoso guitarist Pepe Romero, they are rich with the syncopated rhythms and melodic ideas of Flamenco and traditional Spanish music from the south of Spain–areas under Muslim control for nearly 700 years (755-1492 CE). This connection with the past is embodied in Joaquín Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez.” Rodrigo’s best-known work, it was inspired by the gardens at Palacio Real de Aranjuez, the spring resort (or palace) and gardens originally built by Philip II in the 16th century. Rodrigo hoped to capture “the fragrance of magnolias, the singing of birds and the gushing of fountains” in the gardens of Aranjuez. The musical ideas in both Rodrigo’s and Francisco Tárrega’s work and Flamenco music in general can be traced back even further, however–to a time when Cordoba was at its height, when Spain was a “conduit” between Europe and the vast learning and cultural sophistication of the Islamic world. The similarities in traditional Spanish music and traditional Arab music are reminders of this historic process and the tremendous value of cultural exchange. The connection from traditional Flamenco (found in the excerpt of “Lameto Andaluz”) to Tarrega’s attempt at blending and highlighting the Arab influence on Spanish music (in Capricho Arabe) to Concierto de Aranjuez (at once a Classical piece, a link to the past and the central theme in Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain) complete the journey from Miles to Cordoba, so to speak. Next stop: Mecca.