The passage of time in the Alley of Art

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David of Arahal He takes a lunch of sand. As it slips through his hands, he dreams of unlimited time to create light butterflies on what appears to be a six-string pentagram.

The semantic paradox gives rise to the comparison between the musical poetics of Stravinsky and the Flemish conception of Federico Garcia Lorca, an apparent antithesis that, at times, occurs in this work, where the interpreter faithful to a structural, technical, disciplined and intellectual music mixes with music imbued with a creative, emotional, mystical interpretation rooted in popular tradition.

Meanwhile, the illogic of this dream has not yet become a paradox. The guitarist from Arahal surrounds himself with masters and spirit, light and voices, scene and euphony to enter the network of streets of a town and evoke, with his music, a subtle conceptual universality. There is interpretation and mastery as there is enchantment and feeling, in addition to a literary background transcribed to the touch. flamenco.

The silence of the night becomes a hubbub when dawn breaks in the Alley of Art. Through a rhythmic plucking of notes, the melodies introduce us to a rhythmic combination of Extremadura roots with cadences that remind me of Jerez, but stitched together with deep nuances of Manolo Sanlucar. Behind the aesthetics, Lorca's music can be guessed through the little Argentinian, reminiscences of folkloric petenera and some fragments of classical music.

The street is adorned with red carnations on the walls and they are represented on the rosette of a guitar. A touch of granaínas, brought from the Seville countryside, evokes scenes from the Alhambra. The harmony of the tremolo imprints the freshness of the flower on the whitewashed walls, the falsetas are shreds of carnations from some Carmen and the arabesque of the glissando acts as a cutting to the muted ones that emerge like a shadow in the silence of the alleys of the Albaicín that play chess between the lattices, a complete chromatic conjunction of nostalgia and fantasy.

A halo of shadows emerges in a soleá of unusual sounds, behind which the amalgamated rhythm of the accompaniment is hidden. With the glow of a choruscante moon of voice the veils of the guitar are illuminated. Angeles Toledano leaves the mysteries naked while David de Arahal envelops them with unusual sonority. And so, in that dialogue between cante and guitar, drama is debated with reflection. In the way that one seeks one's own identity, through some momentary reflection that surprises the muses as they delve into unknown depths.

Swans populate the avenue of a park. They travel along it until they reach a pond that brings breezes from a bay in major key. Meanwhile, the polysemy of the word swan leads us to the figurative definition of an excellent poet or musician. And in that excellence, David's hands become two swan wings, where his flight takes the form of an ideal fan to perform voluptuous strumming, like a Zeus transformed to seduce Leda. The crudeness of the myth, brought to verse by Pierre de Ronsard, is reflected in the speed of the alzapúa, the intensity of the forks and the combination of the picados. While the tremolos, together with the games of ligatures, harmonize the metaphor of the musical divinity that ends up captivating the character of human weakness.

«In one of those alleys, David de Arahal took the sand of time impregnated with the canonical touches flamencos. He has let it flow through his hands to turn it into an art that captivates with the spells of the present. While there, chronologically, one glimpses a little square of contemporary legends, a place of excellence that opens up for him because he is forging a style with a highly personal touch, an unmistakable character and, at every turn, sublime.

There is silence in the streets and a child plays with his kite swaying in the Levante winds. A parking attendant watches him in amazement and points a few cantes distant ones that allude to towns beyond Sierra Morena. The guitar transports the musicality of those lands to a closer environment, capturing in the latent binary beat all the possible essences of the road, stopped in Granada air, at times, to release the string and enter the mining depths. While the parking attendant walks away to his chores, the child picks up the kite and dreams of new flights, who knows, maybe through other airs.

The Andalusian winds, like the air flamencos, stand out for their enormous diversity. Thus, rocked by the breezes of the flugelhorn, the music of the guitarist from Arahal has woven a biznaga of freshness reflected in the dynamic and joyful approach of the tanguillos. In a framework that has the bravery of the Jerez neighborhood of San Miguel, he has inserted those jasmines that bring the calm of the Barrameda. A rhythmic composition of sunset scents, where some of the most representative Atlantic airs of the toque por tanguillos have been joined to those that David Rodriguez Romero has been imprinting on them the new fragrances of the fertile garden of his guitar.

Night falls again and the Cafeteria San Francisco becomes a kind of variety theatre. The sound of the cane transports us through the history of this palo flamenco primordial, but at the same time, it suggests alternative scenarios through some avant-garde musical arrangements. A touch brought from the ancestral vihuelas and theorbos of those Andalusian scenes of Estebanez Calderon, which portrayed a dance in Triana, in the atmosphere of a New York club from the 1920s, observed by a poet during his stay. Set at night as a symbolic space for both traditions, the darkness intensifies the roots while allowing for the exploration of modernity. An introspective sphere that shows, at the same time, the human and creative wonders of an emerging and different musician.

David of Arahal and Manuel de la Tomasa have created, From the stop to the platform, a mosaic passage that transports us from the past to the present, recalling stories from the golden age of seguiriya. A piece that preserves the ancestral and collects deep sounds from its long journey, but creating unusual elements in a seguiriya restored on a kind of musical narrative. Because they have been able to give it a descriptive approach to tell a story transmitting emotions. All of this through a cante of centuries-old roots that bloom in renewed branches and a touch of highly classical accompaniment, with a marked rhythm, where the tragic character is brought to a musicality of relief interweaving the major tonality, the variations with modal exchange and the timbre of the high notes dragged in the mode flamenco predominant.

A blue of profound purity is mixed with the solemn elegance of the brilliance of jet in a bulería of twilight. There the symbolism of the color awakens essences of bullfighting, those that were the germ of the inspiration of this piece. And a creative prism allows the composer to collect models of splendor and transform them into new sounds. Like capturing the murmur of a timeless work where the master Manolo Sanlúcar musically reflects the thirds, luck and rituals of the passages of bullfighting or like collecting the echoes of those harmonies that raised the indelible duality of Camarón de la Isla y Paco de Lucía, all of which creates at the same time its own melting pot of musicality.

Loneliness becomes a poem in a composition that explores the most poetic and melodic side of the flamenco guitar. If these original lyrics and music Rafael de Leon y Juan Solano I already had a reference voice, that of Grace Montes, now we can say that he also has an archetype in the guitar, in a way in which the artist interprets while exploring new paths, where his tendency for certain introspective soundscapes is shown and he manages to create Rican atmospheres of extraordinary melodic sensitivity.

The music brought to us by this magnificent work by a young guitarist, David de Arahal, stands out for his natural ability to synthesize the influences of historical masters with a contemporary vision that continues to expand the horizons of art. flamenco. The musicality that he prints on the cante transcends the art of accompanying it to turn it into the magic of wrapping it and his solo playing becomes intimate while being imbued with symbolism.

The alleys have the charm of being portions of space where time apparently stops. But this is a concept that passes incessantly, while measuring the separation between events. Thus time can escape, happen or transform. And in one of these alleys, David de Arahal took the sand of time impregnated with the canonical touches flamencos. He has let it flow through his hands to turn it into an art that captivates with the spells of the present. While there, chronologically, one glimpses a little square of contemporary legends, a place of excellence that opens up for him because he is forging a style with a highly personal touch, of unmistakable character and, at every turn, sublime.

Text: Alfredo Barrera Cuevas, PhD in Mathematics