Vicente Espinel.Alamy Stock Photo
Guasa decimal
is the name of a WhatsApp group shared by some of the best-known poets and musicians in Spain.
Spurred on by the Uruguayan Jorge Drexler and, above all, by the Cuban Alexis Díaz Pimienta, the Spaniards Marwan, Rozalén, Toni Zenet, El Kanka, Pedro Guerra and, among many others, the poets Juan José Téllez and Felipe Benítez Reyes (who makes as an intermediary with Joaquín Sabina, who does not have WhatsApp service) they share in this chat, for fun, but also as a challenge and part of an “intellectual feast”, verses written in what is known as the tenth spinel.
The structure of this verse, the most popular in Spanish music, remains exactly the same as it was four centuries ago, when the Malaga priest Vicente Espinel (Ronda, Málaga, 1550-Madrid, 1624) wrote it for the first time in his book
Various rhymes
, published in Madrid in 1591. Never would I have imagined this character from a fictional biography, poet, musician, novelist, senior chaplain, teacher of Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca, the long life that awaited that type of verse that , paradoxically, he barely cultivated it, but which, however, today is buzzing on social networks.
A metric that is gaining weight in poetry and urban music, as occurs in rap and repentismo (the improvisation of the word), making its way in Spain after centuries of tradition in Latin America.
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Long life and tremendous geographical expansion.
The tenth is the verse that unites Spanish music with the Latin American tradition, in a round trip (in the new continent he became great and returned to Spain with all the honors several centuries later) that has this week stopping in Nueva York.
Together with the undisputed figure of guitarist Paco de Lucía, the Flamenco Festival - the largest promoter of flamenco art outside our borders, with presence in Miami, New York and London - dedicates this year's edition in the Big Apple to Vicente Espinel, of which 400 years have passed since his death, as responsible not only for the popularization of the musical décima, but also considered by flamencos as the father of the Spanish guitar.
This Andalusian priest had the audacity to add a fifth string to the vihuela, the most popular instrument of the Golden Age, thus transforming it, forever, into a guitar.
“Espinel's life and work constitute a formidable historical trompe l'oeil.
Everything is what it is, but nothing is what it seems.
Did she really invent the tenth?
His disciple Lope de Vega says yes, but there are great doubts about it.
He added the fifth string to the vihuela, but it is known that it already existed before.
And, to make matters worse, his picaresque novel
Relations of the Life of Squire Marcos de Obregón
, supposedly autobiographical, is not a reliable reflection of his adventures either.
At least for nine years, between 1572 and 1581, in which there is no reference to his adventures," explains the journalist and poet Juan José Téllez from the Cervantes Institute in New York, in charge of opening the commemorative activities of Espinel, who They will continue in Spain starting in March, after their premiere in the United States.
The journalist and poet Juan José Téllez, in charge of opening the Espinel commemorative activities, poses at the Cervantes Institute in New York. Pepe Zapata
“All indications point to the fact that he did not invent the décima,” continues Téllez, “the grouping of two limericks with the fixed structure abbaaccddc had already been used by Juan de Mal Lara, for example.
But Samuel Gili Gaya assured that 'what he did was perfect it, giving it unity and lightness;
His prestige contributed to disseminating it and making it fashionable.”
Among the most iconic of Espinel, which perfectly captures that structure, Téllez proposes this one:
There is no good that keeps me from evil,
fearful and cowering,
of offended unreason,
and offended coward.
And although my complaint, it is already late,
and reason defends it to me,
more in my damage it lights up,
that I go against those who wrong me,
like the dog that is angry
It offends its own owner.”
The poet from Cádiz has collected, in the conference he gave on Wednesday in New York, the appreciations of the philologist and writer Maximiano Trapero, a specialist in the musical tenth, for whom “Espinel's spinels, being good, as whose daughters they are, do not They reach that level of excellence that has made them proverbial.
His Baroque followers and even current improvisers make them better.
And of course, many more: Calderón and Lope made countless tenths more than their creator;
and any of the current decimists, in a simple song, are capable of creating many more than what Espinel created in all of his work.
tenth and song
We do not know if Maximiano Trapero, resident in the Canary Islands, which was the natural bridge with America and where spinel is a musical stick incorporated into its folklore, has joined the WhatsApp group of our best-known musicians, but the truth is that, as
UNED professors Clara Martínez and María Esteban
report on their website
Décima y Canción , “social networks have provided a new dissemination channel where participants share their love for classical verse in general and the décima in particular.”
Part of the responsibility lies with the Cuban poet, repentista and researcher Alexis Díaz-Pimienta.
His activity has a lot of impact on the new generation of Spanish-speaking singer-songwriters, including Jorge Drexler, Javier Ruibal, El Kanka, Juanes and Marwan.
“From its digital platform
Academia Oralitura
, Pimienta acts as a bridge between genres and continents,” they maintain.
But there is also the self-proclaimed
Brotherhood of the Word
, promoted by the Colombian poet and singer-songwriter Carlos Palacio,
Pala
, with an important presence on the social network Facebook.
“The new platforms are playing a crucial role in linking the tenths on both sides of the Atlantic,” confirms Juan José Téllez, who recalls that in 2011 Jorge Drexler came up with a variant of the tenth, the
semi-spinel
, to adapt it to the 140 characters that Twitter accepted until 2017:
“There is no #Spinela that fits, that I know of, in this obituary.
“The #Semiespinela boasts the character count of her That she dies in one hundred and forty,” the Uruguayan wrote on his social network.
“I take this opportunity to remember that the structure of the fandango, which was also improvised in peasant meetings, giving rise, in Cádiz, to the chacarrá or the Cucarrete fandango, was based on the limerick, which is still the mother of the décima” , also points out the Cadiz poet, who recites this delicious example from New York to amazed Anglo-Saxon ears:
Your name is not Maria
neither Carmela nor Pilar
you will call every day
whatever they want to call you
for being a woman of the road.
Espinel, musician and luthier
The other “invented invention” of Vicente Espinel, as Téllez defines, is that of the vihuela transforming into a guitar, “which has also traveled a long world and has, to a large extent, twinned what Paco de Lucía, one of its great architects , he called “the music of the people with an empty refrigerator.”
Vicente Gómez Martínez-Espinel, in 'Portraits of the Illustrious Spaniards', published in Madrid in 1791. Universal History Archive (Universal Images Group via Getty)
The guitar born since Espinel added a fifth string to the medieval instrument “raised its empire over popular music and, especially, in flamenco: the best-known engraving of the singer who is remembered with the nickname El
Planeta
, has among its hands a guitar,” recalls the Cadiz poet.
As the guitarist Rycardo Moreno, present these days also at the Flamenco Festival in New York, explains these days: “Flamenco can be understood without the guitar, in fact it already existed centuries before its appearance, but it really is the Spanish instrument that gives us represents in its most intellectual quality, the one that has achieved the respect of all the musicians in the world, and this admiration is due to the fact that there are already many generations of guitarists filling flamenco with creativity and commitment.
Pepe Zapata is also walking through Manhattan these days, the hand that has rocked the cradle of the Flamenco Festival and the Cervantes Institute to kick off the Espinel Year on this side of the Atlantic.
Musical promoter, documentary filmmaker and curator of the fourth centenary of the death of the musician and priest from Malaga, Zapata claims him not only in his creative role, but "as a luthier, the builder more than the player, since he was the modifier of the fifth order", he assures.
For this reason, Zapata is currently preparing a large exhibition on this instrument that will stop in Almería, Ronda and Madrid.
It will be the beginning of a commemoration that will return to Spain in spring, after this American start, on the same return trip that the tenth spinel already undertook.
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