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Duende is a difficult-to-define phrase used in the Spanish arts, including performing arts. From the original meaning (a fairy- or goblin-like creature in Spanish and Latin American mythology), the artistic and especially musical term was derived.

The meaning of duende as in tener duende (having duende) is a rarely-explained concept in Spanish art, particularly flamenco, having to do with emotion, expression and authenticity. In fact, tener duende can be loosely translated as having soul.

Contents 1 Origins of the term 2 Example of contemporary application of the term 3 Examples 4 External links 5 See also

Federico García Lorca first developed the concept of Duende in a lecture he gave in La Habana in 1930.

There would appear to be something vaguely pagan and even demonic about Duende. Duende is a spirit of art, much the opposite of the Muse.

Where the Muse brings golden inspiration, Duende brings blood. The Muse speaks of life, yet Duende sings of death. Duende is not inspiration, Duende is a struggle, a dark force, having very little to do with outer beauty, a struggle present in the artist's soul, the struggle of knowing that death is imminent. It is this knowledge of death that awaits and the despair that stems from it that produce Duende, and Duende will then color the artist's work with gut-wrenching authenticity, painful hues and tones that produce strong, vibrant art.

"So, then, the duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.

"Everything that has black sounds in it, has duende." (ie emotional 'blackness').

"This ‘mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained’ is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched Nietzsche’s heart as he searched for its outer form on the Rialto Bridge and in Bizet’s music, without finding it---"

"The arrival of the duende presupposes a radical change to all the old kinds of form, brings totally unknown and fresh sensations, with the qualities of a newly created rose, miraculous, generating an almost religious enthusiasm."

"All the arts are capable of duende, but where it naturally creates most space, as in music, dance and spoken poetry, the living flesh is needed to interpret them, since they have forms that are born and die, perpetually, and raise their contours above the precise present." [1]

— García Lorca, Theory and Play of the Duende

In March 2005 Jan Zwicky (University of Victoria) gave a personal interpretation of duende in the context of contemporary music at a symposium organised by Continuum Contemporary Music & the Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, an event televised by Big Ideas:

"Music is new when it possesses duende. Black sounds, as Lorca called them. The dark counterpoise to Apollo's light. Music in which we hear death sing........ duende lives in blue notes, in the break in a singer's voice, in the scrape of rosined horsehair hitting sheepgut (the playing of stringed instruments). We are more accustomed to its presence in jazz, and the blues, and it is typically a feature of music in performance, or music in which performance and composition are not separate acts. But, it is also audible in the work of classically oriented composers who are interested in the physical dimensions of sound, or in sound as a physical property of the world."

"Even if it is structurally amorphous, or naively traditional, music whose newness lies in its duende will arrest our attention because of its insistence in honouring the death required to make the song. We sense the gleam of the knife, we smell the blood... In reflecting on the key images of western music's two-part invention, the duende of the tortoise, and the radiance of Appolonian emotional geometry, we are reminded that originality is truly radical, that it comes from the root, from the mythic origins of the art (music)".^[1]

(note: in Greek myth Apollo kills a tortoise to create the first lyre).

Prior to this, popular Australian music artist, Nick Cave made reference to duende in his lecture pertaining to the nature of the love song (Vienna, 1999):

"In his brilliant lecture entitled "The Theory and Function of Duende" Federico García Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art. "All that has dark sound has duende", he says, "that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain." In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often; anger, sometimes: but true sadness, rarely, Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and though he tries to he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. It haunts Polly Harvey. My friend and Dirty 3 have it by the bucket load. The band Spiritualised are excited by it. Tindersticks desperately want it, but all in all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever increasing acceleration of the music industry. Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care."

"All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil - the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here - so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering."^[2]

• Delerium's Karma album contains a track titled Duende.
• The 3rd movement of Leonardo Balada's Concierto Mágico (a guitar concerto) is subtitled Duende.
• the Gypsy Kings have two tracks called Duende.
• La Camilla's 1992 track 'Everytime You Lie' features the word Duende. Track 4 on the CD single release is also entitled Duende.
• Olav Basoski produced a track called Duende.
• Mercurial Poet Jack Gilbert penned a poem entitled Duende in his 2005 collection Refusing Heaven.

• Lorca's In Search of Duende - commentary & extracts
• Jazz Institute of Chicago - article on Miles Davis & duende in jazz

• Flamenco
• Blue note
• Words hardest to translate

Notes:

1. ^ Royal Ontario Museum: The Culture of New Music - advance summary of programme, March 12 2005
2. ^ Nick Cave's Love Song Lecture, October 21, 2000