Wednesday, 3 September 2014

Zapatos de Baile - Gypsy Flamenco Masters (MLI song)


This piece opens with a four bar plucked melody (A) played on the guitar and is repeated twice before the introduction of a second guitar on bar 9. The 4 bar melody is repeated eight times overall, but with a slightly different ending on the eighth time. As we can see from the notation below, the melody consists of a quaver, semi-quaver, followed by 5 quavers, semi-quaver, and a final quaver.



The second guitar, which is introduced in bar 2, is used to highlight certain notes within the melody. This is shortly followed by a third guitar, which is introduced in bar 9. This guitar plays a simple rhythm of strummed chords which are strummed on the first beat of each bar for 3 bars, and then in bar 12 the chord is strummed on beats 1 and 4 of the bar. The entrance of the djembe is signalled by a sustained cymbal crash in bar 17.

In bar 30, the main guitar plays the same rhythm using the same notes for a total of three bars. This section is made up of a minim, followed by a quaver, a quaver rest and the two more quavers. The minim and last two quavers are played a tremolo, as you can see in the illustration below.

This melody (A) is then played until bar 32, where there is a 4 bar link that signals the change of melody (B) which is played on another guitar. This melody (B) is played for a total of 32 bars before returning to melody A in bar 68.

From my aural analysis, ‘Zapatos de Baile’ is in binary form (AABB).  The structure of the piece is as follows:

Introduction, A1, A2, A2 (with the addition of a second guitar which plays strummed chords), link, B1, B2, A3, A4, B3, B4, A5

As you can see, the piece ends with ‘A5’ and not an outro. This is because I did not hear a clear outro but it could be argued that ‘A5’ was supposed to play that role. 

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