A Woman Alone in Singing Sings from Many Memories: The "9 Cantares" by Sonia Miranda to José Ángel Valente

Abstract

In the article entitled “El cante, la voz”, written in commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the peña El Taranto, in Almería, José Ángel Valente outlines a kind of poetics of cante jondo in its relationship with the word. Some of the fundamental elements that this primitive lyrical background came to leave in his work, the result of the union between the popular and the cultured, emerge from it. In the first part of our study, we will analyse the keys to this poetics. We will then review the different approaches that have been made to Valente's poetry in the field of cante jondo, and we will stop at what is the most complete work published to date: that of the cantaora Sonia Miranda. In her album 9 cantares, the title of the unpublished composition that Valente gave in 1988 to his friends of the peña El Taranto, Miranda pays tribute to the poet in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of his death. In it he sets to music a dozen texts, some of them in verse, others in prose, which offer us a good sample of the enormous lyrical flow that converges in a work that, despite having been described as hermetic, or precisely because of it, finds in the darkest part of itself the mystery of its incarnation, that voice made song to which the poet already alluded and which is born of the very essence of his poetry. Based on the concept of “expansion” described by Dalmonte (2002), and with music as the gateway to the poetic, this last part analyses five of the songs on Miranda’s album, emphasising the rhythmic aspects of the text that emerge most forcefully in the process of adapting the poem to the song lyrics.