Ana Crismán, the artist who has turned the harp right into a flamenco instrument | Culture | EUROtoday

Ana Crismán (Jerez de la Frontera, 42 years previous) The music had accompanied her from a baby: the piano was her associate through the regulatory 10 years of conservatory of the typical grade she concluded being nonetheless very younger. After that, he determined to finish his coaching with a level in History and Music Sciences, which made it potential to develop into a trainer with solely 21 years. To instructing it was utilized for a substantial time, with out imagining the very important flip that the identical music that accompanied her was going to deliver him.

Very conscious of life and what we do or cease doing in it, Críman tells in dialog with the nation how a summer season, throughout a visit via Ireland, heard in Moher’s cliffs a avenue musician who performed the Celtic harp. He felt bewitched by that sound: “I surrendered to her beauty and, at the same time, I had a heart: I felt that what I listened was flamenco.” An appreciation of nothing trivial for a girl who, by delivery, was not in something overseas to the style.

Probably, he couldn’t think about that that instinct, along with a spell that might reveal in love – “You can fall in love with a non -human entity,” he says, “she would have to change her life. At that time, Crimemán, who had not touched the piano for 20 years, decided to devote himself to the harp, but not to any of them, had to be to the flamenco harp, an instrument that, paradoxically, did not exist. Aware of this, with the same determination that it exhibits in everything it counts, it was used in something that has not yet concluded: create what did not exist and, in addition, get the flamenco sound for its instrument.

The harpist, now converted into Arpaora, It shows a vast knowledge of the variety of existing harps and tells how it was looking for sounds between them, because “not all of them adjusted to flamenco sound”: from Colombia’s llanera harp liked the serious sounds and the Celtic more the media and acute, so, in another determination, and always in the search for that sound, he decided to build his own. It already goes for the third and is not yet satisfied: “Music doesn’t finish, no work should be completed.” Its current instrument, beech wood and firing firing walnut pine, has 35 strings and, in addition to sound, fits the weight requirements you need for your trips.

Learning was a separate chapter. He wanted to study, learn, but all the doors were closed: “They instructed me it was very previous.” I don’t quote another to do it alone. His experience as self -taught, he declares, “was intense and transformative.” He lacked hours and his life became an obsessive search for time to play. “Everything else was for later.” And the most transcendent decision came: to leave his job as a teaching officer to be able to play “about 14 or 16 hours a day”. It was in 2018. “At that point I did not have a live performance,” he recalls.

Fortunately, his uniqueness – he was the first harp of history that enters the sounds – and the magic of his sound were opening doors. In 2019 he already presented in New York his first project, which followed appearances at national festivals – well in Seville, Flamenco sum of Madrid, Festival de Jerez – and international: Flamenco Festival of Los Angeles, the Harp on Wight in England or Lo Andalou de Avignon (France).

The defense that makes your instrument cris is frontal. The same highlights its expressiveness as its jondura and sound, which defends that it is very flamenco: “It is a really magical sound, which takes you to a spot the place you may have by no means been.” He insists on his versatility and ability to incorporate the codes of Jondo discourse and his rhythmic, melodic and harmonic patterns. “The harp is much prior to the guitar, like its great -great grandmother, to say something, but share the same ancestrality. It is a sound that is in collective memory. ”

In his first album, Arpaorapresented during the 29th Jerez Festival, which was closed last Saturday, Crisman has had the collaboration of singers Vicente Soto, Deafness, José Valencia and Tomasa Guerrero, The Macanitato which it accompanies delicately, as happened at the presentation concert. She recognizes that this singing, that of her land, which considers the soundtrack of her life, is what moves and inspires her: “A very good track, in terms of me, offers me for hours of examine.”

Strengthened in its dedication, which can current this Saturday in Madrid, inside the pageant they create, on the Eduardo Urtulo Cultural Center, Crister refuses to take a look at the long run and, with the identical roundness that permeates all their speech, he says he has no plans: “I do not do them or have them. Life took me a turn, it’s not like we planned it. ”