World Music on Flamenco Fridays featuring Solea

The metre or “compás” of the soleá is one of the most widely used in Flamenco. Other palos have derived their compás from the soleá, including Bulerías por soleá, the palos in the Cantiñas group, like Alegrías, Romeras, Mirabrás, Caracoles or, to a certain extent, Bulerías. It consists of 12 beats, and could be described as a combination of triple and duple beat bars, so it’s a polymetre form, with strong beats at the end of each bar. The basic “skeleton” of the soleá rhythm, thus, follows this pattern:

(Each number represents a beat. Blue squares mean weak beats, while big brown dots are strong beats.)

Nevertheless, this is just an underlying structure, like a foundation, a kind of grid where flamenco artists creatively draw the rhythm by means of subdivisions, articulation, and less commonly, syncopation and accent displacement.

The first example of “palmas” is a very common, simple pattern:

Notice that palmas are often (though by no means always) silent during beats 4 to 6, even if beat number 6 is a “strong one”. This is specially true when no dancing takes place: the main interest there is the singing (or playing) and too much percussion can take attention away from the music. Those beats though are often marked when there is dance, or when performing other palos in the same metre like Alegrías or Bulería por soleá. However, these are not to be taken as hard-and-fast rules, but just as general guidelines.

A more complex example.