GUITAR PLAYING.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVI, Issue 63, 12 February 1936, Page 8

GUITAR PLAYING.

' SPANISH ART THAT IS DYING. A chair of guitar playing lias been established by ihe Spanisn government : in the National Conservatory, Madrid, . with Don Regmo Sainz as the first P 1 according to the Madrid correspondent of the Observer, am attempt to check the swift decline ill such arts as the playing of the guitar and the performances of popu- . iar dances, which is a feature of pre-sent-day. Spain. To the average foreign visitor notning is so typical of Spanish life as the strumming of the guitar and the accompanying tap-tap of tne ■ heels of the Andaiusian dancer. . Dancers have popularised Spanisn dances with millions beyond Spain s frontiers: but in Spain itself, it is stated, the old dances fall more into I disuse every day. The influence ol radio and the sound films is enormous, and the young people arc said to be I more interested in jazz than in tne I old folk dances which appear so pic--1 tureseque to the foreigner. J-'\° regional dances are said to hold then own fairly well amid the general decline. One is the “Bade Ilainenco of Andalusia, and the other the melancholy “Sardana” of Catalonia. The . success of Andalusian dancing, is con- , sidered to be clue to its antiquity and the dee]) roots it holds in religion, i The dancing girls of Cadiz, togethei : with salted tunny fish, another speciality of that town, were famous several centuries before the Christian era. ________