Flamenco has been Spain's most influential cultural export in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Carmen Amaya and Sabicas' American success in the 1950s to Paco de Lucía's ability to fill auditoriums across the globe in the 1980s and 90s, this complex and label-defying art form holds an important place within Spanish culture, inspiring the work of national and international artists, writers, designers and film-makers. Caught in countless debates surrounding its origins, developments, and, above all, its purity, flamenco has survived a six-hundred-year history in its multiple manifestations: cante (singing), baile (dancing) and toque (guitar-playing). In spite of its global currency and its wide commercialisation, flamenco is still deeply respected, rigorously performed and carefully studied within Spain. This capacity to flow between the local and the global is one of the core thematics explored in this chapter.

Flamenco's performers and critics (flamencólogos) have, on many occasions, attempted a classification of its forms as a way of elucidating its intricacies. Today, all main Andalusian universities include a Cátedra de Flamencología (Chair in Flamenco Studies), the first of which was established in Jerez de la Frontera (Cadiz) in 1958 – and has been administered by Cadiz University since 1983 – and conferences are regularly held at universities in Madrid and Murcia. From its origins in the late nineteenth century, flamencología reveals an obsession with the documentation of lyrics and performances, demonstrating an anxiety with ‘capturing’ an ephemeral performance practice inherently linked to the live. The early endeavours of Antonio Machado y Álvarez (‘Demófilo’) to document flamenco lyrics in his Colección de cantes flamencos (Collection of Flamenco Songs, 1881), and Ricardo Molina and Antonio Mairena's efforts to provide an analysis of the structure of the art form in their 1965 Mundo y formas del arte flamenco (World and Forms of the Art of Flamenco) remain key influences in the study of flamenco and, thus, its development. The latter's often contested classification of forms, by which flamenco's over fifty palos (styles) are divided between grandes (the ‘big’, deep and serious soleá and seguiriya) and chicos (the ‘small’ lighter and more superficial tangos, alegrías), and their differentiation between flamenco gitano (Gypsy) and andaluz (Andalusian) have been instrumental in contemporary understandings of the art.