Flamenco glossary: 20+ terms every beginner should know

Flamenco has its own vocabulary, and much of it doesn’t translate cleanly into other languages or have an exact equivalent outside the art form itself. Terms like duende, quejío, or jaleo show up constantly in concert reviews, album liner notes, or conversations between fans, but they’re rarely explained with any precision. This glossary gathers more than twenty key terms, listed alphabetically, so you can look them up whenever you come across them and better understand what you’re hearing or watching.

Many of these words stay in Spanish (or in caló, the historic language of the Roma people) across every language, because they’re loanwords with no real equivalent — which is exactly why a glossary like this is useful. Some have an etymology that’s still debated among specialists, in which case the explanation given here is the most widely accepted one, not a settled fact.

Glossary from A to Z

Aire: the particular, almost untransferable way an artist interprets a palo. Having “good aire” for a cante or a baile means having the sensitivity and rhythmic feel to make it sound authentic, beyond pure technique.
Cante a palo seco: singing with no instrumental accompaniment at all, not even palmas. This is typical of some of the oldest, most austere cantes, such as certain tonás, martinetes, and early seguiriyas, where the voice is considered to carry the piece entirely on its own.
Cante chico: the category of flamenco palos with a lighter, more festive or playful character, such as alegrías, bulerías, or tangos, traditionally set against cante jondo. The line between the two categories is actually debated among fans and scholars, and some palos sit between them depending on how they’re performed.
Cante jondo: literally “deep song,” refers to the palos considered the oldest, most serious, and most dramatic in flamenco — seguiriyas, tonás, martinetes, some soleares — associated with themes like death, grief, or injustice. It shouldn’t be confused with “flamenco” as a whole: cante jondo is only one part, the most austere one, of a much broader repertoire.
Cierre: a musical phrase or gesture that marks the end of a section or a full performance, closing out the compás clearly. In dance, the cierre often coincides with a remate marked by the feet or a strong beat of zapateado.
Compás: the rhythmic structure that organizes a flamenco palo, with a fixed number of beats and set accents that repeat cyclically. Each palo has its own compás — bulería and soleá are counted in twelve beats, tangos in four — and mastering it is the technical foundation without which you can’t properly sing, play, or dance flamenco. It’s probably the single most important technical concept in the whole genre.
Contratiempo (off-beat): a rhythmic accent that falls outside the expected strong beats of the compás, creating a characteristic tension widely used both in guitar playing and in the zapateado of dance.
Desplante: a dance passage of great technical and expressive intensity, usually toward the end of a performance, where the bailaor or bailaora displays their virtuosity in a burst of energy and speed before a cierre or remate.
Duende: perhaps the most cited and hardest to pin down of all flamenco terms. It’s usually described as a state of intense, almost uncontrollable inspiration that takes hold of an artist during an exceptional performance, communicating an emotion that goes beyond technique. The poet Federico García Lorca popularized the concept in a 1933 lecture, although the idea predates him and is part of the popular imagination around cante.
Falseta: a melodic guitar passage, more elaborate than simple rhythmic accompaniment, that the guitarist weaves in between the tercios of a cante or presents as an introduction to a palo. Ramón Montoya is considered a pioneer in conceiving and recording falsetas with their own compositional logic in the early 20th century.
Jaleo: a mix of shouted encouragement — “¡olé!”, “¡eso es!”, “¡vamos!” — and palmas that the audience or the musicians themselves direct at the artist during a performance, to cheer them on and reinforce the compás. Good jaleo, well-placed and timed right, is part of the communication between artist and audience that’s characteristic of flamenco.
Jipío (also spelled hipío): a short, broken vocal cry that some cantaores insert at moments of particular emotional intensity within a cante. It’s closely related to the quejío, though some fans draw a distinction of intensity between the two terms.
Letra: the poetic text sung within a flamenco palo, usually a short verse of three, four, or five lines. The same palo can be performed with very different letras, and great cantaores often have their own repertoire of letras, some inherited from other artists and some their own.
Llamada: a rhythmic phrase, played on guitar or marked with the feet in dance, that signals an upcoming change in the performance — the start of a desplante, a return to cante, a cierre. It works as a cue that the other artists on stage recognize and respond to.
Macho: in some palos, especially the seguiriya, a faster, more upbeat closing section that follows what has, up to that point, been a slow and dramatic performance. The contrast between the body of the cante and the final macho is one of this palo’s characteristic expressive devices.
Palmas: rhythmic accompaniment made by clapping, which sustains the compás alongside the guitar or, in cante a palo seco, in its absence. There are palmas sordas (muted, played with a cupped palm) and palmas claras (sharper and brighter), combined depending on the moment in the performance.
Palo: each of the distinct styles or forms of flamenco — soleá, bulería, seguiriya, tangos, alegrías, and dozens more — each with its own compás, its own melodic structure, and its own expressive character. “Palo,” together with “compás,” is one of the central organizing concepts of the entire genre.
Quejío: an intense, often anguished vocal cry that a cantaor lets out at a moment of high emotional charge within a cante. It’s one of the most recognizable sounds of cante jondo and usually marks the points of greatest dramatic tension in a performance.
Remate: the rhythmic and expressive close of a musical phrase or a sequence of dance steps, clearly marking the end of that section before moving on to the next one. In zapateado, the remate usually coincides with a strong, clearly marked strike.
Temple: a vocal introduction, with no defined letra yet, in which the cantaor warms up the voice and finds the pitch before fully entering the letra of a cante. It usually consists of drawn-out sounds like “ay” or “ay ay ay,” which also help the guitarist settle into the right key.
Tercio: each of the fragments or musical phrases a cante is divided into, usually set apart by the guitar falsetas woven in between them. A full cante is built by stringing together several tercios, each with its own intensity and melodic development.

Keep reading

To dig deeper into the most technical and structural term in this glossary, What is compás flamenco explains it with examples from several palos.
To better understand the difference between cante jondo and cante chico beyond this glossary’s brief definitions, Cante jondo vs. cante chico: the differences develops the comparison in detail.
To see how all the palos mentioned here are grouped and classified, Flamenco palos: the complete guide is the reference map.
To place all of this vocabulary in its historical context, History of flamenco: from its origins to the 21st century explains how and when these usages and terms came about.