Feet [1] 2 3 [4] 5 6
Learn first Lesson 9: Three-four time
Sevillanas are the couple dance of the Feria de Abril, the April Fair in Seville, and of the Rocío pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin in the Doñana marshes. They grew from the old Castilian seguidillas and took on a flamenco colour in the nineteenth century, so they are a folk form as much as a flamenco palo, and many flamenco dancers learn them first.
A full set is four sevillanas, or coplas, each with the same fixed shape: a guitar introduction followed by three sung sections and a close. The music is written in 3/4 and the dancers step in threes with the weight on 1, but the song and the guitar's harmony move in twos, so the real unit is six beats. This page counts 1 to 6 across two bars of 3/4, one click per beat, with the stronger clicks on 1 and 4 where the feet fall.
| Pattern | Count |
|---|---|
| Feet | [1] 2 3 [4] 5 6 |
| Palmas base | [1] 2 3 [4] [5] 6 |
| Guitar and song | [1] 2 [3] 4 [5] 6 |
The musicologist Hipólito Rossy wrote in 1966 that the singing of sevillanas is in two while the dance and the palmas are in three. Bernat Jiménez de Cisneros has since shown how the guitar's two-chord pattern and strumming stress beats 1, 3 and 5 of each six, against the dancers' 1 and 4. Some descriptions give the metre as 6/8, most teaching sites give 3/4, and Jiménez de Cisneros writes the six-beat unit as 6/4 over a hidden 3/2. All of them are describing this overlap.
Sources disagree about palmas. Studio Flamenco says no palmas patterns belong to sevillanas, and that the rhythm lives in the guitar and castanets, which stress beats 2 and 3. Rossy, Jiménez de Cisneros and a heritage article on the University Pablo de Olavide's El Patio Colorao site all describe handclaps as part of the tradition, and Jiménez de Cisneros documents a base pattern that claps all six beats with accents on 1, 4 and 5, the extra accent on 5 coming from the hidden metre in two. Exercises 2 to 4 follow his examples.
Sevillanas are brisk. One commercial flamenco metronome offers 100 to 220 beats per minute, and percussionist Miguel Reyes calls 200 a very typical speed for sevillanas corraleras.
Keep your foot in three while you clap the accent on 5. Tapping in two makes the patterns easier, but Jiménez de Cisneros points out that it loses the push that drives the dance.