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Spain's musical history has often resided on - or been consigned to - the margins of historical narratives about mainstream European culture. As a result, Spanish music is universally popular but seldom well understood outside Iberia. This volume offers, for the first time in English, a comprehensive survey of music in Spain from the Middle Ages to the modern era, including both classical and popular traditions. With chapters from a group of leading music scholars, the book reevaluates the history of music in Spain, from devotional works of the Middle Ages and Renaissance to masterpieces of the postwar avant-garde. It surveys a deep legacy of classical music as well as a rich heritage of folklore comprising songs and dances from Spain's many regions, especially but not exclusively Andalusian flamenco. Folklore in turn informed the nationalist repertoire with which music lovers are most familiar, including pieces by Albéniz, Granados, Falla, Rodrigo, and many others.
List of contents
Contents; Introduction Walter Aaron Clark, Ana Llorens and Álvaro Torrente; 1. Music in the Iberian Peninsula before 1450 Carmen Julia Gutiérrez and Manuel Pedro Ferreira; 2. The age of discovery Tess Knighton and Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita; 3. Silver music in a Golden Age Álvaro Torrente; 4. New horizons in the Age of Enlightenment Miguel Ángel Marín and José Máximo Leza; 5. The invention of Spanish music Joan José Carreras; 6. Zarzuela and beyond Enrique Mejías García and Víctor Sánchez Sánchez; 7. In search of a musical identity Walter Aaron Clark; 8. The Silver Age and the Generación del 27 Elena Torres Clemente; 9. Musical traditions in Spain: developments, practices, and discourses Susana Moreno-Fernández; 10. Flamenco: history, identity, and performance practice Samuel Llano and Matthew Machin-Autenrieth; 11. Popular music Celsa Alonso González and Julio Arce; 12. Film music in the long twentieth century Celsa Alonso González, and Julio Arce; 13. From the Francoist dictatorship to the present Germán Gan-Quesada and Gemma Pérez-Zalduondo.
About the author
Walter Aaron Clark is Distinguished Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Riverside, where he founded and directs the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music. He is the author of Isaac Albéniz: Portrait of a Romantic (1999; 2002), also available in Spanish translation (2002). His book Enrique Granados: Poet of the Piano (2006; 2011) won the 2006 Robert M. Stevenson Award in Iberian musicology from the American Musicological Society (2016).Ana Llorens is Assistant Professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She is one of the editors of El canto mozárabe y su entorno. Estudios sobre la música de la liturgia viejo hispánica (2013), among other publications. In 2024 she received the 'Julián Marías' Research Prize in the Humanities (Comunidad de Madrid).Álvaro Torrente is Professor in Music History at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Chair of the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales. His publications include La ópera en España e Hispanoamérica, Devotional Music in the Iberian World, which received the AMS Stevenson Award, and Historia de la Música en España e Hispanoamérica (2016).
