The present article draws upon thirty years of recorded evidence (from the first wax cylinders made in the late nineteenth century, to the first electrical recordings of the 1920s and early 1930s) to ...study two modes of voice production used in Spanish zarzuela: one indebted to operatic singing, characterized by timbral modification and widespread vibrato; and another one more connected to popular forms of entertainment, based on a low-larynx position and clear enunciation. Far from constituting a rigid dichotomy, this article discusses how both modes of voice production coexisted and were combined within the general governing principle of communicating text expressively, confirming-as has been suggested by recent historiographical research-zarzuela's status as a hybrid genre able to absorb a number of influences. The article also discusses how the former of these two modes of production became more widespread at the end of the period under study, and considers the influence of recording technologies in this process.
In this article, I propose to explore questions around the transformations of talking machines into music machines in a specific national context (Spain), using a somewhat unconventional source: ...namely, Spanish género chico works (i.e. Spanish-language musical theatre) which feature such devices, in the understanding that these plays, because of the context in which they were produced and consumed, allow us insights into the reception of these technologies that are not easily available from other sources. The plays were all eminently commercial and present the phonograph or gramophone as a device for group listening, used within the plot of the play in two predominant modes: as a truth-teller or as a stage-device. In the article, I discuss how perceptions of phonographs were initially shaped mostly by existing discourses about science, technology, mobility and knowledge, and they only slowly shifted towards sound and music.
Abstract
Even though scholarship on music and exile under Franco has grown steadily for the past three decades, little attention has been paid thus far to exiled performers who were active primarily ...as members of orchestras and bands. This article makes an initial contribution to this field by focusing on the Banda Madrid as a case study. The Banda Madrid was founded in the spring of 1939 in the internment camp of Le Barcarès (France) by Rafael Oropesa. Its members went into exile in Mexico City and became a fixture of the Spanish exile community until 1947. I discuss how the Banda Madrid and the stories of some of its individual members expand our understanding of politics and modernity in the Spanish Republican exile. In order to do this, I follow the trajectories of Banda Madrid musicians before, during, and after the Civil War, and contrast them with those of left-wing composers in exile.
How music embodies and contributes to historical and
contemporary nationalism
What does music in Portugal and Spain reveal about the
relationship between national and regional identity building? How
...do various actors use music to advance nationalism? How have state
and international heritage regimes contributed to nationalist and
regionalist projects? In this collection, contributors explore
these and other essential questions from a range of
interdisciplinary vantage points. The essays pay particular
attention to the role played by the state in deciding what music
represents Portuguese or Spanish identity. Case studies examine
many aspects of the issue, including local recording networks,
so-called national style in popular music, and music's role in both
political protest and heritage regimes. Topics include the ways the
Salazar and Franco regimes adapted music to align with their
ideological agendas; the twenty-first-century impact of UNESCO's
Intangible Cultural Heritage program on some of Portugal and
Spain's expressive practices; and the tensions that arise between
institutions and community in creating and recreating meanings and
identity around music.
Contributors: Ricardo Andrade, Vera Marques
Alves, Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, Cristina Sánchez-Carretero,
José Hugo Pires Castro, Paulo Ferreira de Castro, Fernán del Val,
Héctor Fouce, Diego García-Peinazo, Leonor Losa, Josep Martí, Eva
Moreda Rodríguez, Pedro Russo Moreira, Cristina Cruces Roldán, and
Igor Contreras Zubillaga
Michael Christoforidis’s Manuel de Falla and Visions of Spanish Music (Routledge, 2018) is a monograph of a kind that we do not find often in English-language academic publishing anymore. It is not ...single-handedly committed to the advancement of an overarching hypothesis or to ‘telling a story’. It is instead the book of an experienced scholar who offers a series of stand-alone essays (some of which were previously published and are now offered in revised form) on a topic he has worked on for...
Through analysis of the zarzuela El fonógrafo ambulante (1899; music by Ruperto Chapí, libretto by Juan González), this article discusses how the arrival of recording technologies in Spain ...(1877-1900) was influenced by and in turn influenced discourses concerning modernity, regional difference and interregional mobility. With recent critical accounts of the early history of recording technologies having emerged mostly from the study of technologically advanced countries, this article is also a reminder of the role of cultural context: the study of the arrival of the phonograph in Spain indeed reveals how early users of recording technologies related their experiences to broader discourses of modernity and identity that had often been taken for granted elsewhere. Intended to entertain large contingents of people across a variety of social classes, El fonógrafo ambulante portrayed an aspect of late nineteenth-century life in Spain that its audiences would have been familiar with, that is, the travelling phonographs paraded through Spanish cities, towns and villages during the 1890s. The work also embodies views on sound-recording technologies which would have resonated with its audience - in accordance with zarzuela's defense of an integrative, progressively industrialized, urban, somewhat relaxed in terms of social mores, yet still ideologically conservative Spain. In fact, whereas the arrival of a phonograph in an Andalusian village at the beginning of the zarzuela is initially presented as a potential danger to social practices, reservations are quickly overcome when it becomes clear that mobile recording technologies can make the Spanish pueblo thrive by encouraging mutual understanding between Spanish regions and ensuring the preservation of gender roles. However, El fonógrafo ambulante shies away from defending transformative uses of phonography that other, more regeneracionista sectors of the population anticipated; in doing so, it ultimately presents a sceptical view of modernity as the path to national regeneration.
La reseña evalúa la colección digital El teatro musical español (https://www.march.es/bibliotecas/tme), de la Fundación Juan March, que recoge documentos (partituras completas y parciales, libretos, ...bocetos escenográficos, grabaciones sonoras) relativas a 154 obras de teatro musical español que datan de entre mediados del siglo XVIII y 2005. La reseña argumenta que se trata de un proyecto pionero en la musicología española por su interfaz clara y pedagógica, por el uso pionero en seis obras del formato MusicXML y por poner a disposición del público obras inéditas o de difícil obtención. Sin embargo, se argumenta también que la capacidad del proyecto de estimular preguntas de investigación que exploten plenamente las posibilidades de lo digital es todavía limitada, debido a limitaciones en los materiales disponibles (particularmente archivos de audio y MusicXML), sus metadatos y las funciones de búsqueda con las que cuenta el proyecto
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