On Music and Nation: The Colonized Consciousness of Spanish Musical Nationalism

On Music and Nation: The Colonized Consciousness of Spanish Musical Nationalism Rafael Lamas (Ph.D. New York University) is Assistant Professor of Modern Peninsufar Literature and Culture at Fordham University. His research interests include comparative studies between music and literature, theories of memory, and the tension between inherited identities and paradigms of action. He is currently working on a book that investigates the cultural significance of modern Spanish music in the last two centuries. He is abo a conductor and concert pianist, having performed throughout Europe and the United States. In the late nineteenth century, some Spanish musicians attempted to synthesize and systematize the historical, geographic, and social diversity of the musical traditions of Spain. Since their purpose was to build a unified musical identity for the Spanish nation , their movement was called Spanish musical nationalism . Most of twentieth century criticism has endorsed the "difference" of Spanish music on the aesthetic achievements of this movement. In the following pages, I challenge this opinion, pointing to the foreign origins and "orientalist" goals of Spain's nationalistic music. First, I address the outpouring of European music about Spain that came after Romanticism, and second, I explore the links between this exotic view of Spain's music and Spanish musical nationalism. The aim is to question what is today considered the "Spanish musical style," by suggesting that it is largely a concept first subscribed to by composers such as the Russians Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov, the Pole Moszkowski, the Hungarian Liszt, and the French Bizet, Chabrier, and Lalo, followed later by Debussy and Ravel. I will show that the influences of these composers on Spanish musical nationalism were all but circumstantial. In fact, the nationalist authors promoted the exotic image of Spain that European music generated during the previous decades, adopting the colonized consciousness that central European cultures grant to the peripheral ones. The nationalist claim of a specific Spanish musical identity should be regarded, Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 7, 2003 76 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies indeed, as a rhetorical construction, which supports the bourgeois program of incorporating Spain into the cultural, historical , and political milieu of European countries . Edward Said's well-known study on orientalism provides the initial theoretical framework for inquiring about nineteenth -century European music about Spain. In this case, the dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires— British, French and American—in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced, (1415 ) began with the arrival of the first travelercomposers after 1840. Just like Chateaubriand , Dumas, Gautier, and Mérimée, or Borrow, Ford, and Irving, who "discovered " Spain for Western literature, the traveler -composers unveiled the treasures of Spanish popular music to the world. Glinka, Chabrier, and Debussy are three of these traveler-composers who illustrate the oscillation between exploitation and creation of meaning in Said's notion of orientalism. They exemplify three stages of the European representation of Spanish music: exploration and exploitation, cultural tourism and consumption, and finally geographic distance and impressionist evocation. While Glinka exploits the distinctiveness of Spanish musical tradition , Debussy imagines it. Chabrier, between these two extremes, consumes Spanish music as a fascinated tourist. In fact, the composers who traveled to Spain first looked for ways to literally appropriate its autochthonous music; then, they focused on grasping its colorful musical effects; and finally, they engaged in producing an imaginary substitute of Spanish popular music. Mijail Glinka's trip from 1845 to 1847 was the first by a European composer explicitly aimed at exploiting Spanish folklore. Just before leaving Paris, Glinka wrote: Estoy decidido a enriquecer mi repertorio con algunas [...] piezas sinfónicas que titularé fantaisies pittoresques' [...] En España me pondré a componer estas fantaisies', la originalidad de sus melodÃ-as autóctonas me será de una gran ayuda, y tanto más por cuanto que nadie ha explotado todavÃ-a esta veta. (Alvarez 82) As a result of the trip, the Russian composer wrote two Spanish overtures, titled Souvenir d'une nuit d'été à Madrid and Caprice brillant sur la jota Aragonesa. In his memoirs, Glinka explained that the trip allowed him to faithfully transcribe the popular...