Music and Exile in Francoist Spain by Eva Moreda Rodrı´guez (review)

As is well known, following the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) a dictatorship was established under the rule of General Franco (1939–75), forcing scores of people, including Spain's finest intellectuals and artists, into exile to various destinations—Mexico above all. Despite a surge in research on Spanish Republican exile during the last two decades, there is still much to do to cast light on this unhappy episode of Spain's history. Moreover, compared with literature and the arts, the musical culture of Spanish Republican exile remains largely unknown and in urgent need of scholarly attention. From this point of view, Moreda's book is a highly welcome contribution, preceded only by isolated monographs that, being focused on single composers or works, fail to offer an overarching view of the exiles' musical culture. That the first book-length contribution to this field of study is published in English will surely help to encourage scholars outside Spain either to join in the task of research, or to use the Spanish case to think more broadly about exile and music.

Moreda does more than merely 'pay justice' to neglected exiled musicians. Her book makes full use of recent theoretical developments in the study of exile—including notable studies on Spanish Republican exile by Balibrea (Mari Paz Balibrea, Tiempo de Exilio: Una mirada crítica a la modernidad española desde el pensamiento republicano en el exilio (Barcelona: Intervención Cultural, 2007)) and Faber (Sebastiaan Faber, Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish intellectuals in Mexico, 1939–1975 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002))—in order to debunk a number of myths about Spanish Republican exile and its musical culture. To begin with, Moreda contests the widely shared perception that exiles did not matter because they were disconnected from Spain. She uncovers and examines a dense communication network established mainly through correspondence that she has tracked down around archives in Spain and studied carefully. The reasons why exiles were partly, though not totally, excluded from music programming and the media in Spain were mostly political. For practical reasons, however, exiles were often offered professional opportunities by musicians who remained in Spain and who needed external collaboration.

The book's greatest merit lies in Moreda's capacity to read beyond binary oppositions in order to offer a rich and nuanced account of exile. To that end, she takes issue with the widespread view that all exiles were political dissidents who neither were offered nor accepted any help from the regime. Her research shows that the limits between political and non-political (i.e. economic) exile, and between forced and self-imposed exile, are blurry and need to be interrogated by researchers. Nor does Moreda agree with the view that Franco's Spain was a totalitarian regime that was completely severed from the outer world and never tried to reach out to exiles. In order to introduce detail and nuance into this simplified account, she studies a wide range of sources including state-sponsored magazines, independently published culture journals (whose survival hinged on their capacity to dodge censorship), correspondence, music scores, and concert programmes and reviews.

The importance of studying exiled musicians and their work lies not only in the perceived need to catch up with other disciplines or fill in a gap in knowledge. Music's unique capacity to overcome boundaries opens up new lines of enquiry in the field of exile studies: 'it is perhaps the non-representational nature of music that facilitated the relative ease with which exiled composers and their music travelled back to Spain' (p. 12). By virtue of its semantic fluidity, music is a privileged tool for analysing processes of canon formation, which are so inherently linked with the study of exile. The study of exile culture must therefore probe the tensions that underpin the formation of a canon from which exiles are excluded, and must also realize that current endeavours to integrate exiles carry with...