La música en España en el siglo XIX by Cristina Bordas, et al. (review)

The new Historia de la Música en España e Hispano América is the most ambitious project in musical historiography undertaken by Spanish and Latin American scholars in decades. It is also the most voluminous and comprehensive study since the publication, between 1999 and 2002, of the groundbreaking, ten-volume Diccionario de la música española e hispanoamericana, edited by Emilio Casares. Directed by Ángel Vela del Campo and published by Fondo de Cultura Económica, this Historia de la música has teamed up some of the most competent music scholars currently working in Spanish universities.

The eight volumes that make the collection were published between 2009 and 2018 (not in chronological order). The first two volumes, edited by Maricarmen Gómez, cover the period from Antiquity through early Renaissance (Volume 1), and from the late fifteenth to late sixteenth centuries, the so-called Golden Age of Spanish music (Volume 2); volumes 3 and 4, edited by Alvaro Torrente and José Máximo Leza, respectively, comprise the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Spain (including its empire in the Americas); Volume 6, edited by Consuelo Carredano and Victoria Eli, discusses the music of Spain's remaining colonies in the nineteenth century (Cuba and Puerto Rico were the last to gain independence, in 1898). The last two volumes examine music in Spain in the twentieth century (Volume 7, edited by Alberto González Puente) and in Spanish-speaking Latin American countries (Volume 8, also edited by Carredano and Eli).

Juan José Carreras, a renowned Spanish musicologist whose recent appointment as corresponding member of the American Musicological Society (AMS) will surely strengthen the relations with his American colleagues, is the editor of the 750-page fifth volume, 'La música en España en el siglo XIX' ('Music in Spain in the Nineteenth Century'). In accordance with current historiography, Carreras and his four collaborators (Celsa Alonso, Cristina Bordas, Teresa Cascudo, and José Máximo Leza) expand the century from around 1790 to the onset of World War I, to make the period correspond to the 'long nineteenth century', a chronology generally preferred by scholars and musicians alike.

The book is divided into six chapters. The first two, El siglo musical ('The Musical Century') and La invención de la música española ('The Invention of Spanish Music'), both written by Carreras, establish the author's methodological parameters and philosophy while discussing general issues and context, and are meant to be an introduction to the remaining four. These are conventionally organised in chronological order: La transición a un nuevo siglo, 1790-1830 ('The Transition towards a New Century, 1790-1830'); Modernización musical y cultura nacional, 1830-60 ('Musical Modernization and National Culture, 1830-60'); La consolidación de una cultura musical, 1860-90 ('The Consolidation of a Musical Culture, 1860-90'); and Perspectivas modernistas del fin de siglo ('Fin-desiècle Modernistic Perspectives'). To the advantage of the reader and the researcher, each chapter ends with a comprehensive annotated bibliography.

The book opens with a categorical, resonant, and altogether accurate statement: 'The nineteenth century invented Spanish music'. Spanish music had of course been invented before; what emerged then, Carreras claims, was the concept of Spanish music, a concept that can be understood as a set of conventions and assumptions that composers, performers, and listeners, less in Spain than in the rest of Europe, identified as unequivocally authentic Spanish music, often disguised as the most universally recognisable form of folk music, Andalusian flamenco, Spain's most successful musical export. In the following pages, the reader sets out on a journey through Spain's turbulent nineteenth-century history and the impact on its culture and music: the loss of its transatlantic empire...