Me enamoran en Jaén: XXV aniversario del Festival de Música Antigua de Úbeda y Baeza ed. by Javier Marín-López and Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita (review)

"Impressive" is the first word that comes to mind when one looks at these two thick, handsome volumes. But the adjective is nonetheless a paltry assessment of the early-music festival being described. The sheer number and importance of the activities listed, the quality of the participating performers, the significance of the repertories unearthed, and the sociocultural impact of the festival strikes this reviewer as the monumental achievement of a major cultural enterprise.

The Festival de Música Antigua de Úbeda y Baeza (FeMAUB), initiated in 1997 with four concert programs, each played in both cities, has developed into an important, multifaceted event, with twenty-four concerts and academic events in 2019 (a number slightly reduced in 2020, in a pandemic environment). It seems significant that the latest budget for the festival was only slightly over €100,000—a modest figure compared with the millions spent on other major festivals. A contributing aspect to this financial frugality seems to be the eagerness on the part of local and foreign artists to participate in an event that goes beyond musical show.

This monumental compilation in book form represents the festival's ideals and accomplishments most accurately, since it has been edited by Javier Marín-López, its director for the last fifteen years, and Ascención Mazuela-Anguita, adjunct director for the last five. The carefully crafted organization of the texts, images, and tables of information is neatly divided between the two volumes, the first containing studies and a directorio (directory), the second encompassing an assortment of assessments by institutional authorities, participants, and the press, followed by a gallery of images and a list (with QR code) of live recordings from the different editions of the festival. Less conventional, perhaps, although anchored in the history of book publishing, are two poems and two musical pieces written as offerings or homages to the Fe-MAUB. In this brief review, I will sidestep the testimonies of volume 2 and comment only on scholarly articles, drawing on diverse disciplines.

The essays are neatly and symmetrically presented as an introduction, seven sections of two articles each, and a final single-article section. The introduction by the editor is not limited to a presentation of the contents; it adds significant accounts of the origin of the project, its distinguishing marks, and the musical pedigree of the beautiful cities that house it, designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. As Marín puts it, "the identity marks that define the festival [are] the orientation, rigor and independence of its artistic project, the recovery and airing of Iberian-American musical heritage, its dedication to education, its links to the monumental architecture of the cities, its projection to the entire provincial territory, the support of emerging performing groups, [and] the closeness between artists and audiences" (1:22, my trans.). The introduction also sets up a framework for the insertion of the ensuing texts within the emergent discipline of festival studies.

The historic-geographic context of the FeMAUB is presented in two perspectives: one is a selective recounting of the history of early-music encounters in Europe, going back to the eighteenth century but highlighting the "rebellious, countercultural, or at least 'subcultural' context in which the birth of [these] festivals must be located" (1:40). After outlining the major developments in northern Europe in the mid-twentieth century, Isaac Alberto de Molina describes the extension of the phenomenon to Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Eastern countries in the 1990s. But his account refuses to close on bare data; his statement that "at the nucleus of Early Music...