The Traditional Folk Music and Dances of Spain: A Bibliographic Guide to Research (review)

Writings focused on traditional music and dance in Spain span from the sixteenth century to the present, resulting in an enormous collective bibliography. At the beginning of the twentieth century, advancements achieved in the study of song by Eduardo Torner and dance by Aureli Capmany signaled a significant shift in the investigation of traditional Spanish music and dance. During this period, Spanish scholars also sought out regional differences and often attempted to trace elements of traditional music back to the medieval era. Increasingly, transcriptions of traditional music reflected more closely the performances encountered in ethnographic fieldwork. Jesús Bal y Gay advocated the use of field recordings, increasing the fidelity of transcriptions. Kurt Schindler's Folk Music and Poetry of Spain and Portugal (New York: Hispanic Institute in the United States, 1941) serves as a milestone among scholarship of Iberian traditional music. After the Spanish Civil War, principal scholars such as Manuel García Matos resumed the mission of conducting ethnographic research and collection of Spanish music and dance. More recently, contributions by Spanish ethnomusicologists display the application of theories and methods from cultural anthropology.

Ethnomusicologist Israel J. Katz has compiled an exhaustive bibliography and bibliographical guide to the literature and musical collections pertaining to traditional music and dance of Spain. The author intends for the guide to serve as a reference tool as well as to promote and facilitate further research on Spanish music. The work marks the first installment of an anticipated multivolume guide on Spanish music and dance. Markedly omitted from the first volume are the subjects of flamenco music and dance.

The first volume of the bibliographical guide consists of nine sections and two indexes. In addition to outlining the organization of the work, the introduction also serves as a concise autobiography of the author's work within the field of Spanish music. All entries within the guide include complete bibliographic citations. In addition, many entries include brief annotations and useful cross references.

The opening section of the bibliographical guide deals with resources related to research institutions, bibliographical aids, and reference materials associated with Spanish music. The second section primarily addresses studies and surveys of traditional and popular music. In this section, Katz builds upon the bibliographies of distinguished Spanish ethnomusicologists Emilio Rey García and Josep Crivillé i Bargalló. Especially interesting is Katz's inclusion of research on the sixteenth-century organist and folk song collector Francisco de Salinas as well as a subsection on the Sección Femenina of the Spanish Falange before and after the Spanish Civil War. Providing bibliographies related to the music of the seventeen regions and their provinces, the third section also includes subsections for historic Muslim Spain, Al-Andalus; the Pyrenees; and Sardinia. As expected with generalized topics, cross references are frequently required, and the author handily provides them.

The large-scale and central subject of dance occupies two sections within the guide. As previously organized and throughout the guide, the author first provides bibliographies for overarching topics, such as general histories, distinctions between bailes and danzas, and dance in Spanish theater, before addressing specific genres or topics. Among topics tackled in the volume, the subsection for Spanish theater stands out for its incompleteness, a situation the author justifies as follows: "[C]itations under dance in the Spanish theater . . . represent but a mere sampling. Placed under the rubric 'Spanish Theatre,' their number would increase greatly" (p. xxiii). Katz separates subsections dealing with historical dances such as the canario, contradanza, fandango, and zarabanda from contemporary regional dances like the Galician muiñeira, Catalan sardana, Basque zortziko, and the pervasively danced jotas.

The author chose to organize the organology section by first addressing general, historical, and regional studies of Spanish instruments, followed with the organological divisions of aerophones, chordophones, idiophones, and membranophones. The next section deals with iconography, a burgeoning area of research...