LAUSR

Tomás Marco’s ([1983] 1993) essay on Spanish art music through the twentieth century, published by Harvard University Press 25 years ago, and up-to-date when it was published, remains the primary general source for English-language information on this topic. The roots and style of his text are to be found in the work of several authors dating back to the music critic Adolfo Salazar ([1930] 1982), a series of whom have periodically tried to depict the in-progress construction of Spanish art music as the twentieth century developed (Diego, Rodrigo, and Sopeña 1949; Sopeña 1958; Valls 1962; Marco 1970a, 1970b). In our opinion, many of these essays share two salient yet controversial aspects: an explicit or tacit nationalist vindication of Spanish music, often barely contextualised within a wider Western context, and narratives around an almost ‘teleological evolution’ of Spanish music toward modernity, with Manuel the Falla’s oeuvre as a central milestone for younger composers who have either followed his path or have tried to escape from his long shadow. Moreover, and even more problematically, many of these volumes contain several passages with quite strong judgment values while discussing composers’ works. For instance, Marco describes his own compositional style as ‘clearly delineated and personal, tending toward the acquisition of an autonomous language’, in which ‘its articulation is always rigorous’ ([1983] 1993, 201). We have no pretense of analysing the problematic aspects of the aforementioned texts and authors—and indeed, such a task has already been started by other scholars (Contreras Zubillaga 2012; Moreda Rodríguez 2017; Parralejo Masa 2012)—within this special issue. It is important, however, to stress how the literature on Spanish contemporary music—largely written by critics, historically speaking—has often been self-centred, and typically with a narrow focus on the Hispanic milieu. Musicology is a relatively young scholarly field in Spain, and for an extended period, in tandem with music criticism, perpetuated these sorts of teleological and sometimes hagiographic narratives: we can highlight in this sense some well-known monographs about Luis de Pablo (García del Busto 1979), Cristóbal Halffter (Casares Rodicio 1980), and Tomás Marco (García del Busto 1986). Spanish musicology has seemingly Contemporary Music Review, 2019 Vol. 38, Nos. 1–2, 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2019.1578110