Discordant Notes: Marginality and Social Control in Madrid, 1850–1930. By Samuel Llano

Abstract

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish music has received no shortage of attention from scholars (mostly in Spain, but increasingly elsewhere), and this should certainly come as no surprise, since this was a period of crucial developments, transformations, and debates, most of which can be connected to ever-perennial questions of music and national (or regional) identity-building, both within and beyond the country’s borders, as Spanish composers and musicians tried to find audiences for Spanish music abroad. It would not be accurate to claim that all or even most of this scholarship has operated within the limitations of the traditional ‘composers-and-works’ model that still dominates much of Spanish musicology: indeed, to cite just one example, the rather active field of zarzuela scholarship has long devoted attention to audiences and reception to account for a complex phenomenon whose ramifications (including in the domain of national-identity building) must be approached from an interdisciplinary perspective. Nevertheless, composers and works, as traditionally understood, as well as rather formalized performance events, are still at the centre of most of this scholarship. By focusing instead on less formalized, fleeting, and often scarcely documented performance events, Samuel Llano’s Discordant Voices: Marginality and Social Control in Madrid, 1850–1930 proves that there is still much to be understood about how music and sound contributed to shaping, and were in turn shaped by, competing discourses and debates on national identity that dominated Spain in the convoluted decades from the beginning of the reign of Isabel II (1843) to the Spanish Civil War (1936).