Eva Moreda Rodríguez’s research while affiliated with University of Glasgow and other places

In the last few years, digitizations and reissues of historical recordings of Spanish zarzuela - from wax cylinders in the 1890s to long-play records in the 1950s - have revealed a range of contrasting vocal performance styles. By focusing on portamento, this Element sets the foundations for a contextually sensitive history of vocal performance practices in zarzuela. It takes stock of technological changes and shifts in commercial strategies and listening habits to reveal what the recorded evidence tells us about the historical development of portamento practices and considers how these findings can allow us to reconstruct the expressive code of zarzuela as it was performed in the late nineteenth century and how it transformed itself throughout the next half century. These transformations are contextualized alongside other changes, including the make-up of audiences, the discourses about the genre's connection to national identity and the influence of other musical-theatrical genres and languages.

La grabación en el contexto iberoamericano: discursos, prácticas y repertorios

In the song cycle Libro de cantares (1987), Spanish-Cuban composer Julián Orbón (1925–91) entered into a dialogue with the work of two other men who, like him, were displaced under the Franco regime: he re-used Asturian folk songs compiled by Eduardo Martínez Torner in 1920; and he followed compositional models deployed by Manuel de Falla in Siete canciones populares españolas (1914). In this article I argue how, by doing so, Orbón engaged in individual and collective memory-building processes that matched to an extent but also diverged from similar processes that were then underway in Spain in the 1980s (following the end of the Franco regime in 1975) and, particularly, in Orbón's natal region of Asturias. I also argue that Orbón's understandings of memory and modernity are unique within the context of displaced twentieth-century Spanish composers, and as such afford us opportunities to reconsider these crucial categories.

The present article draws upon thirty years of recorded evidence (from the first wax cylinders made in the late nineteenth century, to the first electrical recordings of the 1920s and early 1930s) to study two modes of voice production used in Spanish zarzuela: one indebted to operatic singing, characterized by timbral modification and widespread vibrato; and another one more connected to popular forms of entertainment, based on a low-larynx position and clear enunciation. Far from constituting a rigid dichotomy, this article discusses how both modes of voice production coexisted and were combined within the general governing principle of communicating text expressively, confirming—as has been suggested by recent historiographical research—zarzuela’s status as a hybrid genre able to absorb a number of influences. The article also discusses how the former of these two modes of production became more widespread at the end of the period under study, and considers the influence of recording technologies in this process.

In this article, I propose to explore questions around the transformations of talking machines into music machines in a specific national context (Spain), using a somewhat unconventional source: namely, Spanish género chico works (i.e. Spanish-language musical theatre) which feature such devices, in the understanding that these plays, because of the context in which they were produced and consumed, allow us insights into the reception of these technologies that are not easily available from other sources. The plays were all eminently commercial and present the phonograph or gramophone as a device for group listening, used within the plot of the play in two predominant modes: as a truth-teller or as a stage-device. In the article, I discuss how perceptions of phonographs were initially shaped mostly by existing discourses about science, technology, mobility and knowledge, and they only slowly shifted towards sound and music.

This introduction presents and sets the rationale for the special issue ‘Spain in our Ears: International Musical Responses in Support of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War’. It argues that, while research into music during the Spanish Civil War has enjoyed significant advances in the last fifteen years, concern with the international dimensions of such musical responses remains scarce and circumscribed to prominent classical composers with Communist affiliations (Hanns Eisler, Silvestre Revueltas). By inviting a wide range of contributions dealing with a wide range of musics (classical music, film music, popular music), geographies (the US, the URSS, Britain, Germany) and individuals (from Paul Robeson to Dimitri Shostakovich), this special issue therefore enriches discussion of music and the Spanish Civil War with new perspectives (e.g. concerning race issues), while at the same time calling for an increased transnational approach to the study of music and war more generally.

Inventing the Recording: The Phonograph and National Culture in Spain, 1877–1914 focuses on the decades in which the recording went from technological possibility to commercial and cultural artifact, and it does so through the analysis of a specific and unique national context: Spain. It tells the stories of institutions and individuals in the country, discusses the development of discourses and ideas in close connection with national concerns and debates, and pays close attention to original recordings from this era. The book starts with the arrival in Spain of notices about Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, followed by the first demonstrations (1878–1882) at the hands of scientists and showmen. These demonstrations greatly stimulated the imagination of scientists, journalists, and playwrights, who spent the rest of the 1880s speculating about the phonograph and its potential to revolutionize society once it was properly developed and marketed. The book then moves on to analyze the “traveling phonographs” and salones fonográficos of the 1890s and early 1900s, with phonographs being paraded around Spain and exhibited in group listening sessions in theaters, private homes, and social spaces pertaining to different social classes. It finally covers the development of an indigenous recording industry dominated by the so-called gabinetes fonográficos : small businesses that sold imported phonographs, produced their own recordings, and shaped early discourses about commercial phonography and the record as a commodity between 1896 and 1905.