Michael Christoforidis’s research while affiliated with University of Melbourne and other places

Spanish estudiantina plucked string ensembles achieved immense popularity in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and were an important catalyst in the creation of the sonority of a variety of European and American popular musics. Such ensembles had precedents in Spanish student groups dating back to the Renaissance and the rondallas (or groupings of plucked instruments) that were associated with popular outdoor serenades. However, the modern estudiantina movement can be traced back to 1878, and was consciously framed as a modern historical construct. A large grouping of youths and former students, donning Renaissance student dress, decided to form a society to visit Paris during Carnival, on the eve of the 1878 Exposition Universelle. They took Paris by storm, performing in a variety of street settings, reinforcing the exotic stereotypes of serenading musicians associated with Spain, and bringing to life historical notions of the minstrel. In the decade that followed, the European performance contexts of the estudiantinas included theatres, outdoor venues and expositions, garden parties and salons – and they became fixtures of the music hall and the café chantant . This paper explores early English and French constructions of the estudiantina phenomenon, and how the groups were framed in the light of exotic street musics and prevailing tropes of Spain. It also examines how the outdoor performance settings of the estudiantinas were translated onto the theatrical stage.

At the end of the 19 th century, Georges Bizet's Carmen was the most performed opera with a Spanish theme in the Iberian peninsula. It had made its breakthrough into the Spanish repertoire in the late 1880s, just as debates over the state and future of Spanish opera had intensified and were tied to emerging questions of national identity. In a period when full-length Spanish works (zarzuela grande and opera) were struggling to maintain a foothold in the repertoire, Carmen received numerous operatic productions and several adaptations into the Spanish lyric genre of the zarzuela, accelerating the process of acculturation of Bizet's opera.The main ideologues of Spanish national opera, Felipe Pedrell, Antonio Peña y Goní and Tomás Bretón all engaged critically with Bizet's infamous espagnolade, and it formed the backdrop to a wave of Spanish nationalist operas, from Bretón's La Dolores (1895) to Manuel de Falla's La vida breve (1905). This paper will explore the multi-faceted impact of Bizet's Carmen in shaping the discourses of Spanish national opera, and its stylistic impact upon the new repertory of Spanish operas that were created at the turn of the 20 th century.

Although numerous studies deal with cubism and some discuss the representation of instruments like the guitar in cubist still-life constructions by Picasso and Juan Gris, practically none have addressed the relation between this modern vision of the guitar and musical thought of the time. While this musical debate attempted to synthesise elements of tradition and the avant-garde, and paralleled the emergence of the concept of "modern classicism", it was often underpinned by cubist ideas.