The aim of the journal Cuadernos de Música Iberoamericana (ISSN 1136-5536, ISSN-e 2530-9900), the scientific body of the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales (ICCMU), is to provide a forum for research into the music of Spain and Iberian America. The journal includes works from multiple perspectives within the field of musicology. Our title focuses in different periods of history and covers a vast geographical area. Our aim is to engage an international community of researchers with a special concern in Iberoamerican musicology.
Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales
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Musicology and Festivals: Latin Americanand Iberian Perspectives. Introduction
Los festivales dedicados a una amplia variedad de músicas han proliferado en las últimas décadas, lo que se relaciona con un proceso de “festivalización” de la cultura con fines económicos, turísticos, políticos y sociales (Laville 2014). El término “festival”, aplicado a la música, engloba eventos basados en una serie de conciertos, en ocasiones complementados con otras actividades (como conferencias, exposiciones o talleres), pero también hace alusión a una gran variedad de celebraciones, como en el caso de los festivales ligados a manifestaciones folclóricas que han sido festivalizadas, de las iniciativas de carácter formativo como los cursos de verano, o de los festivales asociados a certámenes o concursos.
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Editorial. Festivales, memoria y comunidad
Equipo de Redacción de Cuadernos de Música Iberoamericana
Chris Dromey, ed. 2024. The Routledge Companion to Applied Musicology. Nueva York / Londres: Routledge, 398 páginas, ISBN (tapa dura) 978-0-367-48824-6, ISBN (tapa blanda) 978-0-367-48825-3, ISBN (ebook) 9781003042983, DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003042983
María Elena Cuenca Rodríguez, Miguel Ángel Ríos Muñoz, Francisco Ruiz Montes y John Griffiths, eds. 2024. Propuestas pedagógicas e interdisciplinares sobre el análisis y la teoría musical. Sevilla: Wanceulen, 402 páginas, ISBN (impreso): 978-84-19598-61-5, ISBN (ebook): 978-84-19598-62-2
Helena Costa Araújo y Henrique Luís Gomes de Araújo, coords. 2023. Helena Sá e Costa: fotobiografia. Porto: Edições Aftrontamento, 399 páginas, ISBN 978-9-723-61997-3
Francesco Milella González Luna. 2025. Beyond Italian Opera. Manuel García in Early National Mexico (1826-1828). Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 257 páginas, ISBN 979-12-80640-56-7
Michael Latcham. 2023. Carlo Broschi Farinelli: A Manuscript Description of the Operas and Festivities at the Spanish Court, 1747-1758. Transcription of the 1758 Manuscript Held in the Royal Library, Madrid, with an Introduction, an Illustrated and Annotated Translation, and Appendices. Múnich / Salzburgo: Musikverlag Bernd Katzbichler, 668 páginas, ISBN 978-3-87397-299-5
Guitar Teaching in Nineteenth-Century Spain (c. 1800-c. 1920). A Diversity of Voices and Practices, and a Continuity of Transmission from a Comprehensive Viewpoint
This article presents a new approach to music teaching in nineteenth-century Spain through the study of guitar teaching in this context, using the specific examples of the cities of Madrid and Barcelona. It argues against the traditional fragmented view (periods of growth and decline) and the separatist view (three “practices”: popular, classical and flamenco) in favour of a comprehensive viewpoint that considers all the factors and spheres. In turn, this provides a new perspective from which to examine the solidity, distribution and continuity of guitar playing in nineteenth-century Spain, thereby contributing to a broader understanding of music during this period. Based on a detailed review of the current state of research, the aim is to help establish a framework that will subsequently be used to map out and understand the rich interplay between agents, institutions, models and teaching methods that shaped the pedagogical aspects of this versatile instrument, which was key to its transmission.
María Asunción Flórez. 2023. Sirena de los Tablados: Teresa de Robles. Recorrido vital y profesional de una “hija de la comedia”. Madrid: Iberoamericana. 259 páginas. ISBN 978-84-9192-302-2
Folklorology and Sites of Memory: Disputes Regarding Social Imaginaries of Tradition at the Festival Nacional del Porro in Córdoba, Colombia
This article analyses the Festival Nacional del Porro, an event that brings together wind bands from the Colombian Caribbean, and discusses its endeavour to organise, legitimise and reproduce memories that are central to the construction of social imaginaries about local tradition. It examines the characteristics of Latin American folklore that gave rise to the Festival, drawing on the concept of a “site of memory” to reveal the tension between discourses tied to authenticity and the imminent transformations in practice, which have aesthetic and, above all, political implications. As a conclusion, the article highlights a trend toward spectacularisation that revisits the idea of authenticity as a source of value, while simultaneously challenging band musicians’ intentions to engage with the logic of cultural capitalism.
Paloma Ortiz-de-Urbina y Thomas Macsotay, eds. 2024. Recepción de Richard Wagner y vanguardia en las artes españolas: mitos y materialidades. Madrid: Dykinson, 393 páginas, ISBN 978-84-1070-337-7; ISBN (ebook) 978-84-1070-396-4, DOI https://doi.org/10.14679/3241
Male and Female Rappers on the Streets and on Public Transport: New Trends in Street Music in the City of Concepción, Chile
This article looks at the transformation that street music has undergone in my native city, Concepción (Chile). I analyse some interesting changes in music making and the way in which rappers create these performances. Methodologically, I carried out ethnographic research between 2021 and 2023 that included accompanying and interviewing a group of six male and two female rappers, aged between 20 and 27, who belonged to the middle/working class. To a certain extent, this research employs an autoethnographic approach, as I use my personal and emotional experience to explore and analyse a phenomenon, arguing that the performance of street music comprehensively reflects the way in which the inhabitants of Concepción live and experience the city.
Copyright (c) 2025 Cuadernos de Música Iberoamericana
A Savage in Milan? A Hero in Río? Masculinities, Race, and Nation: The Representation of Carlos Gomes in Italian and Brazilian Illustrated Magazines (1870-1896)
This article examines the portrayal of the opera composer Antônio Carlos Gomes in illustrated magazines from Milan and Rio de Janeiro spanning the years 1870 to 1896. Through an analysis of selected drawings, caricatures, and photographs, it investigates the intersections between Gomes’ visual representation and the generation of discourses related to masculinity, race, and nationality. On the one hand, the study dissects the Italian press’s depiction of Gomes as a “domesticated savage” and, on the other, reflects on the mythification, heroisation and whitewashing of his persona in Brazil. Consequently, by comparing two visions, this text calls for a reconsideration of how the artist’s image was constructed and perpetuated, thereby destabilising hegemonic narratives surrounding his legacy, while also challenging the intersection of the categories of gender, race, and nation.
The Origins of Music Lexicography in Spanish. Metalexicographic Observations
Lexicographical works have played an important role in the dissemination of scholarly knowledge, reflecting the creation and development of different disciplines that make up society. As a cultural expression, music has been the subject of these types of works and musical terms have formed part of this process of systemisation and dissemination. During the 18th century, the boom in music making in Spain led to the emergence of translations and vocabularies written in Spanish, which were included in works of different kinds. In the 19th century, this led to the compilation of the first dictionaries exclusively focusing on musical terms, based on those produced in Europe and, specifically, in France. This article aims to identify the origins of the production and textual dialogue of the first independent and specialised music dictionaries published in Spanish between 1852 and 1899, employing a methodology based on linguistic historiography.
Copyright (c) 2024 Cuadernos de Música Iberoamericana
This article studies the question of counter-canon and ecology by describing the research-based curatorial work of Ultranesia, focusing on some artists participating in the Archipelago Festival, which took place in Madrid between 2017 and 2023. The text follows an interdisciplinary approach that could be framed in the field of sound studies. It discusses several recent publications dedicated to examining Western musical hegemony from media studies, ecology and decolonial thinking. The methodology is qualitative, guided by a deep-time materialist approach. The notion of Experimentalism is considered a kind of Western canon to which alternatives are explored. These may be found on one hand in musicians who embrace tradition in their practice, but on the other hand, in contemporary artists whose work has been wrongly labelled as world music and folklore for not fitting within the Western definition of traditional music.
Listening to the Earth (Under the Asphalt)
The ecological crisis highlights the need to rethink the question of habitation. This requires reconceiving the links between the Earth and its inhabitants. There are two main approaches that converge in this reinvention. The first proposes a poetic habitation (Heidegger). The second calls for changing the paradigm of domination for that of listening (Cage). This entails positing the Earth as a totality and acknowledging the links between the crises that affect us: environmental, social and mental (Guattari). From here, the notion of aisthēsis is revived to suggest a poï-ethical listening that is exemplified here according to the two approaches mentioned above. De agua, viento y verdor, the practices of “walking the word” and the project Voces que caminan, are examples of the former that link words to their sacred character. Representative of the latter, Cuerpospermeables by Eulalia de Valdenebro, is based on a critique of colonial botany, contrasting it with a decolonial posthumanism that can take the form of a body that becomes a wind instrument.
José Valero Peris and his Método fácil de piano (1845): A Valencian Contribution to Nineteenth- Century Spanish Piano Pedagogy
The Valencian José Valero Peris was a well-known figure in the composition of Spanish stage music during the mid-nineteenth century. Although he did not gain the notoriety of other major names of the period, he managed to forge a path for himself as a composer and performer. He was an eminent member of the music section of the Liceo Valenciano, where he appeared in various soirées as a pianist and conductor. He also made an important contribution to music pedagogy in the nineteenth century because of his commitment to democratising access to basic music education. A renowned teacher in several Valencian schools, his Método fácil de piano (1845) provided a simplified structure that facilitated piano teaching for women and amateur musicians, enabling it to remain in print until well into the twentieth century. This innovative approach, together with his collaboration on the Nuevo método completo de solfeo with Antonio Romero, helped to meet the growing demand for accessible methods for beginners.
Ubimus, Post-anthropocentrism and the Ubiquitous Immateriality of Musical Stuff
Research into ubiquitous music (ubimus) interacts with a changing ecosystem of technological resources, based on the many social and cognitive demands of music composition (Keller et al. 2014; Lazzarini et al. 2020). Technological design in ubimus requires strategies involving more aesthetically flexible interaction than those that currently exist, to foster sustainable creative thinking (Keller et al. 2021). Thus, these propositions are aligned with decolonial and post-anthropocentric approaches. Decoloniality may provide a key to unlocking some of the analytical contradictions of current artistic research. To illustrate these arguments, a case study is documented: The Ubiquitous Immateriality of Musical Stuff.
"El mar escupía un lamento". Musical strategies in the face of ecological disasters in contemporary Spain: the cases of the Prestige and the Mar Menor
This article analyses the musical responses to two marine environmental catastrophes in 21st century Spain: the shipwreck of the oil tanker Prestige near the Galician coast and the Mar Menor crisis in Murcia. Thus, looking at different collective actions, such as songs, concerts, compilations or advertising campaigns, and the way in which they use pre-existing or newly created music, we seek to understand how music is instrumentalized in the struggle for the hegemony of the climate imaginaries defined by Levy and Spicer. To do this, a genealogy of the relationships between music and environmental protest in Spain is drawn, with the aim of understanding what characterizes it and what type of changes have been over time.
Sound Arts and Eco-Artivism: From the Political Dimension of Sound to the Possibilities of Situated Listening
This study aims to offer a space for debate and reflection on the political dimension of music and the possibilities of “eco-artivism” in the field of contemporary sound creation. In order to question the vision of the artistic work as a mere object of pleasure and a decontextualized phenomenon, we reflect on sound and listening as sources of production of critical and reflexive knowledge. From this perspective, the space of sound arts is revealed as a fertile field of experimentation capable of projecting itself towards political, cultural, social and environmental claims. The foundations that lead from the classical soundscape to the new framework of biomusic will be reviewed as a propositional space that attempts to pay attention in a situated way to the dialogue between human and non-human sounds, questioning both the dichotomy between culture and nature, as well as the ethical pretensions of preservation that characterize the positions of the traditional soundscape. Finally, in order to illustrate some of these reflections, two specific works are reviewed: La selva (1998) by Francisco López and Amazonia (2019) by Félix Blume. Their divergent aesthetic and ideological positions materialize in two opposing types of listening – one deep and decontextualized, and the other situated and shared – which allows for a debate about their ecological implications.
Presentation. Eco-sound Militancies: Ibero-America in the Face of the Current Environmental Crisis
Pensar las vidas de los sonidos. Una entrevista a Ana María Ochoa por Violeta Nigro Giunta e Igor Contreras Zubillaga
Javier Marín-López, Montserrat Capelán y Paulo Castagna, eds. 2023. Músicas iberoamericanas interconectadas. Caminos, circuitos y redes. Madrid / Fráncfort: Iberoamericana / Vervuert, 648 páginas, ISBN 978-84-9192-409-8
Alexandre Robert. 2023. Devenir compositeur. Enquête sociomusicologique sur Déodat de Séverac (1872-1921). Lyon: Symétrie, 324 páginas, ISBN 978-2-36485-218-1
Gavin Steingo. 2024. Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity. Chicago / Londres: The Chicago University Press, 256 páginas, ISBN 978-0-226-83136-7*
Sound and Space during Charles V’s Visit to Barcelona in 1519
Royal entries and visits set in motion a series of ceremonial events in the city where the king resided temporarily that brought about a shift or change in density in the sounds that were heard in the street and in the most emblematic buildings of the urban complex. When Charles V entered Barcelona in 1519, he was accompanied by the musicians of his household and chapel, among them the Flemish instrumentalists and singers who brought different ways of playing and singing and performing a distinct polyphonic repertory, probably never heard before there. The sonic impact of the visit would have varied according to the experience and expectations of the different acoustic communities present at the variety of ceremonies celebrated in religious and festive contexts: the inhabitants of the city were ear-witnesses to the processions mounted in the streets, but were excluded from the interior spaces of cathedral and palace, while nobles and ecclesiastic and civic authorities listened to polyphonic masses and motets at church services, and French chansons at banquets. This article aims to analyse the relationship between sound and space in the different ceremonies held in Barcelona during Charles V’s visit to the city and to what extent and for whom the urban soundspace was transformed.
Pau Casals and the Sardana from Exile: The Composition and Symbolic Dimension of Sant Martí del Canigó
This article examines the composition process and symbolic dimension of Sant Martí del Canigó, a sardana composed by Pau Casals in 1943 during his early years in exile in Prada de Conflent. Drawing on documentation from the Pau Casals Collection at the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya and secondary sources, this study analyses the work’s historical context, as well as its connection to Catalan identity through Jacint Verdaguer’s poem Canigó. As a result of Enric Casals’ orchestrations and its widespread popularity both nationally and internationally, Sant Martí del Canigó –initially conceived as a piano piece to be performed within the family in Prada– has acquired new significance in the composer’s catalogue, becoming associated with the Catalan musician’s exile and ideological beliefs. Its global reach included performances by orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Puerto Rico, which helped to consolidate its importance within the composers’ repertory. Overall, this sardana can be seen as a testament to Pau Casals’s ethical and aesthetic convictions, as well as that of his brother Enric, with Catalan culture.
The Festivalisation of the Cádiz Carnival
Cádiz, a city with a strong commitment to creativity and culture, hosts a wide variety of events, festivals and celebrations centred around cinema, theatre, puppet theatre, dance, flamenco, the composer Manuel de Falla and Carnival, with its famous Concurso Oficial de Agrupaciones Carnavalescas (Official Carnival Groups Competition) its most visible, vibrant and widely publicised event. This article examines the festivalisation processes that have affected Carnival celebrations in Cádiz since the 1950s. During this period, Carnival groups and their songs were revived in the city, coinciding with the emergence of festivals in Western society, and the festivalisation and the spectacularisation of culture. It also discusses how, prior to this, in the second half of the 19th century, modernisation and the idea of progress had already impacted the Carnival and its musical groups through their municipalisation, gentrification and an incipient commercialisation and professionalisation, which would intensify in subsequent decades.
The first choir competitions in Granada during the Corpus Christi festivities through the press (1890-1892): between initial expectation and final disappointment
In Spain, the choral movement had an important presence in 19th-century society. It was not only a musical and cultural movement, but also a galvanising force for the working classes. Thus, orphéons and choral societies were the ultimate expression of this movement and gained momentum through the competitions organised throughout the country, among other things. In Granada, the first competition took place in 1890 with the participation of three choral societies. These competitions would be repeated the following two years without the success of the first. This article examines the development of choral competitions organised between 1890 and 1892 in Granada, and analyses the cultural and musical atmosphere of Granada and the evolution of choral groups in this city in the last decades of the 19th century.
“There is nothing more powerful to attract him than listening music.” Five songs to attract Narciso in Eco y Narciso (1661), royal feast of Calderón de la Barca
As the creator of a new musical-theatrical genre, Calderón was well aware of the evocative power of music. Consequently, from his earliest works, he incorporated pre-existing tunes into his plays, which were well known to audiences, in addition to composing new ones. This article analyses the playwright’s use of music in a complex scene from Eco y Narciso (1661), whose plot revolves around the power of music over human emotions. To this end, it examines how the scene is structured, as well as the process adopted to give it great coherence, seamlessly integrating five pre-existing tunes of different origins and forms into the play.