Creación musical, cultura popular y construcción nacional en la España contemporánea, edited by Celsa Alonso (a lecturer in music at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid), is published by the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales, a research institute based at the Universidad Complutense and sponsored by the Ministry of Culture of the Spanish Government and the Council for Culture of the Madrid autonomous government. In the Anglo-Saxon academic world, it is relatively rare for a university department to publish an edited book itself instead of doing it through a university press (not necessarily in the same university) or an independent academic publisher. However, in Spain, there are relatively few established academic publishers – either independent or university presses – which operate under both commercial and scholarly criteria, and therefore many universities and research institutes both produce research and publish it. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since it might allow commercially dubious but scholarly worthwhile projects to be disseminated; on the other hand, it might raise questions of relevance and peer-review rigour. I do not think relevance is an issue with the present book – on the contrary, music in Spanish popular culture is an under-researched area and arguably one which can be of interest to scholars in various disciplines – but perhaps earlier peer review could have addressed some of the main issues I see with this otherwise worthwhile volume.
Alonso's book opens with five chapters (grouped under ‘Part 1’) written by herself, in which she provides a context for the actual research chapters; this includes both theoretical discussions of the concepts of nationalism, popular culture and music and politics, and a historical overview of issues of Spanish music and national identity in the 19th and 20th centuries (including representations of Spain in non-Spanish music). These chapters (more than one-third of the total length of the book) draw on a very significant number of sources and could, in themselves, constitute an excellent section of a companion to 19th- and 20th-century Spanish music; they are less successful, however, as part of an edited book dedicated to presenting new research to the reader. Indeed, it would have been more understandable to include these chapters if the book had been published in English, addressed to a readership which does not necessarily speak Spanish and is therefore unable to access most of the bibliography written on the topic.
Part 2 is more akin to what we would label an ‘edited collection’ in English-speaking academia. It includes nine chapters, all of them by Spanish scholars based in Spanish universities and arranged in chronological order (from the 1940s to the present). The topics explored in some of the chapters might be surprising to the reader. In Part 1 Alonso engages to some extent with definitions of ‘cultura popular’ (popular culture), including Gramsci and Labanyi's conceptualisation of Spanish popular culture as ‘conservative modernity’ (Labanyi Reference Labanyi1995, p. 93). However, such discussions do not explain the inclusion of Javier Suárez-Pajares's chapter on the diplomatic negotiations which led to the repatriation of Manuel de Falla's corpse, or Ángel Medina's chapter about the governmental Commission for Music (which dealt almost exclusively with art music) during the Transición. There is no doubt that high culture, including art music, can become popular culture but, in the case of the two above-mentioned chapters, this is more doubtful. For example, did the efforts of the Francoist governments to bring De Falla's corpse to Spain turn him into a popular culture icon, perhaps in the same way as Mozart is in Austria or Verdi in Italy? How was the Commission for Music part of the vibrant and sometimes chaotic developments of popular culture in the first years of democracy? These are questions which perhaps could have prompted some discussion in either the chapters themselves or in Alonso's introduction, and which could have helped redefine the aims of the book and provided a broader discussion of what exactly is Spanish popular culture, and how art music is part of it.
Alonso's own chapter on national stereotypes in Spanish popular music of the 1960s and Julio Ogas's study of intertextuality in Spanish art music provide a nice contrast to this lack of discussion in that they both rely heavily on semiotics, which allows them to problematise concepts which other contributors to the book take for granted and treat in a rather simplistic way, such as those of national stereotypes or the use of folklore as a marker of national identity.
Five out of the nine research chapters are concerned with music and the moving image – most likely a reflection of how global trends in contemporary musicology are unveiling new niches in Spanish musicology as well: Laura Miranda on war cinema in early Francoist Spain; Julio Arce on the early years of the musical in Spain; Ana Pozo on the reception of Jesus Christ Superstar in Transición, Spain; Eduardo Viñuela on national myths in Spanish video clips during the 1980s; and Teresa Fraile on national identity and contemporary Spanish film music.
There are two important issues which pervade most of these chapters in one way or another – simply because they are ubiquitous in any study of Spanish culture during the 20th century – and which are not specifically addressed either in the Introduction or in any of the chapters. These are government control on popular culture (for example, how ‘Francoist’ are francoist musicals or war films?), and the notion that Spanish 20th-century history and politics are an abnormality in the context of the Western world (an assumption that some of the contributors to this volume seem to take for granted). A third issue, which Alonso does explain in the Introduction to the book (p. 11) but which might seem surprising or questionable, is that the so-called ‘historic nationalities’ (i.e. those regions of Spain which have a distinct language/culture, such as Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia) are excluded from the book, which focuses specifically on the construction of a Spanish centralised identity. This is not immediately clear from the book title, which refers to ‘national construction in contemporary Spain’, but not ‘of contemporary Spain’. Perhaps one of the main contributions of the next book to be reviewed, William Washabaugh's Flamenco Music and National Identity in Spain, is that its author engages with and advances discussion on these three major areas.
Washabaugh, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is a major name in flamenco scholarship. Flamenco might be the most written about Spanish music genre outside Spain but, as Washabaugh writes in the Introduction, until very recently flamenco scholarship had a rather narrow view of the genre, focusing on issues which were ‘aesthetically autonomous, historically unique, and largely incomparable’ (p. 1). In the past decade or so, however, scholarship on flamenco has moved away from such frameworks, including Chuse (Reference Chuse2003), Heffner Hayes (Reference Heffner Hayes2009) and Washabaugh himself, who devotes the first five chapters of his book to an in-depth discussion grounded on semiotic, anthropological and ethnomusicological concepts in order to understand why flamenco is such a powerful component of contemporary Andalusian national identity. Washabaugh rejects the idea that flamenco style is an object, in opposition to the current understanding in Andalusia that flamenco is ‘as an internally-defined musical cultural object generated in the past’ (p. 15), which has allowed Andalusians ‘to emphasize the enduring symbolic power of the flamenco style’ (p. 18).
Washabaugh, then, has chosen to focus on a particular historical nationality within Spain – one which, however, is usually disregarded qua historical nationality. Indeed, Andalusia, unlike Catalonia, the Basque Country or Galicia, does not have a language of its own, different from Spanish. Secondly, many traits of Andalusian culture (starting with flamenco) have been absorbed as part of a Spanish centralised identity, which has possibly obscured the fact that Andalusians have indeed been trying to construct a national identity distinct from Spain. Washabaugh addresses this directly in Chapter 1, in which he discusses flamenco as heritage music in contemporary Andalusia, and again in Chapter 10, in which he proposes that new forms of understanding flamenco can be a productive force for agony (understood in the Unamunian sense of ‘the strife and struggle against wills that are imposed upon individuals by impersonal forces’; p. 147) in the region. It would have been welcome, however, to see Washabaugh address more directly the overlap between Spanish and Andalusian national identities in flamenco. There is a mention of nacionalflamenquismo (the promotion of flamenco by the Franco regime; p. 6), but, as is usually the case with contemporary scholarship of flamenco, it is used without fully accounting for the tensions which shaped the reception and promotion of flamenco under Francoism.
This is, however, an exception in the context of Washabaugh's excellent book. In Chapter 7, he uses an ethnographic approach to explore the cultural policies of the current Andalusian government (Junta de Andalucía) to promote flamenco, and he contextualises this within what he calls the ‘institutions’ which have shaped our current understanding of flamenco and those institutions which are currently starting to change it. Among the former, Washabaugh mentions (Chapter 6) Krausism in the late 19th century, modernism in the early 20th century and documentarism (i.e. Spanish film-makers making documentaries about flamenco) from the 1950s onwards. Among the institutions which are starting to change our understanding of flamenco, Washabaugh explores flamenco cinema (Chapter 8), which dismantles temporal linearity in our understanding of flamenco (p. 109); and studio flamenco (Chapter 9), which invites the listener to reconsider notions of musical truth and authenticity (p. 123). These two new institutions, in Washabaugh's opinion, are shifting the focus from the flamenco artists to flamenco audiences, thus providing a new, Deleuzian framework in which flamenco can be indeed become the force for agony I have previously made reference to.
Washabaugh's book is a recent, still rare example of a non-Spanish publisher launching a book on Spanish music. Further examples are provided by Oxford University Press and its ‘Currents in Latin American and Spanish Music Series’. Transnational Encounters. Music and Performance at the U.S.–Mexico Border, edited by Alejandro L. Madrid, is indeed published by OUP but is not part of this particular series – perhaps because of the difficulties of squarely fitting musical practices in the U.S.–Mexico border within the boundaries of Latin American music. This is perhaps one of the very few weaknesses of the book – that neither the introduction nor any of the chapters (with the possible exception of Ramón H. Rivera-Servera's) fully and thoroughly discusses how these musical practices can, or cannot, be considered part of a broader Latin American identity, although some of the chapters seem to invite this discussion. Indeed, border musical practices include genres which are not necessarily American or Mexican in origin, but are part of a broader Latin American community, such as reggae (studied by Luis Álvarez), cumbia (Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell) or reggaetón (Rivera-Servera). Another reason why the book has not been included in the above-mentioned series might be that, although music is very clearly the focus of all the chapters, it is also understood in a very broad sense: contributors include musicologists and ethnomusicologists, but also anthropologists, Latinoamericanists and performance scholars, and the focus is on practices, performance (including Sydney Hutchinson's chapter on dance in the border), dissemination and reception rather than on the ubiquitous notion of ‘style’ criticised by Washabaugh. Indeed, rather than favouring the notion of style, several of the scholars represented in this volume talk about ‘sound’ or ‘soundscape’, such as Josh Kun in his essay about the ‘tijuana sound’.
The book is divided into seven parts, whose titles give a good idea of the main thematic focuses of the 16 chapters: border meanings; nationalisms; indigeneity and modernity; cultural citizenship and rights; trans-border cosmopolitan audiotopias; contested identities; performing locality and gender. As a scholar interested in the study of national identity, perhaps the most revealing aspect of the book was reading through Parts 2, 3 and 4, which go from the shaping of national/regional identities on either side of the border (Donald Henriques on mariachi reimaginings and José E. Limón on tejanos) to musical practices which are indeed transnational, although perhaps not in obvious ways (Helena Simonett on rap and Joan Titus on waila), to replacing nationalism for citizenship (Alejandro L. Madrid on the performance of Blackness among Mascogos, Ramos-Kittrell on cumbia) or even necro-citizenship (Margaret A. Dorsey and Miguel Díaz-Barriga on conjunto festivals). Together with Washabaugh's book, this volume provides a significant contribution to the discussion of crucial broad themes in contemporary musicology – music and place, performance, or the old but still very relevant music and nationalism.
