Music and the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

The Spanish Civil War has been the most important, decisive and traumatic event in contemporary Spain, but also one of the most iconic events in the recent history of the Western world. Since it broke out in 1936, it has conditioned many socio- political processes and has been regularly depicted in literature, cinema, painting and music, both inside and outside Spain. A vast amount of scholarly work has been done on the strife, far beyond that on any other topic in Spanish history and comparable only with that on global conflicts such as the two World Wars or the Cold War. However, musicology has not devoted a great deal of attention to the war of 1936– 1939 until very recently. This volume is the first collective book devoted to music and the Spanish Civil War. It responds to the recent focus on the relations between music and power, propaganda and the construction of identities, particularly in periods of conflict and during dictatorships. The analyses of music in Spain during the early Franco regime have repeatedly shown that it was during the Spanish Civil War that the construction and transformation of the musical discourses and practices of the prewar period took place. Contributions, drawn from musicologists, historians and anthropologists from Spain, Mexico, Australia, and the United States, explore the songs at the front, war soundscapes, propaganda and music policies, censorship, music in prisons, different music genres, exiled composers and critics, musical diplomacy, memory, and the Spanish Civil War as a topic in popular and contemporary music.