The preface begins

In 2018, after publishing two books on the literary reception of Federico García Lorca, it occurred to me that I could write a third one on musical adaptations of his work. A conjunction of fortuitous events brought this topic to the front of my mind: my daughter Julia, then an M.A. trumpet student at De Paul University in Chicago, told me she would playing in a performance of Silvestre Revueltas’s homage to Lorca. Around the same time, my piano teacher suggested that I look at some pieces by Federico Mompou, a Catalan composer who—I soon discovered—had also set Lorca to music. I began to compile a playlist on Spotify, using what I already knew about this topic from my previous research, along with searches on the usual databases. As this list swelled beyond twenty hours, after a few days, my excitement grew. I had given a talk about musical uses of Lorca in 2015, and I touched briefly on other musical topics in my other two Lorca books, but I had not yet seen the potential for an extended study. Nor had I seen my own increasing involvement in music over the course of several years as preparation for writing music criticism.