Last day in library at Granada

My last day at the the library of the Centro FGL in Granada... 

 It's not the first book on Lorca and music, because there are several others, though of much more limited scope. It's not the definitive book, either, because it leaves things out. I would say it is the first more or less complete attempt to lay out the territory. Someone else could come along and do it more completely, or even better. 

I like saying that it is a medium sized book on a vast subject. 

So it is with scholarship. You are rarely the first to do something: you are almost always joining an ongoing discussion. If you are the last, that means that nobody else will even discuss what you have done. You want your work to inspire others, not be a dead end. You want to write something substantial (not too short) but at the same time not [necessarily] exhaustive. 

A lot of detail is good, but if the reader feels you are tellings them everything you found, without any selectivity, then the risk is a certain triviality. "Trivial" details are meaningful to me, as researcher, as a way of getting at the granularity of the subject matter, but a profusion of them in the text produces a sensation of excess, as though. The iceberg theory says that you should not reveal everything you know. Your writing has depth through a process of omission. 

Saw this last night

 https://www.alhambra-patronato.es/notas-prensa/lorca-y-granada-estrena-el-espectaculo-jondo-en-homenaje-al-poeta-y-el-flamenco

Cante jondo was avant-garde

 

Granada

 As we were leaving the apartment a middle-aged British woman asked us why we are staying in our particular Airbnb in Granada. She lives in the neighborhood and thought it was horrible to hear English in the street (she was talking to us in English, of course). It was great when there were no tourists in the past few years. 

She turned out to be Helen Rodgers, author of the book City of Illusions: A History of Granada.  We had a nice conversation. We ended up having a nice conversation. The name Ian Gibson was mentioned. 

Without tourists, though, Granada would not thrive. I don't know what percentage of their economy depends on tourism, but it has to be high. 

Granada

 It turns out my research is more buying CDS (I went to one store on Gran Vía in Granada en found 5 Lorca CDs, most unknown to me previously, and attending concerts and exhibitions, than reading stuff at the library.  I didn't think much about the fact that my 2022 research trip coincides with the centenary of the 1922 Canto jondo festival.  They have an exhibit at the Alhambra, for example, and many concerts.  

Persuasion

 We saw this movie last night, Persuasion.  All Jane Austen is the same plot: the most intelligent woman in her social setting, who can't figure out how to marry the one she ought to. So she is clever about everything except the one thing (in this particular setting) that actually matters. Being smart and practical is marrying for love. 

The move has the fashionable color-blind casting. It is fine for this kind of light entertainment, full of other blatant anachronisms, like people talking about "self-care" and rating physical attractiveness on a 1-10 scale.   

Music in the Edad de Plata, or What I learned last week and today reading at the Centro FGL

 The cultural status of music in Spain in the 20s and 30, through the end of the Republic, seems ultra healthy. Composers begin to see themselves as intellectuals. Falla, Esplá, Pedrell, Adolfo Salazar. The group of 8 in Madrid and the corresponding group in Barcelona, with composers like Mompou. 

Stravinsky and Poulenc pass through several times. The Ballets Russes leaves the US and goes to Spain during the First World War.  Falla, in France, returns to Spain during the War too. The connections between French and Spanish music are strong. Debussy and Ravel like Spanish music. Mompou spends time in France too. 

There is a dislike or romanticism and Germanic music. Musical nationalism, impressionism, and neoclassicism are the dominant trends.  

Lorca is in the middle of this, as friend of Falla and Salazar. Falla and literary intellectuals like Lorca promote cante jondo. 

A lot of this is invisible (inaudible?) because Spanish music is not widely known. Also, the Spanish civil war puts an end to this mini-renaissance. Even the utra-Catholic Falla goes into exile. It could be that none of the composers manages to get to that elite, genius level, aside from Federico Mompou (in my opinion). 

Spanish music has a tremendous cultural capital, but it tends to be valued for its nationalism, its connection to folklore. The modernizing impulse of the music of the Edad de Plata, then, is going to be poorly appreciated. The prestige of Spanish music tends to be channeled into Lorca himself, given his proximity to all of these movements.