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Wednesday, March 28, 2018

A shift of focus

There is a very determined shift of focus between saying, "settings of Lorca's work include pieces by Revueltas, Shostakovic, and Serrat" to thinking: "why not look at those settings in the same way you would look at translations, apocryphal adaptations by Spicer, etc..." In other words, you are seeing Nono, Revueltas, or Mompou as significant figures in their own right. Now musical treatments or Lorca move from the "see also" realm to the focus of attention. It seems obvious enough, but few have thought to do it.

2 comments:

Vance Maverick said...

It's pretty common in music writing. Musicologists take Schumann to be doing "strong" rewriting of Heine, etc.

Jonathan said...

Yes. I've seen that kind of thing a lot since I started on this project, especially from the most prominent guy in the "word-music" field. The thing is that for Heine scholars what Schumann does might be a secondary issue at best.