As numerous scholars have noted, music is omnipresent in the life and work of Federico García Lorca. The amount of music inspired by him, in both classical and vernacular genres, is also substantial. This has been fertile area of scholarship, but it has too often suffered from piecemeal, anecdotal, or impressionistic approaches—the natural consequence, perhaps, of the overwhelming abundance of material available for study.[i] An alternative way of approaching this topic is to focus on a few central questions in a more integrative way, beginning with an accounting of Lorca’s varied musical interests and activities in the context of Spanish culture of the 1920s and 1930s. The logical starting point, in my view, is to consider the various facets of Lorca’s involvement with music in order to define him as one of the most significant musical intellectuals in Spain during the so-called “Edad de plata.” By exploring this dimension of his intellectual biography in a cohesive way, we can see how his musical interests are integrated into his central project as a modernist playwright and poet.[ii] This should not be not a particularly controversial position: for the most part, it is simply a more cohesive and explicit fleshing out of what is already implicit in existing scholarship on “Lorca and music.”
[i] There has been much written about Lorca and music, and a good deal of it is useful, but it is usually more practical to address a small segment of this material. There are books and articles on Lorca and flamenco; on settings of his poetry by classical composers; on Lorca and Afro-Cuban music. What is missing, in my view, is work that puts it all together in a cohesive, integrative way. For general introductions to the topic of Lorca and music see Walters and De la Ossa.
[ii] The intellectual biography of Lorca remains to be written. Fernández Cifuentes’s criticism of Gibson monumental biography makes this point: “Por otra parte, para una empresa que se propone recuperar a ‘Lorca de cuerpo entero’, las restricciones que impone ese principio tendrán una consecuencia notable: la experiencia intelectual de García Lorca, su conocimiento, asimilación y rechazo de formulas y herencias literarias, las corrientes de pensamiento que su discurso aprovecha o desdeña, están cuando menos relegadas y, más a menudo, ausentes de esta biografía; la obra literaria de García Lorca parece haber surgido únicamente de su experiencia vital” (Fernández Cifuentes 231). It should be noted, however, that the intellectual biography of Lorca must also rely on the kind of scholarly documentation provided by Gibson.
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