Instrumental music in late eighteenth-century Spain

In the context of music history, instrumental Classicism has generally been considered a Central-European phenomenon in which Spain?s position was, at best, isolated and marginal. However, the recent research compiled in this volume provides a very different view. The final decades of the eighteenth century were, in fact, a period of modernisation of Spanish musical culture due to the intensive dissemination and copying of music. The expansion of the music market strengthened Madrid?s commercial networks with many cities including Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Paris, Vienna and Venice. This facilitated the arrival of a wide repertory, which subsequently circulated all over the country and had an impact on local composers.

At the same time, the book provides an overview of the evolution of the most important instrumental genres in Spain, which have been largely unexplored until now, with various chapters dedicated to the sonata, duet, trio and piano quintet. Luigi Boccherini?s and Gaetano Brunetti?s contributions were a vital part of this process, together with the works of Joseph Haydn, which were well known in Spain very early on, as well as those of many other composers, both from Spain and abroad who still remain largely unknown. The study of the reception processes of these composers linked to the most important centres of the time opens up new perspectives for analysis and enables a history of Spanish music to be presented from a European standpoint.

CONTENIDO:

Introduction by Miguel Ángel Marín and Màrius Bernadó
Instrumental music in late eighteenth-century Spain: issues and challenges

I. Shaping instrumental genres
1. Las sonatas para violín y bajo de Gaetano Brunetti: reconsideración de un género (Joseba Berrocal)
2. Sonatas italianas en archivos ibéricos: el caso del manuscrito MM 63 de Coimbra (Xosé Crisanto Gándara)
3. Violin duets in Madrid: divertimento all?europea (Ana Lombardía)
4. As simple as possible: Boccherini?s piano quintets and their public (Christian Speck)

II. Copying music
5. Los copistas del rey: la transmisión de la música en la corte española en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII (Judith Ortega)
6. Luigi Boccherini?s copyists active at the Spanish royal court (Loukia Drosopoulou)
7. Manuscript dissemination of Haydn?s symphonies in Spain (Stephen C. Fisher)

III. The musical market
8. Aproximación al estudio de la edición musical manuscrita en Madrid (José Carlos Gosálvez)
9. Four Madrilenian first editions of works by Luigi Boccherini? (Rudolf Rasch)

IV. Issues of style
10. Poet of the galant: the keyboard works of Manuel Blasco de Nebra (W. Dean Sutcliffe)
11. Componer con elegancia en el estilo sencillo: la teoría de la composición en la música instrumental española del siglo XVIII (Thomas Schmitt)
12. Eligiendo las piezas: los tríos de Gaetano Brunetti y la recepción de la música instrumental europea (Lluís Bertran)

Works cited
General bibliography
List of contributors
General index