Spanish avant-garde in 12 monographs available online

AVANT, twelve key figures of the Spanish music avant-garde

http://rwm.macba.cat/en/research/

The AVANT series on Ràdio Web MACBA (http://rwm.macba.cat/) explores the context and careers of the following artists/projects in 12 monographs:

01. Esplendor Geométrico (music selection: http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/avant/avant01_2.mp3)
02. Llorenç Barber (music selection: http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/avant/avant02_2.mp3)
03. Francisco López (music selection: http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/avant/avant03_2.mp3)
04. José Manuel Berenguer (music selection: http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/avant/avant04_2.mp3)
05. Josep Maria Mestres Quadreny (music selection: http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/avant/avant05_2.mp3)
06. Eduardo Polonio (music selection: http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/avant/avant06_2.mp3)
07. José Iges (music selection: http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/avant/avant07_2.mp3)
08. Vagina Dentata Organ (music selection: http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/avant/avant08_2.mp3)
09. Victor Nubla (music selection: http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/avant/avant09_2.mp3)
10. Pelayo Fernández Arrizabalaga (music selection: http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/avant/avant010_2.mp3)
11. Juan Hidalgo (music selection: http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/avant/avant11_2.mp3)
12. Carles Santos (music selection: http://rwm.macba.cat/uploads/avant/avant12_2.mp3)

The series has also included interventions by: Andrés Noarbe, Javier Hernando, Ruben López Cano, Rafael Flores, Joan Saura, Oriol Pérez, Claudio Zulián, Concha Jerez, Miguel Álvarez-Fernández, Marc Valls, Pau Riba, Paco Alvarado, Xavier Cot, Eliseu Huertas i Cos, Marc Viaplana, Pascal Comelade, Juan Crek, Rafael Duyos, Cristina Casanova, Sergi Jordà, Henar Riviére, Rubén Figaredo and Esther Ferrer.

AVANT, conclusions

Unintentionally and almost inevitably, most dictatorial regimes generate opposition cultural movements. But in spite of their political and philosophical importance, these rebellions (which usually emerge within a subculture) do not necessarily entail turning points from an artistic point of view.

The enormous communicative power of the musical medium –which can reach a huge number of people more quickly and easily than, say, literature– led many of these cultural resistance movements to politically instrumentalize their musical discourse to little more than the message, almost stripped of aesthetic or formal elements. The generation of singer-songwriters who opposed Franco’s regime from the sixties onwards in Spain used lyrics that were forceful and provocative for the time, transmitted through forms of popular music that were already well-established in countries like France, England and the United States. The predominance of message over form gave more weight to the existence of alternative musical discourses in a cultural context (Francoism) in which experimentation and rupture were obviously not very widespread ideas. For several generations, even after the regime, risk and transgression in music were almost exclusively associated with political ideas (lyrics), rather than with radical approaches to structure, tempo or tonality, or to the idea of authorship itself, to name just a few of the fundamental concepts that Western music has repeatedly questioned since the emergence of Serialism in Europe and the United States soon after 1920. Even today, the Spanish mainstream media still recounts the history of popular music from the sixties to the eighties by referring to the work, proclamations and actions of singer-songwriters and poets – substitues for the political figures silenced by the regime. Official history has systematically ignored the existence of a series of figures who played a leading role in a very different struggle during those same years, but in other fields. Theirs was a less explicit resistance, often committed to form as well as the underlying message, and sought to rectify the situation that many described as a “desert,” through the individual and collective efforts of artists who were geographically isolated, and also cut off by the dearth of context, support and history.

AVANT is a portrait of twelve seemingly unrelated key figures who are in fact linked by a shared context of supposedly invisible networks that are the product of a fragmented age. It is not about tracing a history of anti-Francoist resistance or of the transition to democracy, even though many of those featured have structured their compositional work around the problems arising from these social and political situations. AVANT offers pieces of a puzzle about the other, less-known, musical situation in Spain. It helps to explain how these and other key actors laid the foundations for a new ideal of contemporaneity in music produced in Spain, which has taken many different forms over the last forty years of slowly moving towards normalization.