of essays presented here are of a pretty even,
high standard; there are no overtly weak
corners.
Overall, this large, hardback book is very
nicely produced by the University of Rochester
Press, with some twenty-five figures and black-
and-white illustrations (albeit somewhat
variable in terms of the quality of reproduc-
tion), accompanied by a generous allocation of
music and analytical examples. Given its sheer
size, it is a pity that the index does not amount
to much more than a list of names and works;
to maximize its usefulness as a resource (not-
withstanding the effort involved in doing so), a
strong argument could have been made for a
much more comprehensive conceptual index.
So, the evidence of this volume suggests that
Langham Smith’s fear about the Debussy schol-
arship barrel running dry is, fortunately, as yet
unfounded. While some readers may be
frustrated that this is not the book that assesses
Debussy’s deep influence upon later musical
cultures, others will undoubtedly find in it a
rich collection of essays and an essential source
of reference to support ongoing Debussy
research through to the next significant
anniversary.
DEBORAH MAWER
Birmingham City University
doi:10.1093/ml/gcz076
ß The Author(s) (2020). Published by Oxford University
Press. All rights reserved.
Discordant Notes: Marginality and Social Control in
Madrid, 1850^1930. By Samuel Llano. Pp. xii
þ 258. Currents in Latin American and
Iberian Music. (Oxford University Press,
New York and Oxford, 2019. »33.99. ISBN
978-0-19-939246-9.)
Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Spanish music has received no shortage of at-
tention from scholars (mostly in Spain, but in-
creasingly elsewhere), and this should certainly
come as no surprise, since this was a period of
crucial developments, transformations, and
debates, most of which can be connected to
ever-perennial questions of music and national
(or regional) identity-building, both within
and beyond the country’s borders, as Spanish
composers and musicians tried to find audi-
ences for Spanish music abroad. It would not
be accurate to claim that all or even most of
this scholarship has operated within the limita-
tions of the traditional ‘composers-and-works’
model that still dominates much of Spanish mu-
sicology: indeed, to cite just one example, the
740
rather active field of zarzuela scholarship has
long devoted attention to audiences and recep-
tion to account for a complex phenomenon
whose ramifications (including in the domain
of national-identity building) must be ap-
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proached from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Nevertheless, composers and works, as trad-
itionally understood, as well as rather
formalized performance events, are still at the
centre of most of this scholarship. By focusing
instead on less formalized, fleeting, and often
scarcely documented performance events,
Samuel Llano’s Discordant Voices: Marginality and
Social Control in Madrid, 1850^1930 proves that
there is still much to be understood about how
music and sound contributed to shaping, and
were in turn shaped by, competing discourses
and debates on national identity that dominated
Spain in the convoluted decades from the begin-
ning of the reign of Isabel II (1843) to the
Spanish Civil War (1936 ).
I use the word ‘sound’ deliberately here,
because Llano (pp. 6^9) does not necessarily
frame his study exclusively within the discipline
of musicology, but rather within the cognate
but distinct field of Sound Studies. The intro-
ductory theoretical discussion (Sterne,
Blijsterveld, Attali, Sterne) is brief, although I
did not regard this necessarily as a problem.
Indeed, it transpires throughout the book that
Llano is concerned less with producing theoret-
ical discussion (which in this field is often
geared towards English-speaking contexts
anyway), but instead to appraise and analyse
how notions of music and noise, and the rela-
tionship of these with notions of aural hygiene,
marginality, modernity, and social control,
took specific forms in Madridça city that, like
many others at that time, underwent a process
of radical expansion, urbanization, and ration-
alization, but was also the capital of a country
(and an empire) in crisis while others flour-
ished. (For example, Llano writes: ‘Most con-
stituents of Madrid’s soundscape, such as the
songs played by organ grinders, the cries of
peddlers, the music of the workhouse bands,
the songs and din coming out of taverns and
cafes, and the traffic of carriages ^ and later,
cars ^ existed in other geographies. But the rela-
tionship between these elements, and the ways
in which they helped to negotiate the tensions
between marginality and social control were
different in each city’ (p. 11).) The concerns
with Spanish identityçand particularly with
viewing it through the prism of who was
included and who was excluded in such
understandings of Spanishnessçresonate, on
the other hand, with the field of Spanish
Cultural Studies. This latter field has tradition-
ally been slow to consider music and sound
compared to other cultural practices, but there
seems to be a recent current of interest into
which this study inserts itself: indeed, shortly
after the present book was published, a special
issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies
under the theme Spanish Sound Studies was
launched, with Llano himself and Tom
Whittaker as editors. The book thus aims to
make contributions to at least three distinct
fields.
Whereas issues of marginality and music
could be approached (and, in fact, there are
precedents in doing so) through the study of
the representation of marginal characters in
music (for example, in ge¤nero chico, where
marginal characters exist in a complex relation-
ship with the Spanish lower classes or pueblo),
Llano (p. 3) explicitly refrains from doing so
and instead turns his attention to a more
diffuse set of practices ‘that made up Madrid’s
soundscape’, and how these were carried out,
thought about, and regulated over a period of
eighty years. The difficulties of researching and
writing about practices as evanescent and seem-
ingly trivial as ‘the cries of peddlers’ (p. 11) are
obvious, and so Llano focuses on three case
studies thatçby virtue of the tensions and
controversies they elicitedçare relatively well
documented in municipal regulations, court
documents, newspapers, magazines, and
ephemera. These are: flamenco performances
in Madrid cafe¤s and the ensuing concerns that
these would encourage anti-social and criminal
behaviour; organ grinders and aural hygiene;
and workhouse bands. Each of these topics
makes up one of the three parts of the book.
Flamenquismoçdefined by Llano as ‘an
amalgam of cultural elements from Andalusia,
plus the culture of Gypsies and flamenco
music, that developed during the Restoration
period (1874^1931) in different Spanish cities’,
and which later, through associations with mar-
ginality and criminality, came to mean, in the
eyes of its critics, ‘nearly any form of degener-
ation they identified in society’ (p. 19)çand its
counterpart, antiflamenquismo, are better known
to Spanish musicology and Spanish cultural
studies than the two other practices examined
by Llano. Indeed, the tense and controversial
role that flamenco occupied within debates of
Spanish identity around 1900 (and, one might
add, even in our day) has been accounted for,
if perhaps not always dispassionately and care-
fully examined. Llano skilfully provides an in-
novative and revealing take on this crucial
issue by foregrounding urban geography: that
741
is, the locations and areas of influence of cafe¤s
cantantes, as well as the shifting centres of mar-
ginality and crime in urban Madrid. This
allows Llano to discuss, for example, not just
the debates and controversies concerning
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flamenco and race (which similarly still extend
to our day), but also how some of these debates
were instrumentalized for the social control of
the Gypsy population (ch. 2). Contrary to
what happens in Parts II and III, there is little
discussion here of the music itself and the
repertories being played or sungçbut this can
be excused given the extensive bibliography on
the musical forms of flamenco, and given also
the fact that, as Llano aptly demonstrates, it
was not flamenco as sounding music that
debates were built around, but rather as
amalgam of practices and ideologies.
Part II, on organ-grinders (organilleros), is
perhaps the most accomplished part of the
book. Llano manages to assemble here an im-
pressive number of sources to reconstruct the
history of organ-grinding in Madrid, which
includes giving us an overview of who these
mysterious organ-grinders actually were. It is
also this section that contains some of the
clearest and most successful discussion of what
was unique about music and marginality in
Madrid compared to other capitals where
similar practices took place (see, for example,
p. 107). Llano aptly follows the organilleros as
they were successively included and excluded,
physically and metaphorically, from the ever-
evolving urban landscape of Madrid following
notions of ‘aural hygiene’.
Music in workhouses, on the other hand, have
normally been a similarly opaque topic for his-
torians due to the secrecy which surrounded
these institutions, where children and teenagers
were secluded to keep them from living in the
streets. Here, musical instruction and perform-
ance became one of the tools by which the state
attempted to discipline these street urchins, al-
legedly turning them into productive members
of society (some of these, the book explains,
went on to have careers as military musicians
and even in orchestras). Llano focuses here on
one such workhouse, San Bernardino, drawing
mostly on administrative records and news-
papers, and productively situates the workhouse
in opposition to life on the streets, with music
acting as a catalyst that either delineated or
blurred the lines between the two. Given the
prolonged history of state institutions using
music to educate, civilize, control, and discip-
line marginalized children and keep them
away from various social ills (stretching from
the Venetian conservatori to the much publicized
El Sistema in Venezuela), it was somewhat
surprising to note that the Madrid workhouses
were not more clearly and substantially
contextualized within this tradition, in order to
ascertain what was unique to Madrid,
although Llano writes on page 167 that ‘bands
were used as instruments of discipline in most
workhouses in nineteenth-century Europe, but
there are aspects of that use [in Madrid] that
were context-specific’.
Discordant Notes does indeed accomplish its
goal of expanding the boundaries and scope of
both musicological enquiry into Spanish music
and Spanish cultural studies. By keeping a con-
sistent focus on music as sound, it sheds light
on a multiplicity of practices that coexisted side
by side (sometimes in a literal way) with
zarzuela performances or with debates concern-
ing Spanish opera and symphonic music,
providing a counterpoint to these by shaping
and defining who was excluded from the succes-
sive ideas of Spanish identity that were being
posited at the time. Concerning the latter,
meanwhile, it demonstrates the benefits of
expanding the discipline’s current focus beyond
text and image to include sound as well, while
reminding us that the study of sound in culture
must be context-specific.
EVA MOREDA RODRI¤GUEZ
University of Glasgow
doi:10.1093/ml/gcz083
ß The Author(s) (2020). Published by Oxford University
Press. All rights reserved.
Music, Modern Culture, and the Critical Ear. Ed. by
Nicholas Attfield and Ben Winters. Pp. xvii
þ 270. (New York and London: Routledge,
2018). »110. ISBN 978-1-472-47686-9
Strauss, Pfitzner, and Schreker have had a hard
time of things, musicologically speaking. While
contemporary scholars seek to resurrect their
reputations, it is hard to undo the damage
wrought over the decades, for various debatable
reasons. A whole host of composers have been
similarly written off from the twentieth
century; according to some, many were dis-
carded because they were contrary to the trend
of Modernism, a current that has been
arguably overemphasized in music histories. In
the 1980s and 1990s, the movement known as
‘Critical Musicology’ (or just ‘New Music-
ology’) sought to critique ideas of canon and of
‘major’ and ‘minor’ composers. Chief among
UK scholars was Peter Franklin, whose 1985
book The Idea of Music: Schoenberg and Others
exploded the idea of musical modernism and
742
questioned the canon. Instead, he sought to
blend the boundaries of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art by
turning to the burgeoning discipline of film
music studies. Skip forward to 2018, and a new
volume seeks to pay tribute to Franklin and his
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life’s work. The sheer scope of Franklin’s schol-
arship is indicated by the range of subjects
present in the book Music, Modern Culture, and
the Critical Ear edited by Nicholas Attfield (Uni-
versity of Birmingham) and Ben Winters (The
Open University). For any reader keen to
acquaint themselves with Franklin’s work, it
serves as an excellent introduction.
Attfield and Winters were themselves pupils
of Franklin, and the list of authors divides into
a rough 50/50 split between Franklin’s former
students and colleagues. The essays all question
the idea of canon, though, partly owing to the
nature of an edited volume, the conclusions
offered do not necessarily all link together
neatly. The nature of the split between authors
is reflected in the first section, ‘Personal
Tributes’. Susan McClary begins, with ‘Peter
Franklin’s Guilty Pleasures’. In this tribute,
McClary recounts how Mahler’s music was
barely heard in the 1960s (to the disbelief of
her twenty-first-century music students). She
highlights the ‘mutability’ of the canon and
pays touching tribute to Franklin’s warm
writing style that manages to communicate his
eclectic musical loves (his ‘guilty pleasures’)
while still maintaining an impressive scholarly
rigour. To complete the portrait, Kate
Daubney provides a sketch of Franklin as
mentor in ‘From Opera House to Cinema:
Forging a New Discipline in 1988’. In her
succinct account, Daubney illustrates the
energy of Franklin’s 1988 film music course at
Leeds University, one of the first of its kind.
What emerges is a memoir of the sheer joy of
intellectual pursuit. She recalls film screenings
in a campus attic, and how Franklin
encouraged his students to forge connections
between film and music. In Daubney’s case, his
enthusiasm proved infectious, and she has since
forged her own career in film music studies.
Together with McClary, the two essays make
for a charming way to start the volume.
The remaining ten essays are grouped as
‘Modernism and Modernity’, ‘Reconsidering
Interwar Germany’, and ‘Musicology and its
Values’. Here, I will survey them briefly under
the spheres of ‘German Music’, ‘Non-German
Music’, and ‘Film Music’. While Franklin’s 1985
book, already mentioned above, is better
known, his work on Mahler is also highly
regarded. In their chapter, Sherry Lee and
Thomas Peattie compare the analytical