DOI: 10.18441/ibam.25.2025.89.79-98

 

 

 

 

Reorganizing the Nation from Afar: The Catalan and Spanish Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Exile

Reorganizando la nación desde la distancia: las secciones catalana y española de la Sociedad Internacional de Música Contemporánea en el exilio

Eva Moreda Rodríguez

University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

eva.moredarodriguez@glasgow.ac.uk
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4512-1992

The end of the First World War saw an increase of interest in internationalist initiatives in the realm of music; the best-known organization to emerge from this climate is the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), founded in 1922, whose annual festival, held in a different city every year, aimed at offering composers organized in national sections a platform to showcase their work internationally and meet their peers from other countries. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the ISCM did not remain unaffected by increasing ideological polarization and geopolitical instability; its internationalist outlook came under scrutiny, and even its very structure built on national units could no longer operate in a straightforward way in a period in which both country borders and individuals often moved around. Spanish and Catalan music were represented in the ISCM from the Second Republic up until the first decade of the Republican exile, and their representation mirrors the unstable climate discussed above, while also presenting some unique traits. During the Second Republic (1931-1936), Spain –unusually for any country– organized itself into two ISCM sections, a Catalan and a Spanish one, mirroring the somewhat divergent paths that Barcelona and Madrid musical life were taking at the time. It is also noteworthy that, throughout the Civil War, the Republican government made considerable efforts to ensure it was them that continued representing Spain at the ISCM. After the Civil War, both sections were disbanded, but attempts to revive them were made in the mid-1940s by a number of composers, which eventually failed.

Apart from historical interest, analyzing this episode –as this article intends to do– is also attractive inasmuch as it can help us advance in the critical study of the Spanish Republican exile, and the musicians who were part of it, along lines pioneered about two decades ago by Mari Paz Balibrea, concerning the difficulties in fitting exiled products and trajectories within national historiography, focusing primarily on literature. As Balibrea writes, the study of exile “se enfrenta al problema de la alteración de lo que Kant llamaba intuiciones puras, las que les proporcionan estructura a las cosas, de tiempo y espacio” (2012, 87). In another place, the same author argues that, in response to this, scholars “need to argue how exile manages to speak the nation, even if to undermine it and force it go to where it ceases to be” (Balibrea 2005, 6). Historians of music and exile under Nazism have also expressed similar concerns in the realm of historiography. Brigid Cohen points out that a national framework (prevalent in the Humanities) “implicitly work(s) to obscure questions of displacement and diaspora in all their complexity” (2014, 182). She also warns that, if approached in a traditional manner, the study of exile, somewhat paradoxically, can serve to reinforce the boundaries of the nation if research questions limit themselves to ascertain what national tradition a particular figure should be ascribed to (Cohen 2012, 15).1

In dealing with music and exile, a traditional, work-centred musicological paradigm (of the type that has been predominant in the study of music within the Spanish Republican exile since the 1980s) might attempt at examining how the music itself speaks of the nation and its negotiations. This is indeed a path that has been attempted productively, most notably in Samuel Llano’s article on Robert Gerhard’s ballet Flamenco (1941) (Llano 2011). Gerhard –as we will see in this article– was a Catalan composer of French and Swiss descent who had studied under Schoenberg in the 1920s, took exile in Cambridge and was highly sceptic of traditional representations of Spanishness; Llano, instead of dismissing Flamenco as a commission for which Gerhard was forced to write music he felt little connection to, argues that Gerhard built in this work “a parodic framework in which Carmen’s subversiveness [from Bizet’s opera Carmen] can be re-enacted and relocated in contemporary Spain” (Llano 2011, 110). The absorption of flamenco into the musical texture, Llano further argues, “may similarly be read as an attempt to exploit its critical, dialogical potential. His strategy looks like an anti-Franco heteroglossia” (2011, 121). Albeit more briefly, Jorge de Persia has attempted to read Julián Bautista’s choral cantata Cantar del Mio Cid (1947) as a reflection on the Republican exile and Franco’s dictatorship, since the original Poema de Mio Cid starts with the eponymous hero being sent to exile by the king after being framed by his rivals (De Persia 2004, 71). Moving beyond the study of works and turning our attention to matters of reception opens up the door to considering that works can be read differently by different audiences; such different readings can often stem from differing understandings of nation, and they might in turn condition a composer’s or work’s place in different national historiographies of music (Moreda Rodríguez 2015, 57-81).

However, a nation is not simply an abstract ideal to be encompassed or read in a specific musical text: the processes of creation, dissemination and reception of music are indeed conditioned by a number of parameters and institutions, some of which exist or are determined by national boundaries (Balibrea 2002-2003, 20) that might pose very tangible opportunities, but also challenges. This is indeed the case for the matters discussed in this article. I will not be discussing composers engaging with the musical past or present of their nation and making decisions on which materials to draw upon, which ones to rework and which ones to exclude from their compositions. The composers I write about here were instead faced with more pragmatic matters concerned with how they interacted with national and internationalist institutions, at times in which the nation(s) they identified with (Catalonia, Republican Spain) did not exist anymore as a political entity and the very idea of internationalism was increasingly coming under scrutiny. Specifically, I will first introduce the history of the International Society for Contemporary Music, and Spain’s involvement in it, up to 1939, and explain how the latter reflects discourses of the nation centered around Madrid and Barcelona, which were not necessarily mutually exclusive. I then examine a number of archival sources with the aim of shedding light on how a group of composers in exile attempted at reconstructing the Spanish/Catalan delegations of the ISCM from abroad and how this required them to negotiate their national allegiances in a rapidly changing political climate, in ways that ultimately made the whole enterprise unviable. Finally, I contextualize this episode within other attempts that exiled musicians made to “speak the nation”, as Balibrea puts it (2005, 6) – not through the composition of new works, but through attempting interventions in musical life that sought to engage with existing national structures or replicate them.

The International Society for Contemporary Music

A number of music associations with internationalist aims were founded in the years following the end of the First World War – including the ISCM in 1922 and the International Musicological Society in 1927. Such initiatives were inspired by the spirit of the League of Nations, or even more or less overtly modelled on it, and they attempted at bringing together nations through the means of musical diplomacy (Shreffler 2015, 60). As with the League of Nations, the ISCM was organized into country sections –i.e. national entities– which were expected to cooperate among themselves to achieve the society’s aims (Sibille 2016, 254, 273). As Masters points out, this implies that the paradigm that the ISCM operated within was still a nationalist one (with the nation being the basic unit in which composers were meant to operate) rather than a cosmopolitan one (which would have presumably done away with national units) (Masters 2022, 561). In its early decades, and up to the late 1940s, membership of the ISCM was also heavily dominated by European countries, with just a few members from outside Europe (Argentina, the United States, Australia), which reflects the extent to which individual countries had been able to put in place structures – conservatoires, stable orchestras and ensembles – that supported composition as a more-or-less full-time endeavour.

From its beginnings, the ISCM’s main focus of activity consisted of organizing an annual festival, held in a different city each year. These intended to showcase what was regarded to be the best “new” music, representing a range of styles and schools of compositions instead of allying itself with a particular one (Shreffler 2015, 61). Composers based in a specific country sent their works to their country section, and the country section’s leadership then selected those that would then be forwarded to the central jury, made up of five or so conductors, composers or composition teachers of international stature, who further narrowed down the list to select the works that would be performed at the festival. Members of the jury changed every year, although some, such as Alfredo Casella, Alban Berg and Hermann Scherchen served on several occasions. Each of the country sections was also in charge of financing the performances of the works selected from the respective country (Sibille 2016, 273). While musical excellence was allegedly the only criterion the central jury used in selecting works, this sometimes proved difficult to combine with the internationalist aspirations of the society, which aimed at broad representation, and the jury eventually adopted an “informal quota system designed to ensure the representation of the most active sections, even if this meant that occasionally works of lesser quality were chosen” (Shreffler 2015, 61). Even in these early years, the ISCM was in some ways aware that it had to negotiate the tensions between its internationalist aims and practical considerations: this is reflected in the fact that composers living outside their country of origin were allowed to submit their work directly to the central jury, as will be discussed later with reference to specific composers– perhaps as a way to ensure that those who could not benefit from strong national networks of support because of forced or voluntary migration would still have a chance of having their music performed at the festival.

In the years leading up to the Second World War, the ISCM was impacted by the exacerbation of nationalist ideologies and the polarization of the international political arena. This even affected the internal organization of the society in country sections: the German section was dissolved in 1933 by the Nazis and replaced by a Nazi-controlled alternative, the Permanent Council for International Cooperation of Composers (Sibille 2016, 275-6), and some other country sections eventually disappeared as such after being annexed by Germany, as was the case with Austria after the Anschluss. The 1935 festival, held in Prague, exposed the difficulties inherent in maintaining a truly internationalist outlook in these circumstances. During the festival, it became known that three young Serbian-Yugoslavian composers had been tortured by the Yugoslavian police for their left-leaning sympathies (Masters 2022, 567). The three composers’ former teacher in Prague, noted composer Alois Hába, lobbied for the national sections of the association to draft a statement condemning the events, but other ISCM leaders, such as Edward Dent, were more reluctant to get the organization overly involved in what they perceived to be a political matter (Masters 2022, 569). After the 1935 Prague Festival, German communist composer Hanns Eisler and others tried to move the 1936 festival to Moscow – under the rationale that, despite its originally apolitical intentions, the ISCM should align itself with the side prepared to defend “progressive music” against fascist governments (Shreffler 2015, 73). Eisler’s proposal was not successful though, with the organization committed to keeping faithful to its apolitical outlook (Shreffler 2015, 78), and the 1936 festival ended up taking place in Barcelona, as originally decided years earlier, under the organization of Robert Gerhard himself.

The ISCM and modernist music in Spain

Spain’s history within the ISCM from the foundation of the latter to the end of the Spanish Civil War also speaks of some uneasy fits between local understandings and experiences of national identity, and the society’s international outlook. An overview of Spanish musical life at this time, and particularly on the development of musical modernism, can help in establish some background information that will subsequently drawn upon to discuss the first steps of the society in Spain. Critic Adolfo Salazar, staring his career in the mid-1910s, was the first in Spain to articulate a discourse decidedly in favour of modernist music with a definite elitist bent, drawing upon the philosophical ideas of José Ortega y Gasset (Parralejo Masa 2019, 23). The 1920s saw the emergence of a number of young composers adhering to various forms of musical modernism in Madrid, among which the best-known example is the so-called Grupo de los Ocho – an association of eight composers who presented themselves as a group in a concert at the Residencia de Estudiantes in November 1930, although most had already been active throughout the 1920s (Palacios 2008, 7-11). Members of the Grupo de los Ocho included Salvador Bacarisse, Julián Bautista and Rodolfo Halffter – all three of whom took exile after the Spanish Civil War, and all of whom will be appear again throughout this article. Although they were not always an organized, concerted group, all members of the Grupo de los Ocho –as well as other composers active in their environment– shared a concern with developing musical styles which could be termed modernist and national (Spanish) at the same time. Manuel de Falla –in no small part thanks to his international success– was an important and influential figure to Los Ocho, who, like Falla, generally preferred to follow Stravinsky and the French impressionists (Debussy, Ravel) rather than Austro-German late romanticism and atonalism.

Concurrently, composers in Barcelona were facing similar questions, but often answering them differently. An important earlier figure in musical modernism, active from the early 20th century, was Jaume Pahissa (who also took exile in Argentina after the Civil War), but it was not until the 1920s that a younger generation started to engage systematically with concerns regarding how to combine modernism and the pursuit of a national identity. This was, indeed, a question that occupied many of the members of the group Compositors Independents de Catalunya – an eight-piece group founded in Barcelona in 1929. Members of the group included Baltasar Samper (who then took exile in Mexico) and Robert Gerhard – a rarity at the time in both the Catalan and Spanish context because of his interest in twelve-tone technique.

While the musical lives of Madrid and Barcelona were quite distinct and autonomous at this point, it must not be presumed that all Catalan composers would regard their own national identity as incompatible with being Spanish, or that they would see their genealogy as being completely separate rather than the rest of Spain. A key figure to understand how Catalan composers might have understood and articulated their identity is Felip Pedrell, a Catalan composer and musicologist who from the last decades of the 19th century pioneered the editing of early Spanish music through the series Hispaniae schola musica sacra – with the title itself suggesting that he conceived of Spanish music as a national school, very much in line with other editing efforts that sprung throughout Europe at this point, conforming the beginnings of musicology as a discipline. At the same time, Pedrell was active as a composer, penning Wagner-inspired operas in Catalan based on Catalan historical myths (El comte Arnau, Els Pirineus). Pedrell’s ideas on a Spanish national school of composition inspired both Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados – Catalan-born composers who went on to achieve international recognition as performers and composers of Spanish music. Pedrell was also highly influential on Manuel de Falla and on Gerhard, who studied composition with Pedrell during the last years of the latter’s life. Throughout his life, Gerhard would cite Pedrell as a major influence in his life and career, together with Schoenberg (e.g. Gerhard 1945b)2. In turn, Falla was also generally held in high esteem by Catalan composers, and Pahissa became his biographer in exile.

These differences were reflected, to an extent, in the early engagements of Spain with the ISCM. Two songs by Falla were performed in the very first festival in Salzburg in 1923. The festival took place before country sections were formally organized, and the programme was indeed chosen not through country sections, but from across a range of some of the then-most prominent European composers, both those commonly associated with modernism (Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Arnold Schönberg, Maurice Ravel) and those from the immediately preceding generation and still alive (Leoš Janáček, Ferruccio Busoni). Falla himself was a member of the former group, and it is likely that it was his international prestige that determined his inclusion at the first festival. Two further Spanish works were included in ISCM festivals during the 1920s – Joaquín Turina’s piano trio (Frankfurt, 1927) and Falla’s harpsichord concerto (Siena, 1928) –, but these do not seem to have been selected through a Spanish section either. A 1931 article by Adolfo Salazar, written on the occasion of his attendance to the ISCM festival held in Oxford (in which Ernesto Halffter’s “Sinfonietta” was performed), sheds some light on what the difficulties might have been in these earlier years for Spain to participate more systematically in the ISCM and for younger composers to be included (Salazar 1931, 3-8). Salazar wrote that, even though Spanish music was featured in past ISCM festivals, it was included

de un modo ‘extraoficial’ y particularísimo, más bien por la consideración de las personas que formaban los Jurados internacionales que por derecho propio, como nación musical, pues que nuestra famosa incapacidad de organización cuantos esfuerzos hacíamos algunos para que España tuviese en la sociedad entidad propia (Salazar 1931, 3).

The statement is consonant with Falla’s and Turina’s participation in past festivals: indeed, it is highly plausible that they were selected by the ISCM jury because of their pre-existing renown and international reach. On the other hand, the younger composers that Salazar was closer to, such as Ernesto Halffter, would have likely necessitated to go through the formal pre-selection and submission process at the hands of the Spanish section, which Salazar suggests had not been happening up until that point:

Se me reiteró la necesidad de que la sección española enviase obras de autores jóvenes al Jurado internacional, ya que las obras que anteriormente habían figurado en los festivales anuales lo habían sido a título excepcional y gracioso, por pura iniciativa del Comité directivo, que quería significar su interés hacia la música española y su sentimiento por que la sección española no funcionase de una manera regular (Salazar 1931, 4).

The Oxford 1931 festival indeed marked the beginning of Spanish music having a continued presence at the ISCM festival series. The next year, in Vienna, it was agreed that Spanish representation would be divided into two sections: one for Catalonia and one for the rest of Spain3. Gerhard’s 6 Cançons Populars Catalanes was indeed performed in Vienna through the Catalan section, as were excerpts from his cantata L’alta naixença del Rei en Jaume the following year in Amsterdam. At the 1933 festival it was also agreed that the 1936 edition would take place in Barcelona, under the auspices of Gerhard himself (anonymous 1935, 3). Despite subsequent pressure to move the 1936 festival to Moscow from Eisler and others, as discussed above, the festival in Barcelona ended up being a momentous occasion, held in combination with the third congress of the International Musicological Society and featuring the premiere of Alban Berg’s violin concerto. The programme featured a concert of both Spanish sections, including music by composers both from within and outside Catalonia, emerging (Salvador Bacarisse, Ernesto Halffter),4 established (Falla, Turina, Óscar Esplá) and deceased within the past few decades and hence part of recent history (Albéniz, Granados, Juli Garreta, Pedrell). Orchestras and ensembles featured in the festival came from both Barcelona (Banda Municipal, Orquestra Pau Casals) and Madrid (Orquesta Filarmónica de Madrid, Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid), which suggests that the sections did not regard themselves necessarily as rivals but were ready to engage in collaboration.

Throughout the Civil War, both the central Republican government and the Catalan Generalitat made considerable efforts, financial and logistic, to keep a constant presence of Republican Spain in the ISCM festivals. This can be taken to suggest –somewhat paradoxically– that the ISCM’s internationalist ideals were increasingly difficult to separate from politics: the Republic wanted to show that political progressiveness could be equated with support for new music –, and to demonstrate that it was still the Republic’s prerogative, and not Franco’s, to select and send delegates to international events requesting national representation. During the war, Gerhard worked on music administration at the Conselleria de Cultura of the Generalitat, (the Culture Directorate of the Catalan Government) where he collaborated with Otto Mayer-Serra – a German-born critic and musicologist who had fled Berlin shortly after the Reichstag fire in 1933 to settle in Barcelona, where he extensively wrote about new music (Alonso 2021, 454-5). Gerhard’s work ensured continuity for the Catalan section of the ISCM. The section continued operating and managed to have two works included in the 1937 festival in Paris, in which Gerhard was a member of the jury. One of the works was the Duet for flute and clarinet by Joaquim Homs, a student and mentee of Gerhard’s. The other was the Concerto for string quartet and orchestra by Josep Valls. Valls will recur more consistently throughout this article, and so some contextualization is in order. Born in Barcelona in 1904, Valls fled to Paris in the late 1920s to avoid military service in Spain (Valls 1961). He subsequently met Catalan poet Josep Carner, who was also a diplomat, and Carner invited Valls to work for him at the consulate in Le Havre (Moreda Rodríguez 2021, 7). During his time in France, Valls tried to get his work programmed in Barcelona with only moderate success (Moreda Rodríguez 2021, 7). After some of his work gained international prominence (such as his concerto for string quartet and orchestra obtaining the Edward Garret Mac Collin Prize from the Music Society Fund in Philadelphia, in 1931), he came to the attention of Otto Mayer-Serra back in Barcelona. Mayer saw in Valls a potential successor to Manuel de Falla,5 and so, from the early months of the Civil War, Valls –who by that point had moved to Anvers following Carner’s diplomatic engagements– benefitted from Mayer-Serra’s and Gerhard’s support, under the form of opportunities for score publication and performance, as well as participation in the ISCM festival.6 Interestingly, Mayer-Serra was somehow sceptic about the role of ISCM festivals and regarded them as a market for performers to sell their services to international conductors and promoters rather than as a worthy artistic event,7 even though he admitted that Valls could find the festivals useful to obtain greater international visibility.8 With Mayer-Serra being a Marxist and part of Hanns Eisler’s circle before he moved to Barcelona (Alonso 2021, 455-6), his attitude towards the ISCM festivals can be understood to mirror Eisler’s own scepticism towards the internationalist aims of the society at a time of increasing polarization, as discussed above.

On Madrid side, the Republic’s government moved to Valencia in November 1936 with Madrid being increasingly under threat of being taken by Franco’s side, and it was in Valencia that Consejo Central de la Música (Central Council for Music) was founded the next year, with its membership including Salvador Bacarisse, Rodolfo Halffter, Julián Bautista and others active in the avant-garde musical circles in Madrid. In autumn 1937, the Consejo Central de la Música reorganized the Madrid section of the ICSM, which largely mirrored the leadership of the Consejo itself and was dominated by composers from the Grupo de los Ocho and their environment, including Bacarisse as secretary and Halffter and Bautista as members. Noted conductor Bartolomé Pérez Casas was named president, and Óscar Esplá was vice-president.9 Since Esplá will also become a key name in subsequent sections of this article, it is in order to offer a brief biographical sketch here as well. Born in 1886 in Alicante, Esplá was an influential and respected figure among composers of the Grupo de los Ocho, being between fifteen and twenty years older than most of them: he held a position at the Conservatorio de Madrid, taught one member of Los Ocho (Gustavo Pittaluga), and was, together with Bacarisse, a member of the controversial Junta Nacional de Música during the Second Republic. Esplá eventually took exile in Belgium.

Shortly after the Spanish ICSM section was reconstituted in Valencia, the Republican government moved again, this time to Barcelona, with the Consejo de la Música and its members following. From this point onwards, the Consejo and the Conselleria de Cultura of the Generalitat were increasingly required to work together, with Gerhard being appointed to the Consejo in January 1938.10 Spanish representation at the 1938 ISCM festival in London mirrored the new state of affairs – but also some of the tensions that were starting to manifest. The festival saw the performance of both Julián Bautista’s Tres ciudades and Gerhard’s Interludi i dansa, representing both delegations of the Spanish section. The financial effort involved in sending both composers to the festival suggests that ensuring representation in a prestigious international forum such as the ISCM rated highly among the Republican government’s priories: the Ministerio de Instrucción Pública supported their travel with 15,400 pesetas – that is, more than one third of the 40,000 pesetas that the Ministerio had budgeted earlier that year for activities related to musical competitions and associated travel and other expenses.11 The Conselleria de Cultura at the Generalitat awarded Gerhard a further 3,000 pesetas for travel and accommodation expenses. Surviving correspondence does not shed light on the reasons why Bautista’s and Gerhard’s works were selected, but a letter from Gerhard to Valls suggests that, as was common before the war, the sections ran separate selection processes.12

At the General Assembly of the Society during the 1938 festival, Gerhard reported on the Republican Government’s activities to support classical music and, in particular, new music. His words on this occasion suggests a desire on Gerhard’s and the Spanish section’s part to align themselves along the ideological lines Eisler had first traced in 1935, equating political progressiveness (both the government’s and the general population’s) with support for new music:13

R[obert]. Gerhard (Spain) said that the Conference would understand if the section had been inactive during the past year, but he was able to give an account of great support for music from the Republican Government. It had inaugurated a National Council of Music, charged with the task of forming a national Orchestra, under Pérez Casas, and this orchestra had been endowed with a large sum of money and was giving frequent concerts to crowded houses in Barcelona. The new mixed audience was enthusiastic about modern music, and the only difficulty was to obtain the material. Mr. Gerhard promised the Delegates that composers who would provide the material and take the risk of sending it, could be certain of a performance.

At the same time, the relationship between Gerhard and Bautista during the festival is illustrative of broader tensions involving personal sympathies, but also increasingly reflective of significant discrepancies regarding how the Spanish and Catalan sections should present themselves to the wider world in a context in which both their own situation and the geopolitical framework was changing. Upon passing border controls during their travels, Bautista was perplexed to discover that Gerhard did not have a Spanish passport, but only a Swiss one, which, in Bautista’s eyes, invalidated Gerhard to represent Spain at international occasions in any capacity. Bautista was also resentful that Gerhard, as a Swiss citizen, was at the time benefitting from food and aid packages from the Swiss Embassy in Barcelona that himself and his colleagues at the Consejo did not have access to, at a time in which Barcelona was increasingly crowded and food increasingly scarce14. Most of this episode was narrated years later by Bautista to Esplá, from his exile in Buenos Aires, in a letter which will reappear in this article as one of the main factors which ultimately curtailed the project of rebuilding the ISCM Spanish sections in exile.15

Significantly, even at a time in which the situation for the Republican government was increasingly desperate, efforts were still made to secure representation at the 1939 festival in Krakow – coming most notably from the Catalan section and specifically, again, from Gerhard. Gerhard was a member of the festival jury, and it was in that capacity that he travelled to Paris in January 1939, as the Francoist troops inexorably advanced on Barcelona. In the Paris jury meeting, Valls’ symphony and Homs’ string quartet no. 1 were selected to be played in Krakow. Valls had returned to Catalonia in June 1938 to be mobilized with the Republican forces16 and, when Gerhard notified Valls that his symphony had been selected for the festival, he could not in the first instance reach him directly,17 as Valls had crossed the Pyrenees with the Republican army while Franco’s troops advanced and was then detained for a few days in the refugee camp at Argèles-sur-Mer.18 Unlike most of his fellow detainees, he was released shortly thereafter thanks to the fact that he was married to a French citizen, and subsequently went back to Anvers.19 Gerhard himself decided not to return to Barcelona but instead stayed in and around Paris (he did not attend the Warsaw festival20) for several months until he finally moved to Cambridge in autumn 1939 at the invitation of Edward Dent, honorary president of the ISCM.21

Reconstructing the Spanish sections of the ISCM in exile

After the end of the Spanish Civil War, neither Franco’s government nor the Spanish Republican government in exile initially made moves to rebuild the country’s ISCM section – and this at a time in which the Republicans in France were putting considerable amounts of energy in rebuilding the state institutions (Cabeza Sánchez-Albornoz 1997, 11-21). A number of reasons can be invoked to explain this apparent lack of interest. First of all, most composers who had been active in the ISCM and other matters of musical organization were scattered around the world (Gerhard in Cambridge, Esplá in Belgium, Bacarisse in Paris, Bautista in Buenos Aires, Halffter and Mayer-Serra in Mexico City), at a time in which transnational communication was curtailed because of the start of the Second World War: the ability to work together across borders was key in such an enterprise, and indeed –as we will see subsequently–, attempts at reconstructing the Spanish sections of the ISCM did start in earnest almost immediately after transnational communication was restored. Secondly, keen composers could still get their work listened to internationally, as well as broadly contribute to the internationalist aims of the ISCM even if not directly representing the country they felt most closely aligned with. As mentioned earlier, they could either submit their work directly to the ISCM jury as composers living outside their native country, or they could also submit their work to the section of the country they were based in. For example, the New York festival in 1941 included a work by Rodolfo Halffter, Obertura concertante (submitted by the Mexican delegation). Gerhard initially intended to submit his violin concerto via the British section,22 but could not finish it in time and ultimately submitted a ballet score directly via Edward Clark,23 which was not performed. It is likely that Gerhard’s decision was more pragmatic than strategic, having to do with impending deadlines set by the British section rather than with a desire to openly detach himself from Britain.

After transnational communication was resumed and composers in exile started to connect again with their fellow musicians living in different countries, the idea resurfaced relatively early of putting structures in place that would allow Spanish and Catalan composers to organize themselves and present their works in national terms while in exile. In autumn 1945, Valls and Gerhard resumed their correspondence, and the former spoke to the latter about a project he was co-organizing with Cultura Catalana – an association of Catalan intellectuals in France, directed by Lluis Nicolau d’Olwer with Pompeu Fabra as honorary president (Dreyfus-Armand 1998, 40). Valls was then living in the Norman city of Le Havre, while most of the activity involving Spanish and Catalan exiles happened around Paris and Toulouse, and so Cultura Catalana was practically his only link to the rest of the exiled Catalan community.24 Although the correspondence does not reveal many details about the Cultura Catalana project or not it confirms whether it indeed went ahead, it is noteworthy that the organizers intended to include composers from both Catalonia and the rest of Spain (Gerhard 1945a), even though Cultura Catalana was a Catalan organization. This was consonant with the climate among exiles in France at this time: shortly after the Ally victory in the Second World War, there were still hopes that Franco would be removed from power soon, and hence returning still seemed to be a real, imminent possibility. This drove the exiled community to engage in a range of collaborative projects which could prove their creative energy and potential (Dreyfus-Armand 1998, 39). From England, Gerhard seemed to understand that the decision to include both Catalan and other Spanish composers was politically appropriate at the time; even though he expressed misgivings about Bacarisse being included in the event, his letter to Valls about the matter reveals that these were likely personal rather than political in nature, and point towards further tensions and hostilities that might have developed when both Gerhard and the Consejo were working together under significant pressure in Barcelona:

Que el programa sigui català o espanyol – tant li fa, i ja suposo que hi pot haver raons extra-musicals pel projecte més “comprensiu”. Amb tot –si em voleu perdonar la franquesa– m’ha sorprès el nom de Bacarisse; vull creure que pot haver fet alguna cosa d’interés durant aquest anys, si és aquesta la vostra opinió em plaurá molt cambiar la meva; pero per si no fós aixó no us vull amagar que tinc en poc concepte tot el que jo conec d’ell.25

In his next letter to Valls, written exactly one month after the first, Gerhard made for the first time the suggestion of reconstructing the Catalan section of the ISCM, taking advantage of the fact that the ISCM itself was being reconstructed following the end of the Second World War. Interestingly, Gerhard floated the possibility of enlisting the support composers who had stayed behind in Barcelona, therefore hinting at a way of conceiving of the Catalan nation that transcended country borders and exile. Gerhard was, however, cautious, and suspected that the project might need to be carried out by exiled composers alone: “No tinc cap idea de si sería prudent escriure a Barcelona ni de com reaccionarien els interessats, que us sembla? Per altra banda amb qui podriem comptar per refer un comité entre exiliats únicament?”.26

Gerhard’s attempts at reconstructing the Catalan ISCM section started in earnest in 1946. He started corresponding with Esplá, who from Brussels was developing plans to revive the Spanish section. Esplá –likely because he was older than most other exiled composers, and had a more establish international reputation and network of contacts– was often regarded as a senior figure in exile who could speak authoritatively about the state of Spanish music (Moreda Rodríguez 2015, 91-2), and so it is not surprising that Gerhard decided to raise the matter of the ISCM with him specifically. Gerhard suggested reconstructing both sections as agreed in 1932 in Vienna, with both groups independently selecting and sending works to the central jury.27 By this point, Gerhard had dismissed the idea of enlisting the support of composers living in Barcelona, because it would be “inútil, además de imprudente”; while Gerhard did not elaborate in this point, it is likely that he was concerned that Barcelona-based composers would not be prepared to work together with the exiles.28 In his letter, Gerhard identified a window of opportunity for the exiles to present themselves as a national unit (or rather a combination of two) at a time in which the Franco regime was isolated from the rest of the West: he wrote that he was not concerned that the Franco government would unexpectedly send a delegation to the festival, but that, in case it did, he was confident that the ISCM would not accept it and would instead recognize the exiles as having legitimacy to form a section.29

With Esplá’s agreement, Gerhard then started to take steps in reorganizing the Catalan section. He ultimately decided against contacting composers living in Barcelona and instead invited Valls as well as Baltasar Samper and Jaume Pahissa –both exiles– to be part of the section,30 and Valls’ home address in Le Havre became the official address of the Catalan ISCM group.31 For the 1947 festival, which took place in Copenhagen, Gerhard and Esplá agreed with the jury that exiled Spain would send four works (two from the Catalan and two from the generic Spanish group)32. Of these, only Gerhard’s Don Quixote ballet suite was ultimately selected for performance.

Relations between Gerhard and Esplá, however, broke down before the festival took place in May. A key factor in the conflict was a letter that Bautista send to Esplá from Argentina, referring the events surrounding the latter’s and Gerhard’s journey to London in 193833, which have been briefly discussed above. Esplá wrote a letter to Gerhard querying whether he had ever had Spanish citizenship. To this concern, Gerhard replied that:

En cuanto a la idea de que un compositor represente a su nación en los programas de nuestros Festivales, no hay que decir que ninguna persona de sentido común puede considerarla seriamente por un solo instante. Venimos catalogados por naciones por razones puramente administrativas: lo que cuenta es nuestra calidad de miembro de tal o cual sección y no nuestros pasaportes.34

Esplá’s insistence on a Spanish passport is indeed contradictory with his attempts at reconstructing the Spanish ISCM section in exile. Such attempts, at their very core, rested on the notion that a nation is not simply defined by administrative matters and boundaries, but rather by a sense of identity and legitimacy. Gerhard’s answer, on the other hand, acknowledged this, but incurred another contradiction: indeed, in the quote above Gerhard seems to question here the idea that national identity mattered, and instead he takes the more pragmatic view that composers should align themselves with specific nations simply for the purposes of being able to submit their works to the ISCM – when in fact Gerhard was making considerable effort to re-establish the Catalan section, instead of simply advising his fellow Catalan composers submit through their host countries if they wanted to be represented. This letter, therefore, stands as testimony to some of the personal and interpersonal negotiations that exiled composers were engaging in at the time in terms of defining the scope of their respective nations, and combining them with their personal and professional aspirations.

In a subsequent letter, Esplá raised the accusation that Gerhard, as an anarchist, had tried to destabilize the Consejo Central de la Música back in 1938;35 years later, Gerhard also reminisced in a letter that Esplá had tried to boycott the performance of Don Quixote in the Copenhagen festival.36 Apart from interpersonal rivalries, by the end of the year, money and other practical issues were threatening the arrangement: the Catalan section had been unable thus far to honour the financial side of the arrangement –whereby the ISCM membership fee was divided in half between both sections, with the Catalan one paid by the Generalitat and the Spanish one paid by the Republican government–, and Gerhard feared that the Spanish section, led by Esplá, would find in this a justification to merge both sections into one37. Both sections were also struggling to establish permanent juries, which made it difficult to pre-select works; in fact, for the 1948 festival in Amsterdam, Gerhard sent his opera La Duenna to the British section, as it was not possible to put together a Catalan jury.38 The Catalan section was still semi-active in October 1948, with Valls nominally acting as president but Gerhard informally soliciting works from composers to be submitted to the festival.39 Lack of correspondence between Gerhard and Valls on the matter in the following years, as well as a lack of Catalan and Spanish presence in subsequent festivals (except for La Duenna in 1951) suggest that the matter was dropped – at a time in which hopes of a return to Spain or Catalonia had all but disappeared, as Francoist Spain cultivated alliances with the United States and the Western block. Esplá’s return to Spain in 1950 and his relatively seamlessly integration into musical life under Franco (García Martínez 2010, 76) opened the door for the Spanish section to be reconstructed, not from exile, but within Spain – as it indeed was in 1955 under Esplá’s leadership.

The ISCM episode as a resistance strategy

Examining the composition of new works and the symbolisms, references and negotiations they contain is perhaps the most obvious route we would expect within a “composers and works” framework to ascertain how exile manages to speak of the nation. However, composing was just one of several strategies that musicians had available in trying to construct and reconstruct alternate ideas of the nation in exile. As shown in this article, composers also engaged in developing institutions and organizations of national scope, which could intersect with Francoist organizations in different ways: sometimes –as is the case in this article– they attempted to overtake the regime to fill in a vacuum; in other cases, however, they existed alongside national structures put in place by Francoism, or even seemingly ignored them. To illustrate this array of possibilities, I would like to briefly discuss here two other cases, which illustrate different moments of the process of building alternate ideas of nation at different points in the dictatorship – from the mid-1940s, where hopes still existed that such ideas could soon be translated into reality, to the 1950s, where such hopes did not exist anymore. Together, these two case studies and the other covered in this article point towards a period of a certain effervescence, between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s, in which exiled composers put forward and negotiated different ideas of nation, not just in their own music, but by creating or attempting to create or replace a range of institutions that aimed at being national in some capacity. At a time in which research on Spanish and Catalan exiled composers is still rather focused around individual figures –understandably, given that for many composers we still lack the most basic information–, exploring such projects, which were almost by definition collaborative, can help frame these composers in a more active, political role than they have often been granted.

The first such case concerns the Banda Madrid – an ensemble consisting of former military musicians of the Republican Army, who all ended up in the refugee camp of Argèles-sur-Mer in winter 1939, started performing there as a group, and eventually left France on board the Sinaia, the first liner officially invited by the Mexican government for Spanish Republicans to settle there. The Banda Madrid performed daily on board the Sinaia, and they kept doing so after settling in Mexico City – they were a fixture in all kinds of celebrations, including national days, various anniversaries of important milestones in the Civil War, homages to Republican personalities and fundraisers for Republican initiatives. This underscores the connection of the Banda Madrid to a national project of sorts: on such occasions, they typically played the Republican Himno de Riego, as well as the anthems of other nations (Mexico, France) the Spanish Republican in exile wanted to pay tribute to at any point (Moreda Rodríguez 2020, 6). But the Banda Madrid also attempted to support the development of new ideas of the nation in less official ways: it regularly performed in leisure activities organized by the exiled community in Mexico City, and in doing so it re-signified some Spanish repertoires (pasodobles, zarzuelas) that the Franco regime was reappropriating at this same time (Moreda Rodríguez 2020, 8). The last mentions in primary sources to the ensemble date from 1947 (Moreda Rodríguez 2020, 7). This, again, is consonant with developments in post-Second World War, as hopes about the Allied governments supporting the Republican government in exile in overthrowing Franco vanished.

A further case study is provided by Salvador Bacarisse’s attempts to infiltrate musical life under Francoism with music by the exiles. Bacarisse was active in anti-fascist organizations throughout the 1940s, and it was perhaps the political failure of such organizations which prompted him to come up with a new strategy towards the end of the decade. From approximately 1948, Bacarisse started sending some of his works to Spanish performers he knew from his pre-Civil War activity, such as pianists Pilar Bayona and Leopoldo Querol, as well as younger ones who had met him in Paris while studying, such as guitarist Narciso Yepes (Moreda Rodríguez 2015, 87-92). This move was not simply informed by self-promotion, but it was –as Bacarisse confessed to his friend Bautista in a letter in 1953– an attempt at “reconquistar el terreno, poner en evidencia a los músicos “ortodoxos” encantados con nuestra desaparición”.40 Bacarisse also attempted –with little success– at getting other exiles to send him works so that they could be promoted in Spain or in the Spanish-language broadcasts at Radio Paris, in an attempt at demonstrating that some of the best Spanish music was being written outside Spain.41 Bacarisse’s plan to bring music by the exiles (including his own) back into Spain was dependent on national, yet not necessarily states, institutions. He was probably aware that having his work performed, say, by the state-run Orquesta Nacional de Espana or at Radio Nacional –both flagship projects of the Franco regime– was likely still out of the question at this stage;42 but he was also aware that Spanish musical life as a national entity was not solely determined by such state institutions, but also by a range of other venues that would likely be more receptive to his work (as some indeed were: several of Bacarisse’s work were performed in Spain throughout the 1950s) – some of which had been in existence since before Francoism, therefore providing continuity to the idea of a national musical life.

Conclusion

Together, these three case studies invite a reconsideration of the “composers-and-works” paradigm for the study of music in the Spanish Republican exiles. In the three case studies above, composers and works are still important, even central. Before exile, composers operate in a national context made up of certain institutions, practices and alliances more or less explicitly defined as “national”, and facilitating the production, performance and consumption of music to develop in certain ways that might be taken for granted. Exile drives composers away from these institutions, practices and alliances, and it is telling that the three case studies above do not speak of an attempt at rejecting the national framework once it has become impracticable, but rather at the opposite – to conjure up this national framework again by different means. The Banda Madrid did so by performing different nation-building roles that would likely have been performed by separate institutions in a nation-state – some officially and formally tied to the state, such as a national orchestra or band; others more informal. Bacarisse, on the other hand, tried to intervene in what he likely regarded as the musical life of the nation – partly dictated by state-run institutions, but also partly shaped by non-state institutions (ensembles, venues, concert series) which had been contributing to the circulation and canonization of certain types of music since at least the nineteenth century. Finally, Gerhard and Esplá attempted at restoring the national framework by pursuing legitimization from outside – in a way not dissimilar to diplomatic recognition of one state by another.

References

Alonso, Diego. 2021. “Transnational Networks of Communist Musical Propaganda in the Spanish Civil War”. Journal of War & Culture Studies 14, n.o 4: 454-478.

Anonymous. 1935. “La XIVa reunión de la SIMC se celebrará en Barcelona”. Ritmo 116: 3.

Balibrea, Mari Paz. 2002-2003. “El paradigma exilio”. Nuevo Texto Crítico 29, n.o 32: 17-39.

— 2005. “Rethinking Spanish Republican Exile. An introduction”. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 6, n.o 1: 3-24.

— 2012. “Hacia una historiografía del exilio republicano cultural: retos y propuestas”. Iberoamericana 47: 87-99.

Cabeza Sánchez-Albornoz, Sonsoles. 1997. Historia política de la Segunda República en el Exilio. Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española.

Cohen, Brigid. 2012. Stefan Wolpe and the avant-garde diaspora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

— 2014. “Limits of National History: Yoko Ono, Stefan Wolpe, and Dilemmas of Cosmopolitanism”. The Musical Quarterly 97, n.o 2: 181-237.

De Persia, Jorge. 2004. Julián Bautista (1901-1961). Archivo Personal. Inventario. Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional.

Dreyfus-Armand, Geneviève. 1998. “Les cultures de l’exil espagnol en France, 1939-1975”. In Literatura y cultura del exilio español de 1939 en Francia, edited by Alicia Alted and Manuel Aznar Soler, 37-58. Barcelona: GEXEL.

García Martínez, María Victoria. 2010. El regreso de Óscar Esplá a Alicante en 1950. Alicante: Instituto Alicantino de Cultura Juan Gil-Albert.

Llano, Samuel. 2011. “Exile, Resistance and Heteroglossia in Roberto Gerhard’s ballet Flamenco (1943)”. In Stages of Exile: Migration and Diaspora in Hispanic Theatre and Performance Cultures, edited by Helena Buffery, 117-135. Bern: Peter Lang.

Masters, Gilles. 2022. “Performing Internationalism: The ISCM as a ‘Musical League of Nations’”. Journal of the Royal Musical Association 147, n.o 2: 560-571.

Moreda Rodríguez, Eva. 2015. Music and Exile in Francoist Spain. Farnham: Ashgate.

— 2020. “Why do orchestral and band musicians in exile matter? A case study from Spain”. Music and Letters 101, n.o 1: 71-88. https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcz080.

— 2021. “Twice exiled: Josep Valls (1904-1999) and his art songs in the context of the Spanish Republican exile”. Search. Journal of new music and culture 12: n. p.

Palacios, María. 2008. La renovación musical en Madrid durante la dictadura de Primo de Rivera. El Grupo de los Ocho (1923-1931). Madrid: Sociedad Española de Musicología.

Parralejo Masa, Francisco. 2019. El música como intelectual. Adolfo Salazar y la creación del discurso de la vanguardia musical española (1914-1936). Madrid: Sociedad Española de Musicología.

Salazar, Adolfo. (1931). “La novena reunión de la SIMC en Oxford”. In Ritmo 39: 3-8.

Shreffler, Anne C. 2015. “The International Society of Contemporary Music and its Political Context (1935)”. In Music and International History, edited by Jessica Gienow-Hecht, 58-90. New York: Berghahn Books.

Sibille, Christiane. 2016. “The Politics of Music in International Organizations in the First Half of the Twentieth Century”. New Global Studies 10, n.o 3: 253-281.

Fecha de recepción: 18.12.2024
Versión reelaborada: 11.04.2025
Fecha de aceptación: 06.05.2025

 

 

 


1 “Notions of exile work in the service of national canons, because the very idea of exile casts displacement primarily in relation to a lost homeland. ‘Exile’ gestures towards the past, recalling the trauma of an original departure and dispossession”.

2 In this letter, at Valls’s request, Gerhard penned a short autobiography, and explained that he did not feel he learned much about Pedrell as a composer, but was encouraged by him to learn more about historical Catalan music from the 18th century whose manuscripts were held at the Biblioteca de Catalunya.

3 Roberto Gerhard. 1946. Letter to Josep Valls, 24th May, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1255.

4 Other younger Spanish composers were included in other concerts of the festival, including Rodolfo Halffter, Federico Elizalde, Manuel Blancafort and Gerhard.

5 Mayer-Serra, Otto. 1935. Letter to Josep Valls, 1st September, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1250; Mayer-Serra, Otto. 1935. Letter to Josep Valls, 6th September, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1250.

6 Mayer-Serra, Otto. 1937. Letter to Josep Valls, 18th December, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1250; Mayer-Serra, Otto. 1938. Letter to Josep Valls, 5th January, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1250; Mayer-Serra, Otto. 1938. Letter to Josep Valls, 29th April, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1250.

7 Mayer-Serra, Otto. 1935. Letter to Josep Valls, 1st September, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1250.

8 Mayer-Serra, Otto. 1936. Letter to Josep Valls, 17th March, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1250.

9 Bacarisse, Salvador. 1937. Letter to Roberto Gerhard, 2nd October, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Robert Gerhard, M699217; Gerhard, Robert. 1937. Letter to Josep Valls, 20th December, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1255.

10 Ministerio de Instrucción Pública y Sanidad. 1938. Letter to Roberto Gerhard, 31st January, unpublished. Institut d’Estudis Vallencs, Col leció Robert Gerhard, 12_02_095.

11 Gali, Francisco. 1938. Letter to Roberto Gerhard, 10th June, unpublished. Institut de Estudis Vallencs, Col·leció Robert Gerhard, 12_02_102.

12 Gerhard, Robert. 1937. Letter to Josep Valls, 20th December, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1255.

13 Anonymous. 1938. Minutes of the general assembly of the ISCM in London. Institut de Estudis Vallencs, Col·leció Robert Gerhard, 13_07_12.

14 Gerhard, Robert. 1940. Letter to Edward Clark, 4th April. British Library, Edward Clark Papers, Add. MS 52256; Gerhard, Robert. 1940. Letter to Edward Clark, 11th April. British Library, Edward Clark Papers, Add. MS 52256; Bautista, Julián. 1947. Letter to Óscar Esplá, 21st March. Legado Óscar Esplá, Obra Social Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, no reference number.

15 Bautista, Julián. 1947. Letter to Óscar Esplá, 21st March. Legado Óscar Esplá, Obra Social Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, no reference number.

16 Valls, Josep. 1938. Letter to Josep Carner, 22nd July, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Carner.

17 Gerhard, Robert. 1939. Letter to Paquerette Delille, 23rd February, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1255.

18 Valls, Josep. 1939. Letter to Paquerette Delille, 8th February 1939, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1255.

19 Valls, Josep. 1939. Letter to Paquerette Delille, 8th February 1939, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1255.

20 Gerhard, Robert. 1939. Letter to Josep Valls, 1st April, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1255.

21 Gerhard, Robert. 1939. Letter to Josep Valls, 1st April, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1255.

22 Gerhard, Robert. 1940. Letter to Edward Clark, 4th April. British Library, Edward Clark Papers, Add. MS 52256.

23 Gerhard, Robert. 1940. Letter to Edward Clark, 11th April. British Library, Edward Clark Papers, Add. MS 52256.

24 Gerhard, Robert. 1946. Letter to Josep Valls, 24th May, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1255.

25 Gerhard, Robert. 1945. Letter to Josep Valls, 9th September, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1255.

26 Gerhard, Robert.1945. Letter to Josep Valls, 9th October, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1255.

27 Gerhard, Robert. 1946. Letter to Óscar Esplá, 30th March, unpublished. Legado Óscar Esplá, Obra Social Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, no reference number.

28 Gerhard, Robert. 1946. Letter to Óscar Esplá, 30th March, unpublished. Legado Óscar Esplá, Obra Social Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, no reference number.

29 Gerhard, Robert. 1946. Letter to Óscar Esplá, 30th March, unpublished. Legado Óscar Esplá, Obra Social Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, no reference number.

30 Gerhard, Robert. 1946. Letter to Josep Valls, 24th May, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1255.

31 Gerhard, Robert. 1947. Letter to Josep Valls, 1st January, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1255.

32 Gerhard, Robert. 1947. Letter to Óscar Esplá, 14th April, unpublished. Legado Óscar Esplá, Obra Social Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, no reference number.

33 Bautista, Julián. 1947. Letter to Óscar Esplá, 21st March. Legado Óscar Esplá, Obra Social Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, no reference number.

34 Gerhard, Robert. 1947. Letter to Óscar Esplá, 14th April, unpublished. Legado Óscar Esplá, Obra Social Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, no reference number.

35 Gerhard, Robert. 1947. Letter to Óscar Esplá, 14th April, unpublished. Legado Óscar Esplá, Obra Social Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, no reference number.

36 Gerhard, Robert. 1956. Letter to William Glock, 31st December. British Library, William Glock Papers, MS Mus 952.

37 Gerhard, Robert. 1947. Letter to Josep Valls, 21st December, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1255.

38 Gerhard, Robert. 1947. Letter to Josep Valls, 21st December, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1255. La Duenna was selected to be performed at the Amsterdam 1948 festival but was not finished in time to be performed; it was, however, included in the 1951 festival in Frankfurt.

39 Gerhard, Robert. 1948. Letter to Josep Valls, 7th October, unpublished. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Fons Josep Valls, Jva1255.

40 Bacarisse, Salvador. 1953. Letter to Julian Bautista, 4th April, unpublished, Archivo Julian Bautista, Biblioteca Nacional de España, M.BAUTISTA/57/1(15).

41 Bacarisse, Salvador. 1953. Letter to Julian Bautista, 4th April, unpublished, Archivo Julian Bautista, Biblioteca Nacional de España, M.BAUTISTA/57/1(15).

42 The first Festival de Música de América y España, held in Madrid in 1961, was likely the first significant occasion in which works by exiles (Bautista, Gerhard and Rodolfo Halffter) were performed in a state-organized event.