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

Abstract

This article examines the unsuccessful attempts made by a group of Catalan and Spanish exiled composers (Roberto Gerhard, Baltasar Samper, Josep Valls and Óscar Esplá) to reconstruct the Spanish and Catalan delegations of the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM) in exile, during the second half of the 1940s. This episode is enormously valuable and revealing if we analyze it, as the article does, within two historical contexts: firstly, the history of the ISCM in Spain, and in particular the efforts that the republican government made to ensure that its country was still present at ISCM festivals during the Civil War, in an attempt to guarantee that the cultural legitimacy of Spain remained on the exile side, at a time when the Franco regime threatened to appropriate it. Secondly, we can observe parallels between this correspondence and other episodes of the Spanish musical exile in the period 1945-1950 which suggests that Spanish and Catalan music also engaged in a generalized reorientation of their strategies of resistance/adaptation