The persistence of eighteenth-century conventions in the music of Isaac Albéniz

Abstract

Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909) is typically assigned a peripheral position in Western music historiography, and described as one of the nationalist composers of the late nineteenth century, emphasizing his use of Spanish folklore as a source of compositional inspiration. This dissertation, on the contrary, studies the persistence of eighteenth-century conventions in the music of Albéniz and their interaction with well-known “Spanish-style” elements of his music. These conventions range from aspects of the reception of Albéniz’s music whose intellectual foundations were laid in the French Enlightenment, to melodic, harmonic, and contrapuntal patterns associated with the Galant style and Classical patterns of phrase structure and formal organization: specific theme types (the sentence and the period), techniques of development like the pre-core/core, and sonata form. In other words, this dissertation addresses questions about the reception of Albéniz’s music, and, more fundamentally, studies compositional techniques, formal and tonal characteristics of his music, his relationship to the classical tradition, and sheds light on slippery concepts like innovation and originality in Albéniz’s music. In so doing, this thesis presents the very first comprehensive analytical study of Albéniz’s oeuvre, and emphasises the fundamental role of eighteenth-century formulas in the conformation of his musical language, studying it as well as their interaction with stereotypical notions of Albéniz’s españolismo.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Alberto Martin: orcid.org/0000-0003-4030-2786

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