General Research interests

My research investigates music and politics in early and mid twentieth-century Spain and the reception of Spanish music in France. Specifically, my research interests include the aesthetics of fragmentation, failure, and puppetry in Modernist music; I am especially interested in “hybrid” theatrical genres of the era that merge pantomimes, songs, dances, masks, and marionettes. Currently, I am writing my dissertation on the eclectic theatrical music of Manuel de Falla, which considers issues of gender, race, and class in the ambivalent aesthetic constructions of Spanish musical Modernism. I also maintain a scholarly interest in noise, disorder, and capitalism in lo-fi rock, indie, and experimental music of the late 80s and 90s.

Abstracts from Select conferences

Spanish Nationalism, Neoclassicalism, and Comic (Dis)Enchantment in Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de maese Pedro

Presented at the American Musicological Society Conference (Denver, CO, 2023)

Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de maese Pedro (1922), a one-act puppet opera based on an excerpt from Don Quixote, takes a decisive turn away from the Andalusian themes that defined his earlier work toward what critics have described as a more universal style. As Falla draws on Spanish Renaissance and Baroque sources, scholars have contextualized his neoclassicism in El retablo within the post-imperial discourse of interwar Spain that increasingly called upon Spanish Golden Age culture to negotiate a modern national identity (Hess, 2001; Torres Clemente, 2007; Christoforidis, 2018). While my analysis is informed by this research, in this paper I focus on the role of humor and its centrality to Falla’s “Castilian” neoclassicism. Inspired by the work of Henri Bergson (1900) and Sianne Ngai (2012), I develop a theory of neoclassical humor that centers on not solely what James Currie (2018) shows is a shared tendency of comedy and modernism to demystify artistic essences, but also on a quixotic vitality that animates Maese Pedro’s puppet theater.

Unlike Ravel’s musical automata or Stravinsky’s infamous claims of objectivity, Falla’s neoclassicism retains a Romantic expressiveness that I suggest emerges from Quixote’s incontinent idealism. To capture Quixote’s innate comic nature and develop his distinctive neoclassical humor, Falla explores the ambiguous transference between Quixote’s excessive vitality and the mechanization of Maese Pedro’s puppets as he collapses these two worlds. Falla’s foregrounding of Quixote’s admirable if foolish faith in the immaterial further situates El retablo within a discourse that sought to reshape modern Spanish identity after, as philosopher Miguel de Unamuno dubbed Quixote in 1912, this “Spanish Christ.” In sum, I demonstrate in this paper how Falla musically refines Quixote’s humor and piety to redefine typical Spanish tropes in a more universal manner, far away from the dominating presence of Carmen and other Spanish “Gypsies.” Essential to his neoclassical style, I contend that those same features simultaneously preserve a subtle mark of Spanish alterity in contrast to neoclassicism’s “Latinate” aesthetics of purity, balance, clarity, and grace (Messing, 1988).

Manuel de Falla’s La vida breve and the Failure of Representation

Presented at the American Musicological Society Conference (Chicago 2021)

Manuel de Falla’s first opera _La vida breve_ (1904-1913) is generally noted for its stylistic hybridity, borrowing elements from zarzuela, Wagnerian opera, and French modernism (Christoforidis 2018; Llano 2012; Hess 2001/2004). By assessing the critical reception of the opera’s various generic elements, scholars have been able to situate the work within the ever-evolving conception of Spanish identity and Spanish music in the early twentieth century. What has been overlooked, however, are the ways in which _La vida breve’s_ eclectic music may in fact productively resist stylistic cohesion. Inspired by the ideas of Judith Butler (1990/1993) and Fred Moten (2003), I explore how that aesthetic fragmentation could confront and help shape international perceptions of Spain by musically articulating the often-ambivalent intersection of gender, race, and nation.

In this paper I demonstrate how Falla’s oscillation between Spanish folk-influenced styles and unmarked musical gestures refuses to paint a picturesque vision of Spain and instead betrays a more complex struggle of self and other, or universal and exotic, that results in the necessary failure of representation. The stylistic disjunction is most relevant in the central character, Salud, whose music repeatedly suggests and defers dance-like characteristics that would have signaled “Spanish” to contemporary European audiences familiar with Spanish Gypsy tropes in Bizet’s Carmen, flamenco dance, and zarzuela. It is through Salud’s embodied dissonance with the archetypal Spanish Gypsy woman that _La vida breve_ can subtly challenge an existing image of Spain and foreshadow one yet to come. In this sense, I further suggest that Salud’s character holds a metonymic relationship with the opera as a whole and, beyond that, the contemporary Spanish socio-political milieu as it levels an inherent critique of Orientalist representational practices. Ultimately, I seek to reconsider the historic and aesthetic significance of _La vida breve_ beyond Spanish nationalism and toward larger issues of exoticism, representation, and the role of music in performing more complex and heterogeneous collectivities.

Franco’s Spain in Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez

Presented at the NeMLA conference (Washington D.C., 2019)

Spanish classical music during the time of the Civil War and the onset of Franco’s dictatorship has not often been studied critically as a cultural artifact of sociopolitical importance. With the exception of recent scholarship by musicologist Eva Moreda Rodriguez, music scholars have largely considered the late 1930s and early 1940s to be devoid of musical interest as the most influential Spanish composers went into exile after the war. This paper considers the cultural relevance of classical music during the Spanish Civil War and General Francisco Franco’s regime by analyzing the shifting sociocultural articulations during those often-neglected years through a comparative and contextual musicological study of prominent Spanish composers’ musical works from 1936 to 1940. I analyze works premiered at the 1936 International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Barcelona and Joaquin Rodrigo’s famous Concierto de Aranjuez of 1940 in order to musicologically and sociopolitically situate the works among the cultural shifts that occurred in the beginning Franco’s dictatorship. I argue that Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez encapsulates the cultural aims of the Franco regime by consolidating nationalistic elements through historical retrospection and exotic evocations within a musically conservative framework. Simultaneously utilizing musical sources of the Spanish Golden Age and commercialized folk music like flamenco, Rodrigo’s Concierto projected the new constructed identity of Spain under the Franco regime that suppressed regionalism and encouraged centralized nationalist essentialism. Additionally, this paper argues that elements of the cultural ultra-conservativism of Franco’s regime was audibly present and developing during the musical culture of the Second Spanish Republic. In comparing music and culture of the Second Spanish Republic and the early Franco regime, scholars can better understand the complex articulations of culture and identity before and during the violent and oppressive years of Franco’s military dictatorship. 

The guitar in negotiations of Spanish national identity, 1920-1930

Presented at the Dublin guitar symposium (dublin, Ireland, 2019) and the Guitar Foundation of America Festival (Virtual, 2o19)

During the Spanish Silver Age (1898-1936) the very cultural and political foundations of the Spanish nation were challenged by a succession of unstable and contentious governments, regional factionalism, and a loss of empire that prompted philosophical debates over the essence of Spain. As intellectuals and politicians debated about Spain’s true essence, composers constructed their visions through historical retrospection, the use of folk music, and the adoption of foreign compositional techniques. During this era the guitar became an even more powerful symbol of Spanish identity as flamenco music and the classical guitar garnered international esteem; yet most musicological research on the Spanish Silver Age prioritizes issues of exoticism in the orchestral works of Manuel de Falla. As a result, there is a surprising lack of critical engagement with the guitar works of this era even though the instrument provides perhaps the most fruitful medium through which to musically analyze the complex negotiations of Spanish identity. This lecture-recital contextualizes musical aesthetics with the sociopolitical negotiations over Spanish national identity through a critical analysis of folkloric and avant-garde musical features in the first guitar works of prominent non-guitarist composers such as Adolfo Salazar, Rodolfo Halffter and others. The guitar functioned as an ideal medium through which to express Spanish identity precisely because of its ubiquity in Spanish culture. I argue that Spanish composers had to directly engage with the negotiations over national identity when writing their first pieces for such a volatile instrument in an equally volatile sociopolitical landscape.