The “Cancionero de Palacio” & Other Songs for Exiles

(Murcia, Spain) During the Franco regime, a group of well-known Spanish music critics, composers, and musicologists living in exile—along with some half-million others—dug deep into music of the Golden Age. Though scattered across the globe, Otto Mayer-Serra, Jesus Bal y Gay, Adolfo Salazar, Roberto Gerhard, Ernesto Halffter, Eduardo Martinez Torner, Jaume Pahissa and others kept in frequent contact through the musicologist and Catalan priest Higini Anglés, who remained in Spain as director of the Spanish government’s Instituto Español de Musicología. Cooperative research and intense musical discussion of this repertoire is understood to have helped these political exiles reconnect to cultural life in their homeland in a profoundly meaningful way.

Exquisitely beautiful and powerfully rousing, music of Spain’s Golden Age was patronized by—and composed to glorify—the Catholic monarchs during a time of vicious intolerance and sweeping expulsion of both Jews and Muslims. How, then, during another dangerously volatile period five centuries on, did this same music, with its problematic origins well-known, serve as a means for another group of exiles—political this time, rather than religious—to re-engage wtih their home country? This program gives us pause to consider how musical meaning shifts with time and context, as the victims and the oppressors change and the role of a particular work or repertoire changes with them. In person and livestreamed at blemf.org.