Orientalism and Sexual Otherness in Spanish Musical Modernity (18981939)

ORIENT/ALT studies Orientalism as one of the principal musical avenues for the expression of homosexual otherness within Spanish and Hispano- French musical modernity from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the Francoist period. Our focus lies on a corpus of several dozen musical works in which Manuel de Falla, Adolfo Salazar, Ernesto Halffter, Gustavo Durán, and other Spanish composers sublimated ancient Eastern cultures as an Arcadia onto which they projected forms of male sexuality and subjectivity considered illicit in the West for failing to conform to the heterosexual norm. This corpus includes central works of Spanish musical modernity, such as Fallas Nights in the Gardens of Spain, as well as lesser-known but culturally significant compositions like Salazars Arabia and Rubaiyat. These works have not previously been studied from perspectives that take into account their authors homosexuality, nor as part of a supranational phenomenon of homoerotic idealization of the East involving major European and American composers within the French aesthetic orbit, among them Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Aaron Copland, and Karol Szymanowski. The study of the corpus will be organized around four thematic axes: 1) National and supranational identities; 2) Extra-musical representational codes; 3) Musical semiotic codes in relation to masculinity and (homo)sexuality; 4) Orientalist / queer temporalities. In addition to extensive library and archival research, we will organize national workshops and an international conference. The research team consists of the PI and Prof. Teresa López Castilla. The working groupcomprised of five members from Spain, Austria, and Germanyincludes some of the leading European specialists in music, gender, and sexuality. Alongside the analytical and historicalaesthetic contextualization of the corpus, ORIENT/ALT includes a project for the recovery and critical edition of central works within homoerotic musical Orientalism that remain unpublished, namely Arabia and Rubaiyat by Adolfo Salazar. This editorial project will be undertaken in collaboration with the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales (Madrid), its scientific editor Lluís Bertrán, and the specialist in critical editions of historical music Saúl Aguado. The project will culminate in a lecturerecital, in which these works will be presented. The PI will also establish the permanent monthly seminar and study group En los márgenes: Disidencias sexoafectivas en la música española de los siglos XX y XXI (At the Margins: SexAffective Dissidences in 20th- and 21st-Century Spanish Music), with participation from the research team and leading scholars in music, feminism, and gender affiliated with the department. The project will consolidate a new line of research in Spain, with the goal of renewing the ways we historicize the canon of Spanish musical modernity through the application of contemporary analytical approaches from gender studies and feminist and queer musicology.