An almost unknown land: Some remarks on the Spanish string quartet in the twentieth (and twenty-first) century

© 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis. The composition of new string quartets in Spain from the end of the 1950s undertook a path of renewal that strove toward modernity through the use of serial and aleatory techniques or new conceptions of timbre. This was in spite of the relatively scarce experience for Spanish composers of international examples of the genre. This essay offers a brief insight into the aesthetic diversity to be found in string quartets composed in Spain from 1950 up to the present, and stresses their openness toward newer hybrid perspectives of intertextuality and narrativity.