Music At The Margin

This book studies the musical life of Jaca, a small town innorth-eastern Spain, during the eighteenth century. The newperspective presented here reveals that a mutually influentialrelationship existed between local institutions and repertories andthe urban framework in which they operated. Analysis of how thisrelationship was shaped in a particular place during a particularperiod forms the basis of this study. In addition, the book aims tocontribute to the placing of less important towns on the musicological map, hitherto dominated by the larger cities. Research to date hasgenerally focussed on ‘significant’ phenomena that have taken place in ‘centres’ while the role of music in smaller, provincial towns hasremained little explored. Taking Jaca as the locus of study, ratherthan the object of study, comparisons are consistently drawn touncover similarities between situations that are close in space andtime as well as illustrate divergences from the mainstream. Thus theconclusions presented here may well be relevant for other similarSpanish and European urban settlements. Music on the margin in not the history of musical ‘heros’, but of music in the lives of ordinarypeople. What is implicit here is an attempt to rescue their ‘voice’ in order to include it in the polyphonic discourse of current musichistory. Even though this voice is as yet a barely perceptiblewhisper, it nevertheless represents the musical experience of a largepart of the European population of that time.