Description
The question of Spain by European musical Romanticism has to be posed in ontic (ontology: the essence) and epistemic (epistemology: the ways of understanding it) terms. On the one hand, the question of Spain's being, of what it was in itself, is conditioned by the way it was seen by the European powers in the natural course of colonialism since the 19th century. On the other hand, Spain's image of itself oscillated between coinciding with the vision of these powers or claiming its own style. These epistemic ways of knowing and accepting both the ontology of others and one's own are intertwined and occur simultaneously in a sea of connections such as the Mediterranean.
In music, the orientalist current refers to works composed from the West that seek to evoke aspects of the East. Spain was typified as a gateway to the properly Oriental by European music and, in many cases, accepted the meanings without fear of resembling its near Other: the Islamic world. Thus, the Alhambrist style was very common in Spanish compositions of the time. However, the unbearable similarity of the Islamic Other also occurred, translating into nationalist musical currents that claimed a style of their own, alien to the Arab, or into a warlike musical Africanism that broke the dialogue between East and West.
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