Conveners
Portugal at the crossroads of Mediterranean and Atlantic cultures: an approach through the biographies of 18th and 19th century musicians
- Luisa Cymbron
Description
In his seminal 1945 work, Portugal, o Mediterrรขneo e o Atlรขntico (Portugal, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic), geographer Orlando Ribeiro provides a nuanced analysis of the country's physical and human geography. He portrays Portugal as a land of contrasts, moulded by the interplay of Mediterranean and Atlantic influences โ dualities that permeate many facets of Portuguese life and culture.
Building on Ribeiroโs vision, this paper takes an approach to the history of music in Portugal, in the 18th and 19th centuries, that highlights transnational dynamics โ symbolically crossing seas โ and individual artistic trajectories, with a particular focus on biography. By analysing the lives and music of two composers, Carlos Seixas (1704โ1742) and Francisco de Sรก Noronha (1820โ1881), I will try to demonstrate how biography can serve as a valuable means of exploring the tension between structure and agency, in the context of the Mediterranean and Atlantic relations.
Seixas was the subject of a pioneering study by Santiago Kastner (1947), a key figure in the revival of Iberian keyboard music. I examine Kastnerโs biographical approach to Seixas (and, more broadly, to the Catalan composer Federico Mompou), emphasising his focus on the composers' musical works and his encyclopaedic knowledge of their contemporary repertoires. Noronha's life took me to focused on the โAtlantic areaโ (2019). Although there is a lot of information about Noronha's life, unlike with Seixas, it is in his works (characterised by virtuosity, hybridity, and patriotic symbolism) that we find some of the most interesting impacts on relations between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
