Following Alan Lomax's Footsteps in Spain

In October 1953, American folk-song collector Alan Lomax broadcast his first programme about his collection of Spanish folk music on the BBC’s Third Programme. As part of the project of this dissertation, I have recreated this programme by piecing together the script with the recordings used in it. I will analyse Lomax’s time in Spain (1952-1953) through the lens of the dictatorship’s thawing relations with the West, and its ideological use of folk music. Situating Lomax within the institutional history of the technological fields of the Third Programme’s studios, and the mobile studios of rural Spain, will help to understand his presentation of the recording process within the broadcast. As well as this technological world, Romantic travelogues about Spain and anthropological Mediterraneanism will offer insights into Lomax’s presentation of antiquity within the broadcast. Lomax’s legacy within ethnomusicology, I will argue, is best heard through an engagement with the ways in which he utilised the music that he recorded, mirroring his mixing of fieldwork and production.

Alan Lomax recorded almost 1,500 folk songs throughout Spain between June 1952 and January 1953. The material results of his journey, which are preserved at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, include music on magnetic tape, but also photographs, field notebooks, invoices, annotated maps, letters, diaries, and even the manuscript of part of a book for publication. These documents can only palely reflect the deep impact that Lomax's visit must have had on the inhabitants of all the small villages where he recorded. Lomax's sound recordings offer a unique opportunity to approach the political situation under Franco's dictatorship, the poverty of the country, and the moral constrictions faced by women through the eyes of Lomax and Jeanette Bell, his assistant in this journey. Lomax showed a special interest in Spanish women's lives and his documents contain constant references to Bell, reflecting the important role that she played in helping Spanish women open up for the recordings and talk about topics that they would never have discussed with a man. This paper aims to analyze how women, from their own spaces, contributed to setting up this collection of sound recordings, by analyzing the documents from Lomax's Spain trip, using a conceptual framework drawn from oral history, and technological tools. Bell's memoirs, scattered among Lomax's papers, contain comments on her experiences throughout their journey, her role in the recording process, and her feelings. These demonstrate her connections with Spanish women, and are very rich in comments on the particularities of Spanish female musical culture. The approach to the lives and singing of women through the otherness of Lomax and Bell suggests that oral tradition is a key question that must be asked to challenge the loss of women's voices in historical accounts and to place women on the map of music history. This paper is a result of the project conducted thanks to the Jon B. Lovelace Fellowship for the Study of the Alan Lomax Collection, at The John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress, between January and September 2017.

Popular Music and Society, 2020

This article analyzes musical practices of rurality in Asturias (northern Spain), focusing on these practices as transits beyond ruralurban, local-transnational, and music-life dichotomies. We map out three modes of the production of locality in relation to musical heritage in order to point out a prevalence of the phenomena of "aural friction" (García-Flórez) and "mutuality" (Colón-Montijo) in expressive practices connected to this underground scene in the context of 2008's rise of neo-liberalism. The introduction of these two concepts leads us to point out a correlation between the current transformation of the local and the social that coincides with a general questioning of the multicultural politics of recognition in Spain.

Liner notes to Correa de Azevedo, Endangered Music Project

Entering the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress, one feels the power of an encounter with the wealth of human history, the sum of human knowledge. That knowledge lies encapsulated not only in the written word --books, journals, magazines, manuscripts --but in millions of sound recordings, photographs, films, and all other media which the 20th century revolution in communications technology has prod uced.

Written with Andrea Zarza Canova It is a study of some of the sound archives in the context of a history of Sound Art in Spain. The text specifies the characteristics of sound conservation in Spain, describes some Sound Art and Experimental Music archives.

Revista de História, 2023

This article analyzes the representation of Chilean "folk" voices in the Smithsonian Institution's U.S. catalog, and specifically its Folkways, Monitor, and Paredon labels. Each, in its own way, sought to record and disseminate the sounds of the peoples of the world, whether for educational, solidarity, or proselytizing purposes. This article examines the discursive strategies carried out to profile "authentic" voices, questioning the lax treatment of the information collected and its relationship with the recorded sounds. Therefore, I seek to make visible the participation of ethnomusicology professionals in the production of musical images for North American and international audiences. Likewise, this article emphasizes the political uses the producers hoped to give to the albums within the context of progressive transformations with a popular intention.

Сборник с материали от Национален научно-практически семинар “ФОТОКОЛОР - ІІІ”, 2012

The German musician Kurt Schindler (1887-1935) was also a famous photographer who worked for several newspapers in Spain and in the United States. He was commissioned by Columbia University (NY) and several Spanish research institutions in 1920 to do a fieldwork on popular folksongs in all over the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) until his earlier death in the 30s. He solved some problems taking white and black photos on Spanish dances with his earlier experience on Russian fieldworks before the I World War. His photographic legacy has still not been catalogued completely. A further research on this photo collection is needed in order to show, to the scientific community, the unique of his ethnographic recollection. With this paper I want to point it out one of the task of the musician Kurt Schindler (1887-1935), composer, piano and organ performer, chorus director, musicologist, folk songs collector and ethnomusicologist, who is well-known for his editions on Spanish and Russian songs. The task I want to show is his role as photographer. In the twenty one English, German and Spanish music dictionaries and encyclopaedias, published since 1920 until nowadays, where we can have information about this artist (cfr. in the bibliography of this article), in any of them we can have an explanation about his photographic collection.