Today, we share with you something completely different. Dr Eva Moreda Rodriguez, Music Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, writes for us about Spanish legal deposit and its value in terms of historical sound recordings. It underlines the importance of legal deposit in a much wider variety of contexts than one would at first imagine.
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Shortly after Claimed from Stationers’ Hall was set up, I had the opportunity to experience first-hand how the requirement to submit copies of every printed work to a library can, if satisfied, change our understanding of music and musical cultures of the past in radical ways. Indeed, when I started to research the arrival of recording technologies in Spain from 1878 onwards and the responses of Spaniards to them, I was faced with the issue of a lack of sources. I did indeed have newspaper and magazine articles – but these were often brief announcements or texts intended for scientific dissemination which did shed little light on how the average Spaniard would have reacted upon hearing a phonograph for the first time. References to the phonograph in Spanish literature were surprisingly scarce, and memoirs and journals did not shed much light on the issue either. Discovering, at the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica (BDH), a zarzuela by successful composer Ruperto Chapí named El fonógrafo ambulante (The travelling phonograph) and dated 1899 prompted the question: did any other theatrical and musical plays of the time feature phonographs and gramophones, and if so, can they shed any light on cultural attitudes towards recording technologies at the time?A search at the BDH website, as well as at The Internet Archive and at the premises of the Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE) revealed that at least fifteen plays were premiered in Spain between 1885 and 1914 which featured a phonograph or gramophone in a significant role. Most of those works (libretti and, on some occasions the music) arrived at the BNE through the legal deposit mechanism. This, in itself, tells us a lot about both legal deposit in Spain and the significance of theatrical genres in the late 19th and early 20th century. Indeed, some sort of legal deposit requirement (privilegio real) had existed in Spain from 1716, but a full, comprehensive legal deposit norm was not introduced until 1957. In practice, this meant that, through the 19th century and early 20th century, legal deposit requirements were often met haphazardly, and not all authors deposited copies of their works at the BNE, then the only legal deposit library in Spain.
Theatrical authors, though, had an incentive to do so. Theatre-going was, at the time, one of the preferred pastimes of Spaniards of all social classes, particularly in urban areas. A number of popular theatre genres, combining music with the spoken word to different extents (sainete, zarzuela, revista, invento, pasillo), flourished in an ever-growing number of theatres. Intended for consumption and entertainment, many of these plays were replaced after a few runs, forcing the authors to constantly come up with new ideas: there was, indeed, money to be made, but the environment was competitive. In this climate, one of the few weapons authors had in order to protect themselves from unscrupulous impresarios who might stage their works without compensating them financially was to deposit copies of their works at the BNE so that authorship could be conclusively proven in case of legal disputes.
A happy consequence of this practice is that works that might not have survived otherwise – because they were generally ephemeral, inconsequential and often of limited artistic merit – have made it to our days, providing us with a fascinating corpus to study both theatrical culture in Restoration Spain and broader social and cultural issues during this period. These plays were written primarily to entertain, and as such they satirized certain aspects of contemporary politics and society – but they never decisively challenged the status quo and ultimately celebrated the Spanish pueblo as a community of individuals happy to live by traditional, conservative values: for example, a number of these plays may feature fiery, memorable female characters, but at the same time the genre mocked the nascent first-wave feminist movement relentlessly.
In my research, I have been working under the hypothesis that these plays would have presented ideas and discourses around recording technologies that would have resonated with their audiences – always within the generally conservative, paternalistic framework I have described above. For example, several of the plays develop the idea of the phonograph being able to reproduce reality with the utmost fidelity – by recording in private, by accident, statements that individuals would not have dared making in public – and then playing them back. Wives are found out not to love their husbands, and vice-versa, and politicians are found out to lie to their electorate in pursuit of votes. Such episodes, however, were developed purely for comic effect, and one never finds even the slightest suggestion that technological modernity – which was generally seen as critical to the advancement of Spain – should be coupled up with social or political modernity. This is too the case with El fonógrafo ambulante, to which I have referred earlier: the travelling phonograph that arrives in a remote Andalusian village at first threatens to destabilize the social order by making the heroine, Araceli, consider breaking her engagement to the town’s mayor and instead marrying Antero, the phonograph operator, instead. However, once it is established that both Araceli and Antero are true representatives of the Spanish pueblo, young and resourceful but ultimately attached to traditional values, the phonograph, which has brought them together, becomes a guarantee for social order, and the play ends with all villagers gathered around the device and listening in fascination.
Sources:
- El fonógrafo ambulante, public domain, from Biblioteca Nacional de España http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000049480&page=1
- Boletin fonografico, public domain, from Biblioteca Valenciana http://bivaldi.gva.es/es/catalogo_imagenes/grupo.cmd?path=1011914
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 