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Available From UC Press
The Tonadilla in Performance
Lyric Comedy in Enlightenment Spain
The tonadilla, a type of satiric musical skit popular on the public stages of Madrid during the late Enlightenment, has played a significant role in the history of music in Spain. This book, the first major study of the tonadilla in English, examines the musical, theatrical, and social worlds that the tonadilla brought together and traces the lasting influence this genre has had on the historiography of Spanish music. The tonadillas' careful constructions of musical populism provide a window onto the tensions among Enlightenment modernity, folkloric nationalism, and the politics of representation; their diverse, engaging, and cosmopolitan music is an invitation to reexamine tired old ideas of musical "Spanishness." Perhaps most radically of all, their satirical stance urges us to embrace the labile, paratextual nature of comic performance as central to the construction of history.
Elisabeth Le Guin is Professor of Musicology at UCLA and author of Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology.
"There is far too much in this amazing book to describe in a blurb. Suffice it to say that Elisabeth Le Guin has immersed herself in the little-known world of the late eighteenth-century tonadilla and honors it by giving us a wonderfully rich picture of place, genre, and period that encompasses questions of comedy, song, historiography, nationalism, gender, the practicalities of performance, and the disadvantages of an overarching theory." —Mary Hunter, author of The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna
"This book attests to a true love for musical theatre. Elisabeth Le Guin achieves what no modern scholar has so far: she makes the tonadillas hers. The Tonadilla in Performance offers a sound understanding of Spanish culture and a rare insight into this repertoire." —Germán Labrador López de Azcona, Professor of Music at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
"This book attests to a true love for musical theatre. Elisabeth Le Guin achieves what no modern scholar has so far: she makes the tonadillas hers. The Tonadilla in Performance offers a sound understanding of Spanish culture and a rare insight into this repertoire." —Germán Labrador López de Azcona, Professor of Music at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid