Description
By showing how music intersected with wider cultural affairs, such as philosophy and criticism, this book connects music and the modern in eighteenth-century Spain within the context of Enlightenment thought.Histories of modern Europe often present late eighteenth-century Spain as a backward place struggling to keep pace with modernity. During the reign of Charles III (1759-1788), Spain pushed for economic and cultural modernization, but encountered resistance from members of the public and the elite alike. They viewed the modern as a passing fad that would, in time, show its fragility, and believed Spain would withstand the collapse thanks to its firm grounding in the pillars of monarchy, religion, and traditional forms of knowledge. One source of this solid foundation was the long-established musical knowledge based on the rules of counterpoint. In contrast, modernizers argued that Spain could be true to its essence, yet simultaneously modern and cosmopolitan: they favoured cosmopoli
