Description
Book SynopsisHow can a song help the hungry and persecuted to survive? Stephanie Sieburth’s Survival Songs explores how a genre of Spanish popular music, the copla, as sung by legendary performer Conchita Piquer, helped Republican sympathizers to survive the Franco regime’s dehumanizing treatment following the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). Piquer’s coplas were sad, bitter stories of fallen women, but they offered a way for the defeated to cope with chronic terror, grief, and trauma in the years known as the “time of silence.”
Drawing on the observations of clinical psychotherapy, Sieburth explores the way in which listening to Piquer’s coplas enabled persecuted, ostracized citizens to subconsciously use music, role-play, ritual, and narrative to mourn safely and without fear of repercussion from the repressive state. An interdisciplinary study that includes close readings of six of Piquer’s most famous c
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction: Conchita Piquer's Coplas as Psychotherapy Chapter One: Camouflage: The Psychology of Survival in Franco's Spain Chapter Two: An Introduction to the Copla and its Star Performer Chapter Three: Coping with Terror Through Popular Music: 'La Parrala' ('The Wine Lady') Chapter Four: Paradise Lost: 'Ojos verdes' ('Green Eyes') as Ritual of Separation Chapter Five: 'Tatuaje' ('Tattoo'), the Unburied Dead, and Complicated Grief Chapter Six: The 'Other Woman': 'Romance de la otra' as Ritual of Marginalization and Disenfranchised Grief Chapter Seven: Reasserting Personhood through Popular Song: 'Romance de valentia' ('Ballad of Bravery') and 'La Ruisenora' ('The Nightingale') Chapter Eight: When a Radio Song is the Meaning of Life: Mending the Torn Fabric of Identity through Narrative, Music and Interpretation Conclusion Notes Bibliography
