In the context of music history, instrumental Classicism has generally been considered a Central-European phenomenon in which Spain’s position was, at best, isolated and marginal. However, the recent research compiled in this volume provides a very different view. The final decades of the eighteenth century were, in fact, a period of modernisation of Spanish musical culture due to the intensive dissemination and copying of music. The expansion of the music market strengthened Madrid’s commercial networks with many cities including Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Paris, Vienna and Venice. This facilitated the arrival of a wide repertory, which subsequently circulated all over the country and had an impact on local composers.

At the same time, the book provides an overview of the evolution of the most important instrumental genres in Spain, which have been largely unexplored until now, with various chapters dedicated to the sonata, duet, trio and piano quintet. Luigi Boccherini’s and Gaetano Brunetti’s contributions were a vital part of this process, together with the works of Joseph Haydn, which were well known in Spain very early on, as well as those of many other composers, both from Spain and abroad who still remain largely unknown. The study of the reception processes of these composers linked to the most important centres of the time opens up new perspectives for analysis and enables a history of Spanish music to be presented from a European standpoint.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction by Miguel Ángel Marín and Màrius Bernadó
Instrumental music in late eighteenth-century Spain: issues and challenges

I. Shaping instrumental genres

1. Joseba Berrocal

Las sonatas para violín y bajo de Gaetano Brunetti: reconsideración de un género

2. Xosé Crisanto Gándara

Sonatas italianas en archivos ibéricos: el caso del manuscrito MM 63 de Coimbra

3. Ana Lombardía

Violin duets in Madrid: divertimento all’europea

4. Christian Speck

As simple as possible: Boccherini’s piano quintets and their public

II. Copying music

5. Judith Ortega

Los copistas del rey: la transmisión de la música en la corte española en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII

6. Loukia Drosopoulou

Luigi Boccherini’s copyists active at the Spanish royal court

7. Stephen C. Fisher

Manuscript dissemination of Haydn’s symphonies in Spain

III. The musical market

8. José Carlos Gosálvez

Aproximación al estudio de la edición musical manuscrita en Madrid

9. Rudolf Rasch

Four Madrilenian first editions of works by Luigi Boccherini?

IV. Issues of style

10. W. Dean Sutcliffe

Poet of the galant: the keyboard works of Manuel Blasco de Nebra

11. Thomas Schmitt

Componer con elegancia en el estilo sencillo: la teoría de la composición en la música instrumental española del siglo XVIII

12. Lluís Bertran

Eligiendo las piezas: los tríos de Gaetano Brunetti y la recepción de la música instrumental europea

Works cited
General bibliography
List of contributors
General index