John Brande Trend (1887-1958) and His Musical 'Iter Hispanicum'

Abstract

In the 1920s the British Hispanist John Brande Trend travelled extensively through Spain with the brief of reporting on Spanish culture. His interest in music, stimulated by the influence of the musicologist Edward Dent, his mentor during his undergraduate years at Cambridge and lifelong partner, resulted immediately in several reports, notably on Spanish music and theatre, and in a long-standing friendship with the composer Manuel de Falla. Inspired by both these highly influential figures, Trend undertook research in Spanish archives to explore Spain’s then little known musical heritage. This article, based on the correspondence between both Dent and Falla and Trend, aims to assess his achievements in making early Spanish music better known to scholars and the more general public through many publications, talks, and concerts in the context of the relatively new discipline of musicology and rapidly changing cultural politics of the second decade of the twentieth century.