Review: Fondo de Música Tradicional

Abstract

Fondo de Musica Tradicional. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas and Institucio Mila i Fontanals, Project Host. URL: http://www.musicatradicional.eu The website Fondo de Musica Tradicional (FMT) presents in digital form the single most important archive of Spanish musical folklore. When complete it will provide ready access to over twenty thousand melodies collected during the so-called “Misiones folkloricas” (folkloric missions) between 1944 and 1960, as well as to sixty-two notebooks presented to “Concursos” (competitions) organized by the Seccion de Folklore of the former Instituto Espanol de Musicologia of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC, Spanish Council for Scientific Research). The FMT offers great promise to musicologists and ethnographers interested in exploring these resources, which were previously all but inaccessible. Before we turn to the details of the site, however, some consideration should be given to the forces, both intellectual and ideological, that led to the creation of the collections it aims to represent. The FMT is linked to the Institucio Mila i Fontanals (IMF), an institution named after a nineteenth-century Catalan military musician, Manuel Mila i Fontanals, who was a keen collector of the products of Spanish folklore, including music.1 Influenced by the philosophical approach of Johann Gottfried Herder, he became one of the main drivers of ethnomusicological study in Spain, his ballad collection Romancerillo Catalan being one of the country's most important works in that field.2 In the early twentieth century Felipe Pedrell (regarded as the founder of Spanish musicology) contributed important work to the Arxiu d'Etnografia i Folklore de Catalunya (Archive of Ethnography and Folklore of Catalonia), producing the first collections to include melodic transcriptions, today …