Industrialization

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Catalonia was the protagonist of an exceptional phenomenon in the context of the Spanish state: industrialization. This long-term, deep-rooted process had a profound effect on society, the economy and both countryside and city; and, in 1832, the opening of a factory in Barcelona to manufacture woven cotton goods on steam-driven mechanical looms marked the start of the modernization of the textile sector that would become the power house of the new industrial economy. Factories sprang up initially in Barcelona and the principal localities of the neighbouring boroughs. By the middle of the century, the availability of hydraulic power to drive the looms saw the establishing of textile colonies on river basins, especially along the Ter and Llobregat. This allowed, in turn, the closer policing of workers since these manufacturing colonies included both the factory and workers’ dwellings in the same space – and, not infrequently, the Civil Guard barracks as well.

Despite its economic power, however, the Catalan industrial bourgeoisie was bereft of any political influence in the inchoate liberal configuration that emerged in Spain after the disappearance of absolutism in 1833. As elsewhere in Europe, it was the intention of these wealth-creators to participate in decision-making as fully as the other leading classes by promoting a programme based on modernization, industrialization and protectionism. This project, conceived in and fostered by Catalonia, was aimed at the state as a whole and demanded progress for Spain. The development was uneven and halting, however, with a desire to return to the old ways rearing its head in the Carlist Wars, which occurred intermittently over the next four decades.

A further complication was, of course, the condition of popular classes and proletariat. With the advent of industrialization workers had to endure long shifts with poor pay, living in overcrowded dwellings that lacked the minimum concern for hygiene or health. They would soon militate against these conditions demanding improvement in social welfare and freedom. This experience would also be dogged by violence as a series of sporadic popular uprisings and reactionary military coups made their presence felt throughout the period.

Running parallel to the economic advance was a phenomenon which, along with industrialization, would eventually change entirely the political condition of Catalonia.

The coming of age of Catalan cinema?

In terms of international visibility, Catalan cinema has often been obscured by the towering figures of its famous painters, architects or musicians. As was the case with literature, during the Franco years cinema suffered from the double restriction of extreme censorship and linguistic proscription. In this way it thus could never achieve international recognition as its distinct voice was thoughtlessly subsumed into a wider ‘official’ national identity. However, 2007 may well have marked the end of such anonymity.

In that year the Lincoln Center in New York ran a series entitled ‘Film in Catalunya. 1906–2006’. The programme included twenty-five feature films plus two special sessions: ‘The Beginnings of Filmmaking in Catalunya’ and ‘Films of the Spanish Civil War’, with documentary works on that conflict by Mateo Santos, Félix Marquet and Adrián Porchet. As such, the series covered the entire span of Catalan cinema in the last century; and although its emphasis was placed in the production of recent decades, it managed to strike a wonderful balance between landmark films, such as Francisco Rovira Beleta's Los Tarantos (1962), the splendid recreation of the Romeo and Juliet story amid the squalor of the gypsy community of the Barceloneta (later demolished to make way for the Olympic village) or Llorenç Llobet Gràcia's Vida en sombras (Life in Shadows, 1948), the extraordinary tale of a man obsessed with cinema, which anticipates many film-within-a-film experiments to come. Also relevant was Juli Salvador's Apartado de Correos, 1001 (Post Box 1001, 1950), one of the first important thrillers to transpose film noir onto Catalan and Spanish screens.

The series also paid due tribute to the Barcelona School – a heterogeneous group of film-makers and artists who emerged during the 1960s and early 1970s with a characteristically cosmopolitan flair that set them apart from the ‘official’ idiom of the contemporary ‘New Spanish Cinema’. Their films were experimental in both script and structure and were largely influenced by Pop Art, fashion imagery and New Wave cinemas.

Barcelona is a metropolis for which the concept of siege has specifically modern connotations. Captive in various forms for much of its history following the comprehensive defeat of Catalonia in 1714, what was to become the economic motor of Spain would learn to live under the watchful eyes, cannon and restrictive centrist policies of the Spanish state for the bulk of its modernization. What is more, around the turn of the twentieth century, a foundational period both in cultural and political terms, this external vigilance was supplemented in the Catalan capital by periods of brutal class warfare among its own citizens. The fact that this time of growth was inflected by urban violence only heightened the city's understanding of what it meant to be under prolonged attack as both working- and ruling-class Barcelona felt besieged from without and from within.

The city persisted and survived these trials. It withstood, as well, two military dictatorships in the twentieth century totalling some 43 years. In terms of urban expansion and growth the period of transition to democracy in 1975 would come to rival the latter half of the 1800s. As had happened during the first modern Catalan renaissance, Barcelona was able to slough off its overt prison garb as it built and developed frenetically. This process of revitalization culminated in the hosting of the 1992 Olympics. The ostensible success of those Games as a performance of urban possibility and renewal has resonated around the world ever since. Even though critics are increasingly questioning the ultimate consequences of this period, urbanists now point to a ‘Barcelona model’ – especially in terms of waterfront revitalization – as a way of helping urban centres connect not only to their citizenry but to the built environment and their natural geographies as well.

Barcelona's arrival as a sought-out destination – an ‘in’ city – on the world's map, though, has been a mixed blessing. Among its valued attractions Gaudí and his contemporaries’ modernista architecture has helped confer upon Barcelona ‘must see’ status for travellers to Europe. At the same time, the celebrated urban renewal has brought the holiday beach experience to within steps of the city proper. Similarly, the image of Barcelona has become one not of a specifically Catalan conurbation but rather as a cosmopolitan/sensorial experience that one consumes.

Along the borderlands of Al-Andalus

Catalan society developed from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries in circumstances that would leave a profound mark upon the region. A new sense of its own geography, its development as a hub of European and Mediterranean trade, its language and collective imaginary, its cultural difference, all emerged from a lengthy and often difficult process of collective formation. It was no coincidence that during this period there also evolved the political, economic and legal frameworks within which identities were forged. But in its origins in the ninth century Catalonia was just one of several small regions of old Spain (Hispania) struggling for survival along the outlying borderlands of the weakening yet still mighty empire of Al-Andalus.

‘The Christian reconquest south of the Pyrenees’, wrote Pierre Bonnassie, ‘began with a memorable defeat.’ In early summer 778, Charlemagne responded to a call for help from the Muslim governor of Barcelona, who had rebelled against his overlord in Cordoba. But Charlemagne's offensive came to nothing. Then, while retreating from Saragossa, the rearguard of the Franks’ army was ambushed in a Pyrenean mountain pass by Basque warriors. The epic defeat, which became the stuff of Roland's legend, had some positive after-effects for those unhappy with the status quo in the region. It was no coincidence that, seven years later, Girona and a number of other Catalan towns and fortifications opened their gates to Charlemagne's warriors and became united in a common purpose. Local support for the Franks must have been widespread, because Cerdanya (Cerdagne) and Urgell declared allegiance to them in 789. After Charlemagne's main deputy in the region, Guilhem, count of Toulouse, entered Barcelona in 801, with other local magnates under the command of Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious, control of the region would never again pass to a Muslim governor. At the time, however, this prospect cannot have seemed like much of a certainty for the two thousand or so citizens of Barcelona.

The vast majority of people in the region stayed away from the coast. Most of it was deserted, apart from a few fortified positions like Barcelona, on account not only of the threat of razzias (military raids) but because of the fear of coast-hugging pirates and Viking war bands. Consequently, population was concentrated in the mountains.

Origins, Catalanism and the Olympic tradition

As elsewhere in Europe, the aristocracy had been the drivers of modern sport in Madrid. However, in Catalonia the industrial bourgeoisie were the prime movers and, together with foreign nationals such as Hans – later Joan – Gamper, founder of FC Barcelona, they were intrinsic to the shaping of the sporting scene. Unlike the Basques, who promoted pelota and the herri kirolak (rural sports including stone-lifting, log-chopping and skiff racing), Catalans looked more to modern sport and international practices than to their own traditions. Accordingly, English sporting custom was a powerful ideological influence on athletes at the beginning of the twentieth century. The same effect is also well documented in the arts, as illustrated in Dominic Keown's chapter on Contemporary Culture, where a graphic obsession with the Hellenic elegance of the human form in noucentista painting went hand in hand with a poetic fascination with tennis and its accompanying social values of refinement.

However, Catalan associacionisme – the readiness of individuals with a common interest to come together and formally organize into societies – ensured that the bourgeoisie did not have a monopoly over sporting initiatives. At the turn of the twentieth century excursionisme – a catch-all term referring to rambling, hiking and expeditions into the Catalan interior – constituted the most vibrant and widespread physical-cultural activity within the country, in part because of its classless appeal. While excursionisme may certainly have become more recognizably a sport as the twentieth century progressed, it had originated rather as a philosophy of life; as a cultural and scientific – as well as physical – re-engagement with the Catalan landscape, geology, flora and fauna, born out of Renaixença desires to rediscover Catalan identity following the centuries of so-called decadence.

Excursionisme in the 1920s and 1930s, framed by the military dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera and later by the Second Republic, became infused with the values of hygiene, regenerationism, nationalism and citizenship, and offered an alternative to mass-sporting spectacles such as football. The Centre Excursionista de Catalunya, however, had not admitted women to their ranks until the founding of a mountain sports section and the first female competition was held in 1911.

Origins and comparison

Catalan is a neo-Latin, or Romance, language alongside a number of European ‘national’ languages (Portuguese, Spanish, French – the so-called western group – and Italian and Romanian – the eastern group) and several other languages that have an official status at sub-state level, or are spoken only in part of a state (Galician, Occitan, Sardinian, Ladin, Rheto-Romance, Friulian, etc.) Several of these languages became the languages of worldwide empires but within Europe itself, their borders coincide, broadly speaking, with the limits of the Roman Empire. This is especially clear in western Europe, the Romance–Germanic language divide being more or less close to the line running down the borders between French- and Dutch-speaking Belgium; between France and Germany, and between French- and German-speaking Switzerland.

Badia i Margarit (2004) reminds us that Catalan and the other Romance languages are a living heritage of the active romanization that lasted for centuries across the Empire (seven centuries, in the case of Catalan, in the north-eastern corner of Hispania, the cradle of what was to be become Catalonia). However, as Roger Wright (1999) underlines, it is impossible to point to a specific date when these languages emerged as clearly separate from the Vulgar Latin spoken throughout the lands that had been part of the Roman Empire before its collapse in the fifth century. According to Moran and Rabella (2004), all the so-called Romance languages emerged in the seventh or eighth centuries, but were not used in documents until much later, as Latin continued to be the only written and taught language (with increasing traces of the new spoken languages over time).

Badia i Margarit considers the language spoken was fairly clearly differentiated by territory at the time of the Saracen invasions in the early eighth century, though nowhere were the requirements yet met to be able to regard them as minimally organized languages, supported by independent linguistic structures. These were to appear in the ninth and tenth centuries, at least in the case of Catalan, and the first attempts to write it can be traced to the eleventh century. Of special significance in this context in the promotion of the vernacular is the Third Council of Tours (813), just before the death of Charlemagne.

This chapter examines the cultural status of ritual song and dance in the Roman Late Republican and Augustan periods. By applying the modern theoretical work of Paul Connerton on the social reproduction of memory, the chapter explores several strategies through which two of the most iconic religious associations in Rome – the Salian priesthood and the Arval Brethren – stored and transmitted their cultural traditions. The hymns of these collegia, as well as their performances, constitute unique artifacts for understanding the interconnected processes of writing and embodiment – what Connerton defines as “inscription” and “incorporation”– in the production of ancient musical memories.

This chapter analyzes Livy’s narrative of the events of 207 BCE, when Roman officials addressed a pressing religious and military crisis by commissioning an innovative musical event – a Greek-style maiden procession with a hymn composed by Rome’s first known poet, Livius Andronicus. Livy’s account asks us to confront the question of how Roman musical and ritual traditions were created and remembered, by inviting the reader to witness a tradition in the very process of being invented. On the one hand, great emphasis is placed on how the hymn’s ritual actors created a collective memory of its success and incorporated it into the religious traditions of Rome. On the other, Livy refuses to record the hymn himself on the basis of its primitive aesthetics, with the paradoxical result that a significant document in the history of Roman music is simultaneously remembered and forgotten. Self-consciously aware of ritual song and narrative history as differently constituted repositories of collective memory, I propose, Livy draws attention to the processes by which his account of Rome’s early song culture shapes his reader’s musical memory.

This chapter explores the confluence of music and memory in classical Athens by turning to figures of Sirens that frequently decorated sculpted funerary monuments. Perched above such monuments, as if on their roofs, Sirens are shown either playing musical instruments or in the throes of a lament, accompanied by birds, vessels, or other mourners. Although they occupy a different space than the figures of the deceased and their family carved below, Sirens often adopt similar postures and gestures, suggesting continuities between the body of the deceased and the body of the mourner on a kinesthetic level. Through an analysis of select examples of Siren monuments as well as a passage from Euripides’ Helen, I argue that these mythological creatures generate an imperative for the beholder to respond not simply through an imaginative act of empathy, but as a mourner fully invested in the tragedy at hand, one who remembers the dead. Sirens on funerary monuments suggest the synesthetic dimensions of sculpture, its ability to open up sensorial experiences that extend beyond sight and touch, and its powerful effects on our own capacity to remember.

This chapter explores two strategies for preserving the memory of live music in early Ptolemaic Egypt by reading Posidippus’ epigram (37 AB) on Arion’s lyre next to Hedylus’ epigram (4 GP) on an automated rhyton in the shape of the Egyptian god Bes. While Arion’s lyre captures the essence of a classic but long-dead virtuoso in amber, the rhyton performs its song on endless repeat. I suggest that the automated rhyton, as interpreted by Hedylus, represents an attempt to create an eternal first performance of a type of song that could represent the Graeco-Egyptian Ptolemaic empire: a hymn to the Nile.