Imagine you are asked in an academic meeting to name three or four prominent Spanish composers in the field of the string quartet. How many would you be able to cite? You might be tempted to answer that the quartet was in fact hardly cultivated in Spain, or you might perhaps wonder whether Boccherini could be taken to be a ‘Spanish’ composer. These potential responses to this fictional situation encapsulate well two of the historiographical preconceptions that have governed our view of this area, the first of which is, to put it in Friedhelm Krummacher's words, that Spanish composers ‘adopted a particularly abstinent attitude’ towards the genre (‘sich . . . besonders abstinent zum Streichquartett verhielten’; Geschichte des Streichquartetts, volume 2 (Laaber: Laaber, 2005), 400). It is equally relevant that Krummacher deals with the quartet in Spain within the chapter ‘Verdi und das italienische Quartett’, taking for granted that whatever little has to be said about the subject, it would necessarily relate to the nineteenth century. This supposed cultural rejection of the genre seems particularly strange to contemplate from the perspective of the end of the eighteenth century. How could it be explained that while the genre flourished all over Europe, with literally hundreds of new quartets being produced, Spain remained apart from this process? The second relevant factor is that for decades composers such as Luigi Boccherini or Gaetano Brunetti have not been regarded by Spanish scholars as forming part of Spanish music history. It was an unavoidable consequence once Spanish musicology assumed that it had to devote itself to the study of ‘its’ music, in other words the music composed by those born in the country. This narrow approach implied that Italian-born composers would be only of interest to other research traditions.

With such preconceptions floating in the air, the University of Granada organized an international conference under the direction of Christiane Heine with the goal of thoroughly examining them. In the words of Roberto Illiano, member of the organizing committee, the conference aimed at ‘filling a gap in the international scenario of the string quartet’. This was probably the first meeting exclusively devoted to the genre in Spain that covered the period from its beginning at the end of the eighteenth century to the present. This was part of the research project ‘Música de cámara instrumental y vocal en España en los siglos XIX y XX: recuperación, recepción, análisis crítico y estudio comparativo del género en el contexto europeo’ (Instrumental and Vocal Chamber Music in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Spain: Recuperation, Reception and Analysis. A Comparative Study in the European Context). The purpose of the project has been to share all the ongoing work within this field and to encourage research into its history and evolution, with the final goal being to ‘contribute to the revision of national and international historiography’. The conference attracted the good number of nineteen scholars (five keynote speakers and fourteen free papers) from Canada, England, France, Spain and the USA. It was obvious that the organizers wanted to do more than bring together the latest research on the quartet, which included the announcement of quite a few newly found works. They also wished to emphasize the performance side of the genre. Thus the closing talk was delivered by the composer Benet Casablancas, recently distinguished with the award of the prestigious National Music Prize, and author himself of four works for string quartet (two of them premiered by the Arditti Quartet). For his part, John Stokes (cellist of the Bretón Quartet) explained the practical problems he had to face when preparing the edition of Conrado del Campo's Quartet No. 8 of 1913, which, incredibly, was premiered only last year at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid. Moreover, two ensembles got involved in the meeting by means of two very interesting concerts: the Leonor Quartet performed works by Casablancas and by an unidentified nineteenth-century composer (a work tentatively attributed to Martín Sánchez Allú), and the Bretón Quartet performed works by Conrado del Campo and Jesús Guridi.

Four sessions arranged in chronological order made up the conference. Regarded as a whole, it became clear that the end of the eighteenth century and the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries were the two peaks in the evolution of the string quartet in Spain. While the third and fourth sessions were devoted to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the first two sessions focused on the long eighteenth century, which took the complete first day of the conference, with six talks.

Keynote speaker Christian Speck (Universität Koblenz-Landau) inaugurated the first session with his lecture ‘Boccherini's String Quartets’. He presented an overview of the composer's output, analysing some of his most particular traits and explaining how and when changes took place. Boccherini's earliest quartets, Op. 2 (1761), already show some key features: interchangeability of melodic and accompanimental roles and variety of metres used, for instance. His short stay in Paris before establishing himself in Madrid brought about some changes related to formal design and texture. For instance, Opp. 8 and 9 feature slow movements placed in first position, rondos as final movements, a more balanced style of writing between the two violins and a more proactive cello part. Although Boccherini composed his music primarily for the Infante Don Luis, he clearly kept an eye on the market, and some composing decisions may have been made for financial rather than aesthetic reasons. That, argued Speck, was the case with the two-movement quartettini that Boccherini wrote in the 1770s, clearly departing from the Haydnesque four-movement model. The works composed for the Prussian king in the late 1780s and early 1790s showed a more private, reserved style of writing. Perhaps the main difference with Boccherini's quartet style (in fact, with his instrumental music in general) is the much more varied formal strategies that one finds compared to those of his Viennese colleagues, not only in relation to the number of movements, but also in the formal layout of the individual movements themselves.

The next two presentations also focused on composing strategies applied to late eighteenth-century quartets. The paper ‘Luigi Boccherini Composing His “Opus Ultimum” under the Patronage of Spain: Inventiveness, Vivacity and Sensibility in the String Quartets op. 64, G 248–249 (1804)’, given by Walter Kreyszig (University of Saskatchewan / Universität Wien), analysed Boccherini's very final quartets. Some of the composer's most characteristic features, such as formal freedom and textural sensitivity, found the maximum expression in this unfinished series. For his part, Jorge Fonseca (Universidad de La Rioja) turned his attention to ‘Estrategias compositivas en los cuartetos de cuerda de Manuel Canales’ (Compositional Strategies in Manuel Canales’ String Quartets). In particular, Fonseca carried out a comparative analysis between Canales’ two series of quartets (published in 1774 and c1782), both milestones in the early establishment of the genre in Madrid. The different circumstances under which these two series were produced in terms of patronage, musical functions and intended market were reflected in the music itself, as this paper convincingly showed.

The papers by José Carlos Gosálvez (Biblioteca Nacional de España) and Jon Bagüés (ERESBIL-Archivo Vasco de la Música) approached the genre from a documentary perspective, as both scholars are accomplished music librarians. The former described the rich collection of printed and manuscript sources preserved at the Real Conservatorio Superior in Madrid and the Biblioteca Nacional, exploring their origins and how they had been compiled. The latter described the ‘Garat’ project, which is devoted to cataloguing and disseminating quartets by Basque composers from the 1820s up to the present.

The second session opened up with my address ‘Modelos compositivos para los primeros cuartetos españoles’ (Compositional Models for the Earliest Spanish Quartets; Miguel Ángel Marín (Universidad de La Rioja)). I first presented an overview of quartets and their composers in late eighteenth-century Spain, showing a fuller picture than what we had so far believed. It can now hardly be argued that Spain remained outside the general rise of the genre in all Europe during this time. The main focus was on Brunetti and his large output of more than fifty quartets. This Italian-born composer settled in the Spanish court and developed an original language, partially based on a personal combination of elements from both Haydn and Boccherini, then certainly the main models for quartet composers all over Europe. This session expanded the chronology up to Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga (died 1826), whose three quartets represent an outstanding case in music historiography: very few works can have attracted such an amount of attention while we know so little about the composer and his musical background. Tim S. Pack (University of Oregon) offered an analytical approach in ‘The String Quartets of Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga: Innovations in Form’. Pack looked into Arriaga's modifications of classical forms from two different angles: the composer's use of harmonic language and contrapuntal textures, and the incorporation of Spanish dances. The addition of slow introductions, modified recapitulations, the use of Neapolitan chords and the fusion of contrapuntal texture and Spanish dance idioms were revealed to be key features.

The other two sessions were preceded by lectures by Christiane Heine (Universidad de Granada), who presented an overview of the main composers working in Spain during the nineteenth century from Arriaga to Conrado del Campo, and by Germán Gan Quesada (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), who considered aesthetic perspectives on the string quartet from the 1960s until the present. Six papers completed these two sessions, again approaching the genre from a variety of angles. Some of them were case studies: Stéphan Etcharry (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne) on the Quatuor à cordes sur des thèmes populaires basques (1905) by José María Usandizaga, Florence Doé de Maindreville (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne) on Joaquín Turina's Quartet Op. 4 (1910), Diana Díaz González (Universidad de Oviedo) on the unpublished quartet by the little-known composer Miguel Asensi Martín (1879–1945) and Gabrielle Kaufman (University of Birmingham) on the composing activities of cellist Gaspar Cassadó (1897–1966). The other two papers tackled the genre from the point of view of its reception history: the influence of Debussy and Franck in early twentieth-century Madrid (Beatriz Hernández Polo, Universidad de Salamanca) and the reception of avant-garde Galician composers of the last few decades (Carlos Villar Taboada, Universidad de Valladolid).

It is planned to publish (through Peter Lang of Bern) a selection of the papers presented at the conference. This starts to fill a historiographical gap which will nevertheless need much further attention in the future.