Manuel de Falla' s Siete canciones populares españolas: The composer's personal library, folksong models and the creative process

Abstract

Manuel de Falla's personal library provides a unique resource for the study of the composer's assimilation of ideas, and his lifelong habit of annotating his reading material and scores heightens the library's usefulness to an understanding of his creative process. Falla's reliance on musical borrowings in his compositions means that a study of the printed scores in his library often gives insights into the sources employed and the development of his musical ideas. The limited extent of Falla's field work in the realm of folk music makes this source even more valuable to discussions of folk-inspired works such as the Siete canciones populares españolas. The provenance of the melodies employed by Falla in that work has been the subject of articles by Manuel Garcia Matos and Josep Crivillé i Bargalló. While indebted to their research, this study argues that in the Siete canciones populares españolas all of Falla's melodic lines and some of the accompaniments are based, to varying degrees, on the assimilation of materials taken from specific publications in his possession. Falla's exposure to and incorporation of folk music in his scores is also examined, and the Siete canciones populares españolas are situated within the creative context of Falla's Parisian milieu. Finally, similarities are drawn between Falla's use of folk sources and the process through which early music was incorporated into his neoclassical scores of the 1920s.