The Field Notebook of Palmira Jaquetti (1895-1963) about the Mission M12 (Barcelona, 1945) in the Fondo de Música Tradicional IMF-CSIC: Introduction and Edition

Abstract

In 2020 we celebrate the 125th anniversary of Palmira Jaquetti (1895-1963), a composer, poet and folklorist whose name does not appear in the main music dictionaries. She carried out an important task of collecting ca. 10.000 Catalan folksongs for the project “Obra del Cançoner Popular de Catalunya” (1922-1936) —most of them unpublished— and collaborated with the Instituto Español de Musicología in the Misión M12 (1945) to collect songs of oral tradition in seven charity nursing homes in Barcelona. The transcriptions of the ca. 450 songs collected in the Misión M12 and the informants’ cards of the people who sang them can be consulted in the website of the Fondo de Música Tradicional IMF-CSIC (https://musicatradicional.eu/source/130), but the field notebook where Jaquetti annotated the vicissitudes of the mission remained unpublished. This notebook, transcribed here, is particularly valuable, owing to its ethnomusicological and social interest —describing aspects of post Spanish Civil War Barcelona— and, from the literary point of view, as an example of clear, straightforward, elegant, and expressive prose of an extraordinary woman.