Jeffery: España de la guerra as a printed book clothbound

Brian Jeffery’s book España de la guerra describes for the first time the political songs in Spanish that were sung in Spain against King Joseph Bonaparte during the war known in the UK as the Peninsular War or in Spain as the Guerra de la Independencia. It is unexplored territory because these songs have never been written about in full before. This book tells their story.

The principal composer of these songs was Fernando Sor, with six songs to his credit.

TECLA 3001 (paperbound), TECLA 3002 (clothbound).

Readers write:

“I couldn’t put it down” (a musicologist in the USA)

“su maravilloso libro . . . un libro fundamental e imprescindible
para el estudio de la música española de la época de la Guerra de la
Independencia” (Tomás Garrido, a composer and musicologist in Spain)

“Your wonderful book” (a professor of musicology in Spain)

The songs as propaganda

The book will interest you if you are interested in Spanish music history, or the Peninsular War or the so-called Guerra de la Independencia, or Fernando Sor, or just the workings of propaganda.

There is a video of Brian Jeffery speaking about the book at tecla.com. The book has 417 pages and includes a catalogue of about 160 songs.

These songs have never been described before, because most of their surviving musical scores are now outside Spain, in London, Lisbon, and elsewhere. You will not (currently) find these songs in Wikipedia. I find this exciting.

This book takes a view of the politics of the time which is wholly different from the view normally current today. It bases itself solely on documents of the time, not on later victors’ rewriting of history as today’s view largely is.

This book considers that these political songs of the time were one of the most powerful aspects of the propaganda of the time because in these songs, the recipients of the propaganda not merely heard the message but participated in it by actually themselves singing the message of the propaganda.

The principal composer of these songs of the war was Fernando Sor, who has six known songs of this kind to his credit, all of them discussed in this book.

You can consider buying also the pdf version to serve as index to enable you to find readily any of the songs.