ABSTRACT
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a Spanish theorist, the Jesuit Padre Antonio Eximeno, in his book on the laws of music, expressed the idea that “every country ought to base its art-music on its own folk-song.” For he had begun collecting and sorting out materials for his monumental survey of the traditional sources of Spanish music. The service Felipe Pedrell rendered his country with the Cancionero is in many ways comparable to that Bela Bartok had done with regard to Hungarian folk-music. Both Hungarian gipsy-music and the “Andalusian gipsy” of Flamenco guitar-music and cante jondo were highly glamorous stuff that easily caught the fancy of audiences and composers at home and abroad, and which generally is held to represent the very essence of these two countries’ national music. Besides his studies in folklore, Pedrell had become more and more involved in antiquarian musical research.
