ABSTRACT
It was not only the music of the exiles that travelled back to Spain: some of the exiles established a presence in Francoist Spain mainly through their books and other writings on music from as early as the mid-1940s onwards. Although not always received enthusiastically, such writings were not normally overlooked or criticized for political reasons either. Their reception, however, had a different political angle to it, one that had to do with the history of Spanish music, its apparent backwardness with respect to other arts and humanities, and the potential solutions to this perceived problem. Indeed, in the exiles who wrote about music, some Spanish critics and historians saw a new type of intellectual musician that, in their view, had never existed previously in Spain – or had existed only in a very limited way.
