Most visitors to Catalonia will be familiar with the sight and sound of the sardana, the simple round dance performed to the distinctive accompaniment of the cobla throughout the country. Yet while a Catalan folk music tradition can be readily identified it is more problematic to define a Catalan school of composition even at the high point of musical activity in the first third of the twentieth century. Clearly, the disruption of the Civil War and Franco dictatorship and the resulting diaspora of many of the protagonists, notably Roberto Gerhard, Jaume Pahissa and Pau Casals, had a deleterious effect on the consolidation of any such school. This chapter will explore the increase in musical activity from the time of the Universal Exhibition in 1888 until 1936 as well as developments later in the twentieth century.

Cultural heritage and contexts for music-making are central to this study; but music and language are also inevitably intertwined. The extent to which both the flourishing of a distinctive musical culture and its subsequent disruption is inextricably linked to the history of the language has yet to be thoroughly explored but is, nonetheless, immediately evident. Once again, in this respect as in so many others, we are faced with the notion of the history of Catalonia repeating itself as the cultural situation in the early decades of the twentieth century has a precedent in a much earlier period, as is readily apparent in the chapters by Alexander Ibarz and Miquel Strubell.

From the second half of the fourteenth century, the Catalan–Aragonese court witnessed intense musical activity that coincided with a flowering of literature in the vernacular. This, too, was largely disrupted by political circumstances. When the ambitions of the first non-Catalan-speaking king, Alfons el Magnànim (1396–1458), focused on expansion in the Mediterranean and, in particular on taking Naples (which he entered in triumph in 1443), the royal court in Barcelona ceased to be the focal point for musical activity. Furthermore, with Castilian correspondingly established as the language of the court in Naples, surviving musical settings of Catalan verse dwindle and display few distinctive stylistic traits.