Soundless music of the Adalid Collection or the invisibility of domestic music-making of male elite society during the Restoration period

Abstract

During the period of European Restoration (ca. 1815-1848), the Adalids and the Torres, two related upper-bourgeois merchant families resident in the city of Corunna, used a major part of the family fortune to achieve the cultural level consistent with their social status, which included music as a principal element. Two great score collections provide the documentary evidence for this cultural investment together with pictures, letters, notary records, accounting books, bills, etc. We start with a discussion of whether it is possible to consider a score collection such as the Adalid Collection to be music, a question that arises due to the scarcity of visible marks denoting the existence of music-making in the scores. Consequently, the first aim of the present text is to demonstrate that in this kind of collection the performance marks in the scores are far from being the determining criteria of whether the pieces were actually performed. In addition, we will show that a collection with the characteristics of the one that is the object of our study, gives the question “what is music?” a different interpretation, closer to the social, cultural and economic representation of music, in this case, of a wealthy and powerful group of men of Restoration period Spain.