Brian Jeffery – España de la guerra, as a digital download (pdf)

The book describes for the first time the political songs 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, but it has plenty to say about other (though related) things, especially what we call fake news. Read it and enjoy, it has ideas which aren’t those of the conventional view of this period.

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 find these songs in Wikipedia. I find this exciting.

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)

This book has a catalogue of about 160 of these songs.

It 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.

It 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.

I think that you will find the book interesting and with new information if you are interested in the Peninsular War, or the Guerra de la Independencia, or Fernando Sor, or the nature of propaganda, or indeed the whole political and propagandistic state of Spain at that time.