Pedagogy and politics: music and the arts in the Valencian academy (1690–1705)

The last decades of the reign of the Spanish king Charles II saw the flowering of a movement of renewal in the field of sciences and arts, which was especially strong in towns such as Madrid, Seville and Valencia. In Valencia a strong academic movement attempted to place the cultivation of all the arts at the service of politics, thus fostering the consolidation of a local ruling class especially well formed in everything related to ceremony and etiquette. Politics, poetry, mathematics, music and dance were cultivated above all in the Academia de Valencia, whose members actively participated in theatricalized public festivities in which the display of artistic cultivation and of the skills acquired in ordinary sessions was presented in parallel with the display of power. These men also contributed directly to the music and choreography of the fiestas with a repertory ranging from the most traditional polychoral pieces to the Italianate recitado and to instrumental music of different kinds. In this, they to some extent contradicted their own aesthetics, which ranked music and dance lower in comparison with the other arts. The study of the documents relating to these activities proves to be of the greatest interest, allowing as it does a better perception of the cultivation of music in the domestic and secular sphere in Baroque Valencia. The War of Spanish Succession caused the academy to disappear, thus truncating a well-defined space for the integration of music within the means of social discourse of the educated upper class.