How America Learned to Hear Spain: Joaquín Rodrigo and the New World Imagination

Joaquín Rodrigo emerges as a central figure in a documentary exploring the influence of Valencian artists in the United States. His legacy, like those of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Joaquín Sorolla, and Rafael Guastavino, continues to resonate today in the American cultural imagination, challenging prevailing stereotypes while reflecting the image of a Spain in constant transformation.

Joaquín Rodrigo occupies a distinct place among the Valencian artists whose work entered the cultural imagination of the United States. He was not an immigrant; he never set foot on Ellis Island or sought to reinvent himself in America. Yet his music became part of the way generations of Americans imagined Spain.

This is one of the central ideas explored in a new documentary portraying the contributions of four Valencian artists to the cultural dialogue between Spain and the United States in the decades following the Spanish-American War.

Joaquin Rodrigo

Chronologically, Rodrigo is the last of these four Valencians to enter a conversation that begins with architect Rafael Guastavino’s arrival in New York, almost a decade before the war, and continues with painter Joaquín Sorolla and writer Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. Rodrigo’s impact cannot be measured by his physical presence in America, as it can in the cases of Mahler or Dvořák. His music traveled farther than he did, and once it reached America, it acquired a life of its own.

Any consideration of Rodrigo’s American experience owes a particular debt to Cecilia Rodrigo Kamhi. Her preface to the Instituto Cervantes at Harvard volume De España a Estados Unidos: el legado transatlántico de Joaquín Rodrigoprovides an intimate framework for understanding the artist and her role as daughter and privileged witness. Cecilia Rodrigo begins with the man himself: a composer blinded at the age of three who developed his own adaptation of musical braille, composed in that medium, and then dictated his completed works note by note to a copyist. Her mother, Victoria Kamhi, subsequently worked through the scores with him at the piano.

Cecilia Rodrigo makes a deceptively simple observation that is essential to understanding her father’s American story: the United States played a fundamental role in his career. Four of the five guitar concertos he composed received their premieres here.

But Rodrigo’s importance to the story I am pursuing goes beyond the professional success of any one of the four artists under consideration. The more interesting question is whether they—and, in this case, Rodrigo—helped change the image of Spain in the American imagination.

The evidence suggests they did, although not in a simple or linear way.

From picturesque Spain to a contemporary Spanish voice

American audiences certainly did not discover Spain through Joaquín Rodrigo. Long before him, there existed a powerful repertoire of images: flamenco, guitars, bullfights, Andalusia, Moorish Spain, passion, color, and exoticism. Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra had helped shape this romantic vision of Spain for American readers more than a century earlier, but he was hardly alone. Some of those images—and some of that exoticism—remained very much alive in the American reception of Rodrigo.

Indeed, Isabel Pérez Dobarro’s study of American criticism demonstrates precisely this point.

American critics repeatedly emphasized Rodrigo’s Spanishness, his blindness, the guitar, and, especially, the Concierto de Aranjuez. In doing so, they also continued to employ familiar stereotypes.

A 1955 review of the Concierto de Aranjuez spoke of its Spanish dignity with a Moorish inflection. Pérez Dobarro identifies in such language the recurring American association of Spain with exoticism and its Islamic past—an idea that had captured Washington Irving’s imagination and perhaps that of Louis Comfort Tiffany as well.

I cannot say that Rodrigo came to put an end to the romantic vision of Spain that had taken hold in the American imagination. Nor did his music simply replace the familiar images of Moorish Spain, Andalusia, the guitar, and the picturesque with something new.

What he did was something subtler. He allowed Spain to breathe with a contemporary voice, moving beyond the modernist explorations that had found in Joaquín Sorolla a new light. Rodrigo did not discard the Spain of the American imagination; he gave it another way of being heard.

In a 1958 interview with The Washington Post, the composer mentioned that he wanted to capture the spirit of Spain’s sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but not simply reproduce traditional Spanish music: he sought to modernize and intellectualize it.

That distinction is crucial.

Rodrigo offered a world audience eager to listen a Spain immersed in an internal dialogue with its past without becoming hostage to nostalgia. The sound of the guitar strings, ancient forms, regional rhythms, and echoes of earlier Spanish culture remained present, but they were articulated by a twentieth-century composer conversant with European modernism and working within the international institutions of contemporary classical music. Rodrigo’s Spain was not abandoning its past; it was finding new ways to inhabit it. It was the voice of a country changing, adapting, and redefining itself in the long aftermath of imperial grandeur.

American critics noticed the distinction surprisingly early. In the 1930s, Rodrigo’s music was already being described as combining a Levantine character with the influence of French modernism. Later critics praised his Spanish rhythms and lyricism while explicitly observing that his music escaped the obvious clichés of “tango and castanets.”

For a documentary concerned with the creative currents flowing from a Valencian well, there is another significant detail. American critics initially misidentified Rodrigo as Catalan, but soon began identifying him specifically as Valencian and recognizing a Levantine character in his music. Valencia was therefore not merely the place where Rodrigo happened to have been born. It became one of the cultural coordinates through which Americans learned to locate his Spanish identity. Something similar can be said of Guastavino, whose Valencian origins remained a defining element of his identity in the United States.

Culture arriving before diplomacy

There is also a political dimension to this story that should not be exaggerated, but should not be ignored.

Spain emerged from the Civil War and the Second World War internationally isolated. Javier Suárez-Pajares places Rodrigo’s growing international presence precisely within this context. He argues that cultural relations were already preparing the ground before diplomatic normalization took place. During the 1950s, the United States became a priority of Spanish foreign policy, while Spanish musicians and cultural institutions increasingly appeared before American audiences.

Rodrigo inevitably became part of this process.

But Suárez-Pajares introduces a distinction that is essential. Rodrigo could function as an instrument for the projection of Spanish culture and civilization abroad, but he rarely acted as an official representative of the Spanish state. During the 1940s and 1950s, he generally represented himself, often with limited resources, principally in order to promote his music. Suárez-Pajares even suggests that this independence may have made his cultural message more effective.

That distinction matters enormously.

Rodrigo’s Spain could be received independently of Franco’s Spain.

An American listener did not need to approve of the Spanish government to respond to the Concierto de Aranjuez. Music could cross a political frontier that diplomacy could not easily cross. Spain could appear not merely as an authoritarian regime emerging from diplomatic isolation, but as the source of a sophisticated and emotionally compelling contemporary culture.

Rodrigo was not alone in carrying that culture into American musical life. The network around him is itself remarkable. Andrés Segovia, Enrique Jordá, José Iturbi, Alicia de Larrocha, Victoria de los Ángeles, Narciso Yepes, and Los Romeros all participated in different ways in bringing Spanish music to American audiences. The Valencian connection is especially intriguing. Suárez-Pajares explicitly places Iturbi within the circle of Valencian musicians in which Rodrigo had formed before Iturbi went on to become a mass celebrity in the United States and Hollywood.

Iturbi also provides a revealing counterpoint to Rodrigo. His journey to America was physical and his presence there concrete: he performed, conducted, recorded, and ultimately entered American popular culture. Rodrigo’s journey was different. He remained rooted in Spain while his music crossed the Atlantic and acquired an American presence of its own. Two Valencian musicians thus entered the American imagination by very different routes—one by going to America, the other, to a remarkable extent, by sending his music in his place.

This begins to look less like the isolated success of one composer and more like a cultural constellation.

And then Miles Davis heard Aranjuez

The decisive transformation, however, occurred outside the classical concert hall.

The American premiere of the Concierto de Aranjuez took place in Cleveland in 1959, nineteen years after its premiere in Barcelona. But the event that propelled Rodrigo into a completely different cultural sphere came almost immediately afterward: Miles Davis and Gil Evans incorporated the Adagio into Sketches of Spain.

This is where the story becomes extraordinary.

A composition born in Valencia, rooted partly in the historical imagination of Spain and written before the United States entered the Second World War, entered one of the great creative laboratories of modern American music.

And it changed there.

Pérez Dobarro describes Sketches of Spain as the recording that catapulted Rodrigo’s fame far beyond classical music. After its success, the Adagio migrated into television advertising, film and popular culture, while performances of Rodrigo multiplied among classical musicians.

Antoni Pizà goes further. His essay in the Harvard volume treats Sketches of Spain as something deliberately difficult to classify: neither entirely jazz nor classical, neither simply Spanish nor non-Spanish, neither traditional nor modern.

Sketches of Spain

That ambiguity may be precisely where Rodrigo’s greatest importance to the American image of Spain resides.

Spain was no longer merely being displayed to America.

America was actively participating in modeling that new image of Spain.

Miles Davis and Gil Evans took Rodrigo’s musical language into another cultural vocabulary. Later came the Modern Jazz Quartet, Jim Hall, Laurindo Almeida, Herb Alpert and many others. By the late 1970s, an American critic could actually speak of the “Americanization” of the Concierto de Aranjuez.

This was no longer cultural export. It was cultural exchange.

And Rodrigo himself initially resisted that transformation. According to Pizà’s account, Rodrigo first heard Sketches of Spain after the blind Catalan jazz pianist Tete Montoliu brought the record to him. Rodrigo was angry that his music had been used without authorization and initially disliked the arrangement. In time, however, he accepted the jazz versions, recognizing that rather than displacing the original concerto they had helped disseminate it.

That episode seems almost emblematic of the entire transatlantic process: an artist creates something profoundly associated with Spain; America receives and transforms it; the creator initially resists; and eventually the transformed work becomes one of the principal vehicles through which the original travels around the world.

From concert hall to American consciousness

By then Rodrigo’s music had escaped every boundary originally available to it.

Cecilia Rodrigo recalls hearing of her father’s music not only in concert halls but in Hollywood films, television programs, sporting events, fashion shows, radio broadcasts and even as music accompanying exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. American universities increasingly taught and researched his music.

His relationship with America also generated new compositions. The American Wind Symphony Orchestra commissioned a work; the Concierto Andaluz was created for Los Romeros and premiered in San Antonio; the Concierto Madrigal received its world premiere before an audience of 20,000 at the Hollywood Bowl; and Rodrigo’s visit to NASA in Houston eventually inspired A la busca del más allá, composed for the American bicentennial and dedicated to NASA.

This reciprocal relationship is important. Rodrigo was not simply sending Spanish music westward across the Atlantic. America was sending experiences back into his imagination.

By the 1980s another change had occurred. Pérez Dobarro observes that Rodrigo’s music increasingly ceased to be confined to specifically “Spanish” programs. It began appearing alongside Schubert, Stravinsky, Walton and other composers as repertoire in its own right.

Perhaps that is the ultimate measure of cultural acceptance.

Rodrigo no longer needed to represent Spain every time his music was performed.

He had become Rodrigo.

A Valencian voice in an American story

This is why I believe Joaquín Rodrigo belongs in a film about Valencian creative forces in the United States, and in the way in which these forces redefined the ongoing dialogue.

His story is not simply one of Spanish cultural influence abroad. It reveals the mechanism through which cultural identities travel and survive, morph and fusion.

Rodrigo carried with him a recognizable historical Spain: its guitar, its musical memory, its regional traditions, its Moorish brush strokes, its seventeenth-century masters. American critics often reduced those elements to stereotypes. But American musicians did something more interesting with them.

They performed them, recorded them, rearranged them and eventually absorbed them.

The result was neither the Spain Rodrigo inherited nor quite the Spain American audiences had previously imagined.

It was something transatlantic.

The irony is that one of the most recognizably “Spanish” musical statements in twentieth-century American consciousness became inseparable from Miles Davis. Aranjuez could inhabit Carnegie Hall and the jazz club. Rodrigo could coexist with Segovia and Gil Evans. Spanish tradition could enter American modernity without ceasing to be Spanish.

And perhaps that is the larger story connecting the Valencian figures in this documentary. Their importance may lie not simply in what they brought from Valencia to the United States, but in what happened to their ideas once they arrived here.

They altered America, certainly. But America also altered the meaning of what they had created.

Cecilia Rodrigo ends her account of her father with two words that she believes describe him both as musician and human being: “Nobleza española.”

There is something fitting about ending there. Rodrigo carried an unmistakable consciousness of Spain throughout his life. Yet the American history of his music demonstrates that cultural identity is not diminished when it crosses borders. Sometimes it becomes larger.

In Rodrigo’s case, a musical imagination born in Valencia became one of the sounds through which America learned to hear Spain.