Baltasar Samper and folk research in Mexico. Notes on a forgotten Catalan exile

Abstract

: Baltasar Samper, composer and researcher of folk music, and native of Catalonia, arrived in Mexico in 1942, together with the pianist and companion Dolors Porta as part of the Spanish exile. His stay in Mexico, plagued with incon-veniences, allowed him to create a professional research model of folk music for the recently founded Section of Musical Research of the National Institute of Fine Arts (inba, by its acronym in Spanish), as a result of his earlier work in Barcelona for the project l’Obra del Cançoner Popular de Catalunya . Based on his papers housed by the archives of National Center for Research, Documentation and Dissemina-tion of Music (cenidim, for its Spanish acronym) and other sources, this paper presents his experiences in Mexico, which given the circumstances proved rather frustrating. Samper has been largely ignored both in musicology at large and in the literature on the Spanish exile in Mexico.