Exile and Memory in Post-Franco Spain: Julián Orbón's Libro de cantares (1987)

In the song cycle Libro de cantares (1987), Spanish-Cuban composer Julián Orbón (1925–91) entered into a dialogue with the work of two other men who, like him, were displaced under the Franco regime: he re-used Asturian folk songs compiled by Eduardo Martínez Torner in 1920; and he followed compositional models deployed by Manuel de Falla in Siete canciones populares españolas (1914). In this article I argue how, by doing so, Orbón engaged in individual and collective memory-building processes that matched to an extent but also diverged from similar processes that were then underway in Spain in the 1980s (following the end of the Franco regime in 1975) and, particularly, in Orbón's natal region of Asturias. I also argue that Orbón's understandings of memory and modernity are unique within the context of displaced twentieth-century Spanish composers, and as such afford us opportunities to reconsider these crucial categories.