Eduardo Ranch y el aniversario de Cabanilles en 1962: una celebración desde el margen

Abstract

This article describes the celebration in 1962 of the 250th anniversary of the death of the composer and organist Joan Cabanilles, in
Valencia, where he died, and in his native Algemesí. Some atypical circumstances concurred in the commemoration: it arised from a private initiative, led by the music critic and bibliophile Eduardo Ranch from the pages of the magazine Valencia Atracción, and it
combined the exaltation of the memory of a musician of the past with the claim of a concert hall for the city of Val encia. The journalistic
campaign was joined by the writer Joan Fuster, who described Cabanilles as the most famous of the sons of the Ribera district and
managed to make the celebration acquire a district affirmation bias. Due to the insistence of Ranch an d his collaborators, almost all the
relevant personalities and musical instances of the time joined the anniversary. Apart from the results of the commemoration, the
preparatory process, marked by the fears and silences typical of the dictatorship, provides a rich image of the intrincacies of the classical
music ecosystem in the Valencia of the time.