Many concrete documents written by Clavé and published during his lifetime allow us to understand how he employed a rhetoric similar to the one used by the biographers mentioned earlier in this chapter. The first three issues of El Metrónomo, a journal created in 1863 and devoted to the diffusion of the choral activities, offer the reader a “Historia de las Sociedades Corales en España,” written by the composer almost twenty years after their creation. But more than a history in itself, the text is given as a justification of the utility of Clavé’s project for the nation while at the same time promoting a discourse of sacrifice and devotion through which he presented himself as a Christological figure:

Érase un día triste para mi. Inutilizado para el trabajo en que librara mi sustento, hube de abandonar forzosamente los talleres, y ante la negra perspectiva de un porvenir incierto, me propuse consagrar mi vida entera a conseguir en lo posible el mejoramiento de la aflictiva condición moral y material en que yacía la desvalida clase en cuyo seno acababan de transcurrir los más floridos días de mi adolescencia … ¡Ojalá que el éxito corresponda a las esperanzas y me sea permitido llevar a mi pobre tumba la dulce satisfacción de haber prestado algún servicio a la santa causa del progreso de los pueblos! (“Fundación” January 11, 1863: 2).

Entonces me fijé en aquellos cantos, tan en boga entre las gentes del pueblo, e intenté lo que creyóse un imposible … Su reforma. (“Historia” January 25, 1863: 2)

In this text, the vocabulary and the tone —particularly the epithet adjectives as well as the points of suspension— create a discourse based on affectivity and religious connotations, two aspects that are omnipresent in Clavé’s and his biographers’ writings, and are the basis for the public presentation of his philanthropic attitude –qualified by Clavé himself as “santa” and called a “progress” for the people.

The self-qualification of both social progress and the divine character of his own work lays the foundations for the discourse devising an ideal situation for the working class. In this idealized setting, the main nineteenth century social conflicts –be they economic, familial or collegial– cease to exist. The discourse claiming social emancipation through confrontation is superseded, in Clavé’s plan, by a utopian pacific stage, in which the worker participating in the choral institutions would become a tropological model for the rest of society while Clavé himself would remain as the redeemer of the masses.

This is particularly important given the kind of philanthropic project that underlies this household word that is Clavé: a project entailing the reorganization of industrial workers not through political activism or through any kind of syndication, but through an artistic expression that takes place in the localized cosmography of the stage under the direction of a conductor, Clavé himself. This is the meaning that history has given to Clavé’s involvement with industrial workers in a historical moment in which urban turmoil and uprising was the norm. The processes of modernization of the new capitalist liberal society, the exigencies of the patrons and the lack of stable employment for the working class created a discomfort in the cities (Olaya Morales 166). The first social protests started in 1821 and the strikes began to appear mid-century, like the ones in Catalonia in March 1853 and July 1855, right when the Cors started to be successful.

According to Clavé’s project, the objective of workers’ choral associations in nineteenth century Spain was to prioritize musical practice as a means to achieve social goals, such as basic education for its members, the diffusion of a social pedagogy and the creation of a workers’ presence in cultural spheres. The labor conditions for workers in nineteenth century Catalonia were unsurprisingly hard. They worked between twelve and sixteen hours per day and earned just enough to feed themselves and their family. For this reason, between 1837 and 1847, life expectancy was around 23.55 years (Carbonell i Guberna, Josep Anselm Clavé 25). This unstable and precarious labor situation gave birth, in the middle of the century, to social organizations such as cooperative movements and workers associations. The objective of those organizations was to improve the conditions of life for the proletariat. The discontent of the working class coincided with the arrival of socialist ideas from France (Proudhon’s, Fourier’s and Cabet’s), and in 1835 the first important social uprising of the century took place: “The Revolt of the Miserables,” which constituted the first reactions to stem from worker dissatisfaction and was the beginning of a large number of revolts. Those revolts and the existence of the first associations of workers can be considered the visible signs of how the working class was growing and also of how it wanted to get organized. For example, the first “Junta Central de Directores de la Clase Obrera” was created in Barcelona in January 1855 to resolve the workers’ demands, which were right of association, fair and secure earnings, and a maximum of ten working hours per day. The social climate was tense due to the industrialists’ exploitation of the workers and to the mechanization of the workshops (Abello Güell 13-15).

The choral associations for the workers in Catalonia were created in this unique social context. Although singing was a well-known social activity among men at work (Ayats 27), Clavé’s choral institutions were specifically designed for the Catalan industrial worker, the keystone of the new industrial society. From their inception, the legal establishment of the choral institutions provided the workers, from their inception, with a concrete space in which they could gather to learn to sing and to read ––all that within a federative structure, with official and controlled statutes. Even if it is true that during the nineteenth century an important number of associations for the workers were created, they had to live ––or rather, to precariously survive–– between 1840 and 1868 because the government undertook all kinds of repressions and prohibitions against them. In this context, and taking into account the workers’ demands ––“association or death” was a recurrent slogan (Termes, Històries 44)–– the choral associations could be transformed or used as a gathering space and could ascribe socio-political implications to the activity of singing.

Clavé’s musical project is usually seen ––both by his critics and by himself–– as undertaking social class reform, as we have seen in chapter One. However, the idea of reforming the industrial class implied that this particular class did not fit into the humanistic society that Catalan intellectuals and philanthropists were trying to build. Their project was based on cultural and social criteria that were closer to bourgeois norms than to the working class social movements (Carbonell i Guberna 41). The Ancien Régime society founded its stability on a rigid patriarchal system linked to agriculture. The rise of the industrial revolution and the migration of impoverished workers from agricultural exploitation to urban milieus implied a dramatic change both socially and economically and were vessels for new illnesses, a growing lack of hygiene, a new kind of urban poverty, and other plagues (Termes, Històries 45). Therefore, the reformist aspect of choral music for the workers can be interpreted as a disciplinary aim intended to train the participants to be part of modern society as model citizens, as tropological models that could become a referent for the rest of society and, above all, that could show the authorities how music could modify habits that were often deemed morally reprehensible. Thinking about the choral activities for the workers and about Clavé’s project in Foucauldian terms of control and discipline illuminates an aspect that has been set aside from the beginning regarding how music can have a direct impact on the organization and maintenance of the social order. By participating in the choruses, Clavé’s workers would be located on stage and presented to the audience as orderly, docile and useful citizens who would participate in the achievement of the social project of a modern state.

Josep Anselm Clavé affected a refinement of the workers’ daily life by making them participate in the choruses. The use of a specific artistic genre like the chorus, the performance on stage, and finally the establishment of an educational discipline by learning poetic texts both in Catalan and in Spanish were three cornerstones of the socio-cultural reform of the industrial worker in nineteenth century Catalonia. In Clavé’s perspective, those three elements gave the workers access to a culture different from their own, and offered them new visibility in the artistic panorama of that time. I argue, however, that this was a visibility controlled and suitable for the social order at least as much as for the workers themselves. Clavé’s project consisted in giving the public a concrete product that at that time was completely new and previously unseen in Spain: the representation, on stage, of a marginal social class, obedient to an order and to a time and tempo established by music. The performance showcased not only the educational task undertaken by the composer, that is, his capacity to have the workers committed to study for the rehearsals and perform in front of an audience, but also his capacity to discipline a social class —and in that sense, the conductor would also become a public tamer. The stage was the space where the composer projected the theatrical light onto the group of workers before the eyes of the public. This light projected onto the workers was a way to successfully perform a methodology: the ability to artistically rearrange a group whose growing presence in the cities was pushing, at this particular time in history, a radical reorganization of social spaces.

Furthermore, we have to take into consideration that in addition to giving the workers an educational structure, the choruses were a space in which their conduct had to follow shared laws of coexistence and of obedience to the group. The “Estatutos,” or statutes, in particular, constituted the legal founding document for the control of the members’ conduct. Jaume Carbonnell i Guberna clarifies the usual interpretation of the choral societies’ structure. He affirms “no és pas veritat, doncs, que tothom qui volia hi podia cantar” (“it is not true, thus, that everyone who wanted to could sing in them”) and explains that participation in the chorus was regulated and that every member had to comport himself according to a certain behavior regarding the functioning of the group if he wanted to participate in the activities (Carbonnel i Guberna, La societat coral Euterpe 50). There was, thus, a rigorously controlled system of inclusion and exclusion functioning in that same organization. Articles 7, 11, 12 and 13 of the 1850 manuscript “Estatuto de la Sociedad Coral” contained in Clavé’s personal archive specifies that if a member missed more than two rehearsals or if “por inercia o mala voluntad” did not carry out his role during a performance, he would be excluded from the Society and all his rights would be revoked. The chorus member also had to guarantee his exclusive participation in the society in which he was inscribed. There was, thus, no mobility inside the organization. Likewise, the statutes stated very clearly that it was not an association free of rules and obligations that would have accepted any worker, undermining the thesis argued by some biographers already mentioned here like Caballé y Clos or Guansé, put forth as a means to construct Clavé’s aura as a redeemer of the masses. At the same time, the production and performance of the scores and poetic texts were closely regulated:

7. El socio que a la hora señalada para una función no se halle disponible para la misma y deba ser relevado por suplente alguno deberá hacer constar una imposibilidad grave, bajo pena de exclusión de la sociedad a la segunda falta de esta especie.
8. No se podrá pertenecer a sociedad alguna de canto, distinta o análoga a la presente, sin dejar de ser separado de esta el que infringiese esta prohibición.
9. Será expulsado de la Sociedad el que por inercia o mala voluntad comprometa el éxito de una función desempeñando mal su parte, o haciendo por malograr la de cualquiera de los demás socios.
10. Asimismo dejará de pertenecer a ella perdiendo sus derechos de reclamación el que vendiese, enseñase, ejecutase o esparciese, fuera de la sociedad cuaquiera de las piezas reservadas para la misma y particularmente las de propiedad del director. (MS 1-2) ⁽¹⁾

One might say that statutes like these are, in the end, mere rules, proper to any kind of musical organization. The adversarial context in which this occurred asks, however, for a specific analysis. The fact that industrial workers were on stage and singing in a socio-political context that was in a constant process of negotiation and construction between the workers’ movement and the authorities made the structure of choral activities all the more relevant. Surely, it permitted the workers to gain access to a musical education but it also implied being lined up on stage and minutely commanded by a conductor. It meant the acceptance of a particular set of rules of behaviors, a redefinition of the terms of internal solidarity and the contract of exchange that took place within the choral society. By the same token, we have to imagine the phenomenological impact of the presence of hundreds of workers lined up on stage and directed by one man in the second half of nineteenth century revolutionary Europe.

Clavé turned the practice of music into a method of conducting participants that listened to and obeyed the director’s instructions. The decisive element in the phenomenon, what I would call “pedagogy of control,” was the visible presence of the group of workers in the public sphere. A constant visibility, an element that Foucault highlights as the key to discipline, was materialized on stage and in the newspapers. This visibility regularly presented the worker reformed by music and was indispensable for the success of such pedagogy of control.

To appropriately evaluate the uniqueness of what we have just discussed, it is important to highlight the contradictions in the project of creating choral institutions with workers: on the one hand, the distinction that the workers gained by being performers, on the other, the fact that they were not granted a full voice, as I have demonstrated elsewhere (Vialette, Intellectual Philanthropy, chapter 1). The acceptance of the rules to both participate in the choruses and gain its privileges (such as the access to the cajas de ahorro [savings accounts] promoted by Clavé, or the protection that could entail being part of such a community) meant that the worker made the decision to be part of a structure that implied rehearsals, performances, studying, that is, spending probably his entire leisure time in this activity. At a time when the working class was considered a threat to the social order all over Europe and when revolutionary groups were spreading, the idea of creating a structure where workers would learn how to sing and how to perform in front of their co-citizens every week was an alternative for a collective union, an alternative in which violence and rebellion were excluded. There is no doubt that Clavé tried to enrich the workers through the creation of a community in which music would give the masses a certain cultural visibility. I do not agree, however, with Clavé’s biographers (whose influence on today’s critiques and conception of the history of choral music in Catalonia prevails) that Clavé gave a voice to the voiceless masses. The workers participating in this structure chose to be part of it but at the same time renounced their individual creative participation. Choral music was only a collective practice conducted by one man, Clavé —no soloist, no predominance of the worker individual as such, and, according to the statutes, no possibility for the worker to express himself in any of the choral institution’s publications or performances. The functioning of the choruses and the worker’s presence on the theater stages were very complex, since the members of the choruses seemed to express themselves during the performances (by singing on stage), but, in fact, this expression was structured by Clavé in its entirety. The composer conducted an important part of the disciplinary pedagogy contained in the choral activities.

Moreover, this visibility transformed the group of workers into a commodity. The business and economic aspects of the choruses is an important parameter that we must consider when framing the aesthetic and political activities of this association. It is through Clavé’s letters, like the one written from Madrid on May 7, 1863, that we know how the performances had to be kept solvent.

He visto todos los locales que aquí existen para darse en ellos funciones y ninguno absolutamente me sirve para el festival. El gasto que necesariamente importarían el pasaje, alojamiento y manutención de los coristas, no puede en manera alguna cubrirse con el producto que pueden ofrecer las dos ó tres funciones ó lo mas que se darian en cualquiera de estos locales. (“Carta a Isabel” 7 may 1863).

In this sense, the performances had not only the value of a cultural exchange, but, furthermore, the monetary value of use, a cultural commodity to be widely sold within the Spanish cultural and social market of the second half of the nineteenth century. Hence, positing that the cultural visibility of the workers had to be the result of an economic transaction ––namely, the sale of tickets for the performances–– makes it possible to stress the social implications of music when the commercial exchange was the only way for the group of workers to obtain cultural acknowledgment in the public sphere. Clavé’s biographers either did not know the existence of those manuscript documents (the accounting ledgers and the budget details) or did not consider them a central element in understanding how nineteenth century popular cultural phenomena worked, and how the relationships of cultural power between the working class and the rest of society were mediated by the market.

The choral associations’ ideological and philanthropic point of departure (redeeming the workers through music) appears to have dissuaded the biographers from considering the material aspects of associations’ organization, as if this would tarnish the aura attributed to the group and to its founder by biographers, or by city mayors who named streets and squares in honor of Clavé, or groups of citizens who contributed, by public and private subscription, to the erection of statues in honor of the musical leader in Madrid, Barcelona, and many other municipalities. Economic accounts and interpretations seem to deflate auras, but they, in fact, are the source of both Clavé’s project and his proto-archiving attitude.

The most interesting manuscript document related to the economics of the group is Clavé’s personal account notebook for the years 1873 and 1874. There, he recorded, month by month, his income and his expenses. The greatest part of his income came from his work as governor of the province of Tarragona in 1873, when he earned approximately 3,777 reales a month. The second source of income was the sale of his scores, listed as “copias de partituras” (copies of scores) in the manuscript. He details copying his manuscripts and selling them to the choruses of workers of the Barceloneta, Sarrià and Tarragona. These choruses for which he was copying and selling his scores were part of the Choral Institutions. Each chorus of workers created in Catalonia had its own local conductor but belonged to the whole movement. All of them were related to each other, while the center was in Barcelona, with Clavé as conductor. He also directed annual festivals during which they would organize musical contests. Clavé, whose philanthropy has been underscored in every biography written about him, was nevertheless a businessman who was perfectly aware of the economic decisions he had to make if he wanted to survive, such as selling copies and the copyright for his scores to the very same groups of workers whose lives he was reforming or redeeming. He clearly received economic compensation in return for his creativity and for his performances on stage, as the letters often indicate that he was paid for each of them (“Carta a Isabel” 7 May 1863). It would be possible to argue that Clavé’s awareness of the necessity of covering expenses is not surprising, as it is a common issue for any artist. Nevertheless, what is surprising is why and how historiographic discourse considered Clavé a character whose life had to be synonymous with abnegation, sacrifice, poverty, illness and disinterest, when, in fact, he was just as much an entrepreneur in favor of the social order as he was an artist and politician conscious of his power over the working masses.