Josep Anselm Clavé

Josep Anselm Clavé, an ex-industrial worker, musician, composer and politician, founded the Cors de Clavé in 1845. Clavé composed most of the lyrics and music sung by these choruses. He was a former worker who had sustained an incapacitating injury at the factory; as a result, he taught himself music and composition and decided to dedicate his life to playing and composing music for the workers.The Cors put on stage hundreds and sometimes thousands of illiterate workers, singing in unison, which was an absolutely innovative cultural practice, one that ruptured pre-established cultural codes.

The choruses of industrial workers were gathered by Clavé as a solution to the supposed lack of morality in the industrial Catalan working class.From its inception, the Cors de Clavé were united by a rhetoric of communitarian love substantiated in their telling motto: “Instruíos y sed libres, agrupaos y sed fuertes, amaos y sed felices,” a rhetoric that pervades the whole specter of the chorus’ official publications such as El Metrónomo, El Eco de Euterpe, La Aurora, etc. This message, in obvious connection with the Communist Manifesto’s emblem about the union of the proletariat, also echoes the evangelical message on mutual love. But, this love is not only a Christian Paulinian love for each other, it is also a way, as Slavoj Zizek would say, “to invoke the people’s love for their leader” (98). In that sense (and it is what Zizek points out regarding totalitarian regimes) the leader is the one who seduces the masses in order to create this political love, a tether created by an unconditional agape.

Clavé affected a refinement of the workers’ daily life by making them participate in the choruses. According to Clavé’s project, the specificity of worker’s 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 worker’s presence in the cultural spheres. The choral associations for the workers in Catalonia were created in a unique social context. Although singing was a well-known social activity among men at work ((see Ayats, Jaume and Museu Industrial del Ter. Cantar a la fàbrica, cantar al coro: els cors obrers a La Conca del Ter Mitjà. La Turbina. Manlleu: Museu Industrial del Ter; Vic: Eumo, 2008)), Clavé’s institutions were specifically designed for the Catalan industrial worker, the cornerstones of the new industrial society.

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. Aurélie Vialette has argued, however, that this was a visibility controlled and suitable for the social order at least as much as for the workers themselves ((see “Poetics of the Proto-archive: Creating the Industrial Worker’s Redemption.” Catalan Review24 (2010), 223-241 and Intellectual Philanthropy: the Seduction of the Masses, Purdue UP, 2018)).

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. In that sense, 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.