Perusing Clavé’s personal archive calls into question the hero built by musical and political historians and shows how the emancipation of the working classes through culture was not a spontaneous group free of rules and organization and could not be detached from a previously established pedagogy of control.

Part of this pedagogy can be gleaned from Clavé’s private manuscript archive. His archive is both a commencement and a commandement, as Derrida defined it (arjé, Mal d’archive11). That is, it is both the beginning and the set of original rules of a cultural phenomenon. The word arjé implies the obligation to remember, to archive memory and, at the same time, implies the beginning of the institution of the archive itself. The composer also kept composition notebooks in which he compiled a catalog of his works. ⁽¹⁾

Notebook number 376 is a two part inventory of works: “Partichellas de coros de las piezas de mi composición que se hallan en los cajones de la librería” and “Copias de partes de coro y orquesta de las piezas de mi composición que se hallan en las carteras guardadas en el armario de madera pintado.” This document collects in detail the artist’s compositions and lists them; it also indicates their name, the type of composition (waltz, polka, contradance, etc), the number of pages for each of them, the number of sheets, and the type of voices or orchestra that would be necessary for its performance. Just as important is the fact that the archival objects are carefully placed in a piece of furniture whose description will accompany the proto-archive before any institutionalization and even beyond its existence as a piece of the musician’s household.  This inventory also features footnotes. Remarkably, in addition to the numbered musical or poetic pieces, several other items or entries throughout the notebook are lacking important information and, instead, sport a blank space, preceded only by the number that would correspond to the piece that should fit in that slot. This concrete material element suggests that Clavé was constructing the index for his own archive and that he was conscious of his artistic legacy. He created the space, the armoire, for the archive even when the piece that would fit in it had not yet come into archival existence.

Reading Clavé’s notebooks and correspondence helps us to understand how he worked, how he distributed and conserved his work, and how he even predicted the future of his own archive. The irregular numbering reflects a precise ordering of his writings and opens a window to the fact that he himself considered his production as an organic legacy: regular and apparently irrelevant bookkeeping becomes, thus, a system of organization to be studied and analyzed. He considered himself an archivist and was aware that everything he would write or compose would be included in an archive that would have a future use. His correspondence, and the exchange with his wife Isabel in particular, provides a good example. Those letters, written while he was traveling, are a record of ideas, of musical or political projects ––and therefore a statement about the meaning of love and family letters–– they are a space the composer filled with observations, comments about his encounters, about the cities he visited and about his experiences in various cultural milieus of that time. Isabel, in this process, was the maternal figure that gathered the letters; she was invested as a recipient, as the repository of the archive. Her presence permitted its establishment and its maintenance:

El relato breve que sigue a esta carta os dará una idea aunque pequeña de lo mucho que nos place haber emprendido una excursión tan pintoresca. Yo voy tomando apuntes de todo, porque los bellos paysajes que se presentan a nuestra vista, los cuentos y tradiciones que recojo de los sencillos campesinos y las costumbres de algunas de las poblaciones en que pasamos, todo presta a escribir un cuaderno de poesías curiosas, en particular para los que unidos recorremos tantas preciosidades. Así mi idea es anotar todo lo que sea digno de dar mayor realce a las mismas, y no será mal de que conserves para cuando vuelva la relación que sigue que esta tarde he escrito, y las demás que te envié, para el caso de que si se me extraviase algún papel pueda guiarme con los que estén en tu poder para recordar mejor cuanto haya visto, oido y admirado. No sea a leer esta relación a nadie más que a los de casa, o de casa de la Señora Juyas, cosa indispensable para que te la lean, por la sencilla razón de que escribiendo con precipitación he notado que lo que viene escrito detrás de esta carta, y esta carta misma, no llevan lo que se llama sustancia, por algunas descripciones torpemente hechas. Al leer lo escrito antes de esta carta, quería borrar mucho. (“Carta a Isabel” 4 September 1852)

This letter, written in Vic on September 4, 1852, could exemplify a minimal theory of hypomnemata. The hypomnemata are materials originating in memory, which include notes one reads, hears or thinks, or fragments of works whose preservation makes possible their reading or future use. Foucault explains that the hypomnemata are very different from a personal diary in the sense that their objective is not to illuminate an interior conscience or present a confession for purification ––therefore, the hypomnemata are not linked to the psychoanalytic exercise implied in the diary (Foucault, “On the Genealogy” 364-65). On the contrary, the exercise consists in collecting what has been said, listened to or read; that is, it consists in putting together the fragmentary without filling in the blanks that lie between the fragments.

Clavé’s letters are a form of “travel narrative”; they are, in William Sherman’s  terminology, “texts in transit” (227) exteriorizing memory. In that process, the letter organizes a thought and records it as a trace, as symbols that transmit and organize knowledge, announcing it to be what one should know. Reading Clavé’s archive helps us formulate how an artist can construct socio-artistic visibility for a marginal cultural group (the industrial workers) in the public sphere while at the same time making sure that he can control the procedure as well as the results of the actions of such a group (the idea of arkhé). This doubleness of intent constitutes the grounds for the construction of his socio-cultural discipline.

For Clavé the space of correspondence is a space of consignation. Throughout the letters, he makes the use for this writing exercise explicit. What Farge calls the “volonté de mise en texte” (15) can be clearly discerned in this type of correspondence. Clavé was very conscious of the impact that his own private archive could have in the future. Through the construction of a proto-archive, he was constructing the author, a fonction-auteur. In a sense he was constructing the path for his transformation into a “household word.”

In this process, the female figure, Isabel, becomes indispensable as a lieu of consignation. She is apparently unconnected to the artistic and political sphere Clave discusses and in which he participates. We sense, after reading Clavé’s letters, that she barely knew how to read and did not know how to write. As a silent listener, she is simply “à l’écoute” (Nancy). What does it mean, for an artist, to establish as recipient of an archive an addressee that cannot write, that cannot answer? By establishing Isabel as a recipient of his archive, Clavé is creating an interlocutor and a poesis in which this interlocutor is the space for memory. Isabel is a place of consignation regardless of her level of education, that is, the fundamental space for the proto-archive to exist as much as the painted armoire is. The person here permits Clavé to store the documents (without transforming or moving them), while he is traveling. In her hands, an archive is constructed as the artist writes and as the letters are received–– a à venir as Derrida would say. She embodies what Sherman calls the “matriarchive,” that is, she is the place, the house, where the archive is deposited and kept. Derrida reminds us of the etymology of the word “archive” (arkhe and arkheion). Arkheion is first of all a house, but also the residence of the custodians of the law (Derrida 12-13; Sherman 55). It is the place where official documents are deposited so they can be saved and guarded. This domiciliation is the archive in its own constutitive act and where the transition from private to public is resolved (Derrida, Mal d’archive 13). In Clavé’s deposition of the archive in Isabel’s hands the tension between the private and the public spheres is settled. This relationship does not translate into a simple exchange of letters on family matters. On the contrary, the composer clearly expressed his awareness that every single word he would write could become public. Furthermore, he sometimes expressed the wish that his wife show some parts of the letters to political figures or friends, or that she bring the letter to the editorial office of El Metrónomo so it could be published (“Carta a Isabel” May 4, 1863). The composer’s voice stemming from his letters indicates his struggle against the fear of having a dispersed, entropic, cultural legacy, of possible chaos in the choral movement’s future if he did not impose his authority to distribute and conserve his work.

Clavé very closely controlled the construction of his archive as a way and desire to handle his own inscription in the archive memory of Catalan cultural history. Derrida explains that the archive is inevitably hypomnesic but that, at the same time, it can’t exist without the external space, a space that would guarantee its memorialization, its repetition and its reproduction (Mal d’archive, 26). In that sense, I argue that instead of being only the repository of the past, the “matriarchive” activates a future historic temporality. The written dialogue between Clavé and Isabel implies a permanent dialogue between Clavé and his legacy as a Catalan intellectual, a legacy that leaves a trace, that shows the socio-artistic visibility of his activities. Without the desire and the establishment of a trace, the archive does not exist. This trace, however, is so poignant, has such an effet de réél, that even biographers, as we saw at the beginning of this text, dismiss the possible existence of the proto-archive. They reject this notion, as it is too centered in material, economic and household matters, not to mention ego, rather than in the epics of a man whose declared miracle was to redeem the worker and save the country from revolution.