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Two opposed conceptualizations of Granada, shared across poetry, painting (and photography) and music, combined to create a contrasting transmedia soundscape of the city throughout the twentieth century. Granada "the Beautiful" responded to the romantic myth of the city and was rooted mainly in the Alhambra, an Arab palace among the mountains, filled with gardens and water fountains. This idealized image could be heard in Manuel de Falla's literary and pictorial dream: Noches en los Jardines de España [Nights in the Garden of Spain] (1916), and also appeared in Federico García Lorca's musical conception of his city (1933). Fifty years later, the democratic transformation of Spain generally led to a punk, poetic deconstruction of the city in Rimado de ciudad [Rhyming from the City] (1983), singing about the margins of the city: Granada "the Wounded", emerging from the suburbia and from the dark streets of the Arab quarter: the Albaicín. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The correspondence between Manuel de Falla and the conductor Enrique Fernández Arbós, which went on for more than twenty years and includes more than two hundred unpublished documents, reveals important exchanges of aesthetic conception, which bridge the divide between traditionalism and modernism, and reveal previously unknown information about the international reach of Falla's music and the creation of an image around the quintessential Spanish composer of the time. This article analyses Arbos's biography in relation to his aesthetics and cosmopolitan outlook before moving to a discussion of his correspondence with Falla, which sheds valuable new light on Falla's move towards modernism. By focusing on key institutions and events at the time (such as the Sociedad de Autores and the 1936 ISCM Festival in Barcelona), I interrogate the dialectic between nationalism and internationalism in European music during the first decades of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]