Felip Pedrell A pioneer of his time

Against the background of the regeneracionist movement that aspired to place late nineteenth-century Spain back on the European map for the fullest manifestation of its plenitud cultural, this study portrays Pedrell (1841-1922) as the first regeneracionist to create a historiographic documentation of Spanish music, using research standards that were innovative, qualitative and critical for his own time. The historiographic turn about in the study of Spanish music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, through the efforts of Felipe Pedrell, is presented here in relation to political and cultural changes that Spain underwent in the second half of the nineteenth century. The interpretation of Pedrell's image as a regeneracionist historiographer enabled a dialectic vision of the two philosophical positions rampant in Europe, clearly distinct from each other and not at all given to fusion: the scholarly, rational and abstract approach to culture and the sciences; the tendency towards cultural relativism that focuses upon the particular element in the nature of nations and cultures.