Gerardo Diego’s Creation Myth of Music

Since its publication nearly eight decades ago the consensus among scholars about Fábula de Equis y Zeda by the Spanish poet Gerardo Diego (1896-1987) remains unchanged: Fábula is an enigmatic avant-garde curiosity. It seems to rob the reader of the reason necessary to interpret it even as it lures him or her ineluctably to the task; nevertheless the present study makes the case that this work is in fact not inaccessible and that what the anhelante arquitecto intended with his masterpiece was a creation myth that explains the evolution of music in his day. This monograph unlocks the fullness of the poem´s meaning sourced in music’s mythical consciousness and expressed in a poetic idiom that replicates aesthetic concepts and cubist strategies of form embraced by the neoclassical composers Bartok Falla Ravel and Stravinsky.