| Summary: | This thesis presents a holistic approach to the music and life of the Spanish contemporary composer Tomás Marco (b. 1942). Such an approach combines a number of interconnected perspectives (historical, sociological, philosophical, analytical and performative) that aim to provide a general picture of Marco’s music and intellectuality, proposing over‐arching analytical frameworks that take as a point of departure, but go beyond, the consideration of a selection of Marco’s works for violin. The lack of scholarship on Marco in English makes necessary a biographical introduction, presented in Chapter 1: a number of crucial historical and sociological elements are considered in order to develop a critical perspective on Marco’s life and oeuvre. Chapter 2 analyses Marco’s relationship, during the 1960s, with the avant‐garde Spanish musical movement ZAJ. It traces the parallelisms between ZAJ and Fluxus, considers its political dimension and explores its influence on the formation of Marco’s mature musical idiom. Chapter 3 examines the connections between Marco’s thinking and Theodor W. Adorno’s and Henri‐Louis Bergson’s philosophies. Such analysis seeks, ultimately, to uncover Marco’s consideration of time and its relationship with specific elements of their philosophical worlds, which will work as the basis for the development and application of a number of time‐related analytical perspectives, in Chapter 4, on Marco’s works Umbral de la Desolación, Dúo Concertante nº 3, Dúo Concertante nº 6 and Iris. Performance plays a key role in those analytical perspectives: I include my own recording of Marco’s works, used both as analytical material and to introduce the centrality of the performative side of music, as its realisation through time, in the consideration and analysis of musical time. A second volume, consisting of an important collection of material on which a significant part of the arguments developed throughout the thesis are based, is included for two main reasons: the lack of material in English, and the hope that this research project might ignite an interest in Marco’s work and the world of Spanish contemporary music to which the annexed material is clearly relevant.
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