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Clark, Walter Aaron. Los Romeros: Royal Family of the Spanish Guitar. Urbana, Chicago, & Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2018.
The history of a dynasty is not an unusual subject for a book (e.g. Medici, Romanov, Bach, Strauss), but rarely are most of the protagonists alive and involved to some degree in the project. The author of Los Romero: Royal Family of the Guitar is Walter Aaron Clark, Distinguished Professor of Musicology and Director of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music at the University of California Riverside.1 His most recent book is also atypical of most scholarly biographies in which the author's physical and chronological distance from the subject enforces a sort of remote objectivity. Clark makes no attempt to disguise his admiration and affection for his subject(s), who welcomed his research, freely shared their memories, and provided complete and unrestricted access to the family "archives."
Nevertheless, Clark is a scholar and his book bears a university imprint; he is no Boswell enthralled by a clan of brilliant Samuel Johnsons. In his Introduction, Clark states that his research was undertaken with the understanding that this was not to be an "authorized biography." "[T]he Romeros have neither supervised nor attempted to monitor the preparation of my manuscript or to exert editorial control in any way," he declares. The book is his "personal assessment of their importance in the musical and cultural history of the past several decades." He also convinced the Romero family to deposit the family archives in the UC Riverside library, so that "nearly all" of the primary documentation for the book is available to the public, and much of it is now online.2 Although Clark generally avoids adulation or hyperbole (not always an easy task!), he does not dodge relevant controversy. For one example, note his respectful but neutral analysis of the existential crisis of Angel Romero leaving the Romeros quartet in 1990. It establishes Clark as the right scholar to write this fascinating book about a remarkable family.
The guitar has been a palpable presence in almost all of Clark's publications,3 including his highly-regarded monograph biographies of composers Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados, and Federico Moreno Torroba (the latter co-authored with William Craig Krause)-three composers who were not themselves guitarists but...