Vanscheeuwijck, MarcTrujillo Sanz, Laura2024-12-192024-12-192024-12-19https://hdl.handle.net/1794/30271Although the term, “grotesque,” did not appear until the late fifteenth century, this aesthetic category has been recognized in the visual arts since classical Antiquity, in literature by the first part of the sixteenth century, and is currently found in every artistic discipline. In music, scholars identify the grotesque beginning in the nineteenth century. Studies concerning the grotesque prior to this period are scarce. My dissertation challenges current musicological narratives by identifying the existence of the musical grotesque and noting its relationship to eighteenth-century literary and visual trends in compositions produced for the Spanish royal court in Madrid during the reigns of Charles III and IV (1759 to 1808). I focus on composers Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) and Gaetano Brunetti (1744-1798), whose compositional techniques depart from neoclassic aesthetic conventions and display musical elements that parallel the grotesque in other artistic fields.The creative force of the grotesque, its subversive character and ability to rupture conventions of beauty and classicism, was utilized by authors, painters, and performers in Spanish literature, iconography, and theater during the second half of the eighteenth century. By identifying its appearance in contemporaneous musical compositions and demonstrating the relationships among these compositions and the grotesque in other art forms, I challenge current music historiographies that situate the emergence of the grotesque in the later nineteenth century. Instead, I argue that musical expressions of the grotesque during this period– like their artistic counterparts – must also be situated within the complex intellectual, political, and cultural climate of the Spanish Enlightenment.en-USAll Rights Reserved.GrotesqueHistorical Performance PracticeLuigi BoccheriniMusical AestheticsSpanish Chamber MusicSpanish EnlightenmentElectronic Thesis or Dissertation