AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

34 Thursday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009
THE “FOLIA FRAMEWORK”: A LINK BETWEEN ORAL AND WRITTEN
TRADITIONS IN SPANISH MUSIC OF THE RENAISSANCE
Giuseppe Fiorentino
Universidad de Granada
This paper analyzes a particular harmonic-melodic framework frequently found in Spanish
secular polyphonic music from the end of the fifteenth century to the second half of the
sixteenth century, with variant musical readings and with different texts. I have been able to
identify at least eleven vocal compositions connected to a particular form of the so-called folia
framework: five in the Cancionero Musical de Palacio (Madrid, Biblioteca Real, MS. II-1335);
four in the ensaladas by Mateo Flecha (el jubilate and el fuego) and Bartomeu Cárceres (La
trulla); and two in the manuscript Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, M. 747/1, and in the
treatise Arte de tañer fantasía (1565) by Tomás de Santa María, respectively. These polyphonic
secular works, although they share a similar harmonic and melodic structure, are not identical,
but their variants can hardly be explained by a process of transmission from one source
to another. However, the analysis of both text and music shows that all these secular pieces
share some fixed patterns that connect the variants of musical structure with the variants of
poetic structure. Thus, these works point to a compositional process that is not based exclusively
on originality, but on the application of a basic musical framework to different texts.
Tomás de Santa María, in his treatise Arte de tañer fantasía, affirmed of one of these pieces
(the polyphonic song “No niegues Virgen preciosa,” found in the falsobordone chapter) that
it belonged to a polyphonic repertoire characteristic of “hombres y mugeres que no saben de
música” [men and women who do not know music], i.e. a kind of polyphony of oral tradition
practiced by common people. Besides, Santa María states that music belonging to this
“not very artistic” repertoire (“cosa de poco arte”) shared some structural features with the falsobordone
genre. Thus, on the basis of this hitherto unnoticed statement by Tomás de Santa
María, it is possible to suggest that all these secular works based on the same folia framework
offer a glimpse of the relationship between oral and written traditions of polyphonic music
in the Iberian Peninsula, and of how learned composers usually gained inspiration from this
unwritten tradition, not only employing specific musical themes, but also imitating its general
stylistic features.
ORIGINS OF THE CANCIONEROS COLOMBINA, SEGOVIA, AND
PALACIO: THE CODICOLOGICAL EVIDENCE IN THE CONTEXT OF
THE COMPILATION PROCESS IN LATE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN
Emilio Ros-Fábregas
CSIC [Spanish National Research Council], Barcelona
A detailed codicological study of the three cancioneros (Colombina, Segovia and Palacio)
of the time of Isabel I of Castile and Fernando V of Aragón questions previous assumptions
about the compilation process of these manuscripts in late fifteenth-century Spain. The
combined new evidence of watermarks, gathering structures and foliations indicates a extremely
fragmentary process of compilation which contradicts the idea of cancionero as a
unified collection planned beforehand. Curiously enough, none of the three manuscripts can
be connected directly with the musical chapels of either Isabel or Fernando, and thus our
knowledge about the secular polyphonic repertory performed at their courts is based only