Download PDF | (Brill’s Companions to the Musical Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Europe) Tessa Knighton (ed.) - Companion to Music in the Age of the Catholic Monarchs-Brill (2016).
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Introduction
Tess Knighton In the winter of 1504, Isabel made her last journey through the kingdom of Castile. Immediately after her death in Medina del Campo on 26 November 1504, preparations were made to take her embalmed body to Granada for burial, as she had specified in her will. The journey was long and arduous— over five hundred miles—and, according to the humanist scholar Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, it rained incessantly, with seriousflooding en route (López de Toro 1953–57, 2: 92–94). The accounts for the ‘extraordinary’ expenses incurred by the journey provide details about the bier (carried on two mules draped in black velvet), the silver cross which preceded it, the torches and candles purchased forthe funerary ceremoniesthat took place along the route, the alms given to the poor, and payments to boatmen to ferry the sizeable royal retinue across swollen rivers (Torre y del Cerro 1968: 441–43). The funerary entourage comprised twenty-five chaplains of the Castilian royal chapel, including d’Anghiera, fourteen singers, an organist, seven chapel boys and two chapel attendants, as well as nine chapel members—at least six of them singers—from the Aragonese royal chapel, all dressed in mourning (Torre y del Cerro 1968: 348–49, 438–39). In the wake of the clergy and musicians of the royal chapels went the personnel of the royal household responsible for guarding, portering, finding accommodation and provisions, cooking (six cooks were paid), and taking messages: well over a hundred royal servants in total (Torre y del Cerro 1968: 440). As this solemn funerary cortège advanced slowly under the leaden skies of Castile, it would have been accompanied by the continuous intoning of the Requiem Mass and Office of the Dead at each town through which it passed, and those who witnessed it must have been struck by the mournful sound. Yet the sight of the progress of the royal entourage would have been recognized as an integral part of the peripatetic existence of the monarchs, in life as in death.
During their lifetimes the Catholic Monarchs travelled ceaselessly throughout their kingdoms,2 accompanied by the hundreds of servants they employed and with many of their possessions packed into chests, boxes and saddlebags and transported on carts pulled by mules or oxen. As Roberta Freund Schwartz demonstratesin her essay, nobles and courtiers, including high-ranking clergymen, often travelled with them, each accompanied by their own entourage (see Chapter 5). The peripatetic existence of the court of Ferdinand and Isabel can perhaps be considered to have been one of its defining features, and affected not only their daily lives and the effectiveness of their government, but also the artistic projects they undertook and the cultural developments fostered in the court environment. This constant travel stemmed from the need to legitimize and impose royal power in kingdoms that had previously been torn apart by strife and civil war, and where certain nobles and bishops exerted their own power over lands and dynasties to an extent that proved a threat to the monarchy itself. Other reasons were lawlessness and banditry. The royal presence, and the quick and sometimes harsh dispensing of royal justice, helped to quell strife and increase the monarchs’ prestige. As the royal entourage progressed through their kingdoms, ceremonies of diverse kinds resulted in the heightening of the perception of monarchy, as royal entries, civic processions and plays brought contact between urban centres and royal protocol; as Ronald Surtz shows, such pageantry enabled both self-promotion and image manipulation on all sides (see Chapter 4). The importance and impact of princely presence were not, of course, restricted to the Spanish kingdoms, but the sheer extent and mountainous topography of the monarchs’ lands meant that the distances travelled were long, and the way arduous, with at times inclement weather and the constant threat of bandits. A network of royal and noble palaces and monastic foundations—particularly those of the Jeronymite order much favoured by the Aragonese monarchy (Rumeu de Armas 1976)—served to provide lodgings, and some were reconstructed, enlarged or adapted to make sure they were suitable for royal sojourns (Domínguez Casas 1993; Yarza Luaces 1993). The monarchs rarely spent more than one year in any one place, the rhythm being established in the early part of the reign by the monthsspent in army campsin Andalusia—sometimes visited by the queen—as the final stages of the Reconquest gathered momentum. It was not until after the taking of Granada in early 1492 that the monarchs could embark on an extended sojourn in the Kingdom of Aragon.
All this was a far cry from the situation in other parts of Europe, even where itineracywas also a mark of princely status. In England, the royal palaces of the Tudors were clustered round London and mostly reachable by the Thames (Thurley 1993). Similarly, Louis XII of France tended to progress between Paris and the various satellite royal châteaux along the Loire or Marne. The French and English kings of the time did travel abroad, to Italy and France respectively, but these were occasional forays impelled by matters of war and peace, rather than an unremittingly peripatetic existence. The ruling élite of other important regions such as northern Italy and Flanders operated over much shorter distances, with a much higher density of urban centres that benefited from mercantile wealth as well as dynastic rivalries, notably among the great Italian noble families such as the Sforza, Este, Gonzaga and Medici who transformed Milan, Ferrara, Mantua and Florence into powerful and closely interconnected court-cities (Merkley & Merkley 1999; Lockwood 1984; Fenlon 1981; D’Accone 2006). The highly developed princely rivalry in all matters, including artistic and musical patronage, characteristic of these Italian courts was not altogether absent from the Spanish kingdoms, but the dynamic was markedly different. During the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, nobles and high-ranking clergymen—particularly after 1492 when fewer resources and energies had to be directed towardstheGranadine campaign—began to enlarge their households and to build palaces on a substantial scale. However, a good number of these nobles had to travel with the court and were as itinerant as the monarchs themselves. Princely rivalry was present, but rather different in nature, based more on the desire to follow the model of Prince Juan, heir to the thrones of Castile and Aragon, before his untimely death in 1497. Many of the younger members of the great noble families were educated at court alongside Prince Juan, who was by all accounts an avid music-lover and a fairly accomplished music-maker (Fernández de Oviedo 1870: 182–83). It would be simplistic to suggest that it was the heir to the throne’s musical interests alone that gave impetus to music patronage among the nobility, but it has to be considered as a contributory factor, especially among his peers (see Roberta Freund Schwartz’s discussion of the rivalry among nobles vying to attract royal favour in Chapter 5). The monarchs’ peripatetic existence held important ramifications for musical developments in the Spanish kingdoms in the decades around 1500, some positive, others less so. On all major journeys, Ferdinand and Isabel were accompanied by theirseparate households, including their heraldic and chamber musicians and royal chapels. The four-monthly accounts (terçios) of the Aragonese royal treasury, for example, detail payments made to all the personnel of the king’s household, from the teeth cleaner (‘limpiadientes’) to the mayordomo, in the different locations along the royal itinerary (Torre 1955; Fernández-Armesto 1975; Domínguez Casas 1993; Knighton 2001).
Household members absent from service when their salaries were paid at the end of each terçio were noted, and were paid individually at a later date, presumably when they (or possibly their procurator) had caught up with the court. Absences from court service could be licensed on a regular basis; in 1508 Ferdinand obtained a Motu Proprio from Pope Julius II that allowed the members of the royal chapels leave of absence for up to a year in order to deal with matters arising from the ecclesiastical benefices and sinecures they held and to which they had been presented by the monarchs (Knighton 2001: 80). This would explain in part the increasingly large number of singers paid in the royal chapels, especially after1492whenthemonarchswere grantedrightof presentation to the new ecclesiastic posts created in the new cathedrals and churches of the kingdomof Granada:not allthe singerswerepresent at any one time.Individual chapel members, including singers, often sought benefices in or near their home towns, thus being able to combine business and family matters while they were on leave from royal service.3 When the monarchs sojourned in their home town, or the town where they held their ecclesiastical position, leave of absence was not required: this was the case, for example, with Francisco de Peñalosa, who held a canonry at Seville Cathedral and attended chapter meetings while Ferdinand was residing in the city in 1508 and 1510 (Knighton 1993; Knighton & Morte García 1999: 127–28).4 This situation, arising directly from the peripatetic existence of the court, had important musical ramificationsfor both the court and the Spanish cathedral network in a syncretic manner. As the monarchs travelled between the major cities and monastic foundations of their kingdoms, the bestsinger-composers were recruited for the royal chapels. In 1479, relatively early in the monarchs’ joint reign, the trajectory followed by the Aragonese royal household went from the western province of Extremadura to Barcelona on the east coast and doubled back to Toledo by the end of the year (Knighton 2001: 103– 4). Ferdinand’s father, Juan II, had died in January, and the purpose of this journey was for Ferdinand to take the oath as King of Aragon in his own lands.
At least twelve singers were recruited for the Aragonese royal chapel on this journey—in Cáceres, Madrid, Hita near to Guadalajara, Saragossa, Barcelona, Tortosa, Valencia and Toledo. Some of these musicians seem to have been coopted orrewarded in an honorificmanner, notably the organistGabriel Terraça (d. 1514) in Barcelona and the French composer Enrique de Paris (d. 1487–8) while the court was in Valencia: both had served in the royal chapel of Ferdinand’s father, and neither reappear in the treasury accounts after 1479. Years earlier, in December 1461, Enrique de Paris had been appointed to prince Ferdinand’s household following the death of his half-brother Carlos de Viana (GómezMuntané 1993). Both royal musicianslived forsome yearsin Barcelona after the royal visit of 1479, demonstrating that prestigious local musicians were also hired temporarily to boost the performances by the Aragonese royal chapel during the king’s entry and sojourn in a city, giving rise for ample opportunity for the exchange of musical repertory and techniques. In other instances, chapel singers recruited from cathedrals and private noble or ecclesiastical chapels en route served in the royal chapels for many years. In 1479, Juan Fernández de Madrid was recruited in the village of Hita nearto Guadalajarawhere theMendoza family had their main residence, often visited by the monarchs on their journeys to and from the kingdom of Aragon. His name appears in the royal treasury accounts for some years. Later, in 1493, a Juan Ruiz de Madrid, who had previously been in the service of Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza joined the king’s chapel, and served there until shortly before his death in 1501. Four songs, a motet, a Gloria and, possibly, a setting of Asperges me are attributed to ‘Madrid’ in Spanish-related sources, and one of these musicians with this toponymic is likely to have been the composer.5 These processes of recruitment and reward established longer-term networks between the royal chapels, cathedrals and other chapels. While these institutions must at times have been left bereft of their best musicians, benefits were also gained through the appointment of singers to benefices that were—eventually—conceded and served. Some singers, like Juan Álvarez de Amorox or Esteban de Villamartín, left royal service to return to the cathedral environment butwere then delegated by the cathedral chapters of Segovia and Palencia respectively to be their representatives at court when the need arose (López Calo 1981; López Calo 1988–89; Knighton 1993). Reward through ecclesiastical benefice had a particularly important impact following the diaspora of the over forty singers in the Aragonese royal chapel following Ferdinand’s death in January 1516, when many of them must have fallen back on the benefices they held as a way to earn their living after Charles V arrived with his Flemish choir (Knighton 2014). The exceptionally large group of singers at the time of Ferdinand’s death can be seen as another ramification of the peripatetic existence of the court.
Expansion in numbers was not only a matter of increasing royal prestige, but also a necessity to ensure that there were always sufficient musicians in any one place at any one time. The standard number of singers (or xantres) in the royal chapel of Ferdinand’s father, Juan II, was eight; in Ferdinand’s reign, the number hovered around twelve for much of the 1480s and ‘90s, but in 1498, five new appointments were made—including that of Peñalosa—and from then onwardsthebody ofsingerswithinthe chapel continuedto increase.Expansion on an unprecedented scale occurredwith the bringing together of the Castilian and Aragonese royal households, although they continued to be maintained and financed separately. At least on certain major occasions, this resulted in a kind of superchapel, such as when Philip the Fair took the oath as heir to the Castilian throne in Toledo in 1502 (see Chapter1): at that time, the joint chapels included up to thirty or forty singers, even allowing for some absences (Knighton 2005).6 The sheer volume of sound made by this number of singers during the celebration of Mass must have been quite extraordinary. It was also probably relatively exceptional, since the royal households often travelled separately. Even so, it is surely significant that when Isabel died in 1504, at least nine of the singers of theCastilian royal chapelwere reappointed in Ferdinand’s chapel and served there for many years. Even allowing for absences of individual singers, and the honorific positions of others, it is striking that such a large chapel choir was maintained. Each chapel appears to have had one major composer—Anchieta in the Castilian royal chapel and Peñalosa in the Aragonese royal chapel—as well as a number of minor, or apparently less prolific, composers (see Chapter 1). It should be borne in mind, however, that almost all the polyphonic manuscripts associated with the royal chapels have been lost (see Chapter 11) and these conclusions are drawn only on the basis of those that survive. The maintenance of such a large body of singers, almost all of whom were of Castilian or Aragonese origin—with some notable exceptions, such as Juan de Urreda (Johannes Wreede), chapel master in the Aragonese royal chapel from June 1477 until at least 1482 (Strohm 1985: 43, 142; Knighton 2001: 346)— led Anglés to suggest that the monarchs deliberately cultivated a ‘national’ school of composition in the royal chapels(Anglés1940/61: 9–11).7 Significantly, this section of Anglés’s pioneering study was entitled ‘Reivindicación de la música española’ in response to earlier claims by nineteenth-century Belgian musicologists that a polyphonic school did not exist in Spain before Philip the Fair’s visit of 1502 (Gevaert 1852; Van der Straeten 1867–88/1969, 4).8 Anglés’s counterclaim was strong: ‘we trust that we can shed a little light on this dark corner of musical history that is Spain in the late fifteenth century and the early years of the sixteenth, the time when a characteristically national polyphonic music emerged (‘confiamos poder aclarar un poco este periodo tan obscuro de la historia musical del siglo XV y principios del XVI, época de gestación de la música polifónica típicamente nacional’ (Anglés 1940/61: 11)). As Juan José Carreras has argued, Anglés’s emphasis on a national style responded not only to an already established music historiographical tradition—that of the ‘national’ schools of composition—but also to the nationalistic concerns of the time when he was writing (Carreras 2001). The notion that a new, inherently ‘Spanish’ musical style was forged in the royal chapels of Ferdinand and Isabel has continued to prevail among music historians (Kreitner 2004b: 158–61), but needs to be nuanced.
Rather than stemming from an artistic desire to build a large body exclusively of Spanish singers or a deliberate policy to create a distinctive ‘national’ school, the high proportion of autochthonous singer-composers must have resulted at least in part from practical needs and circumstances. The system of reward through ecclesiastical benefices in Spanish territories by royal patronage meant that a foreign singer would have to become, again with royal support, a naturalized Castilian. This did happen, but only rarely. An example is offered by Juan ‘Henrart’ who can probably be identified with Johannes Hemart, originally from Saint Guilain in Hainault and master of the boys at Cambrai Cathedral between 1469 and 1484 (Fallows 1982: 249; Knighton 2001: 81–82, 101; Fallows 2009: 26–28). Henrart/Hemart was naturalized on 11 June 1492 with the name Juan de Arrarte/Amarte, and soon afterwards was nominated for prebends in Granada and Salamanca; he died in January 1496 without, as far as is known, having obtained either benefice. As Juan Ruiz Jiménez demonstrates in his essay on cathedral music in this volume, there were clearly more musicians of north European origins working in cathedral choirs than was previously thought (see Chapter 7). Indeed, it seems more likely that the description by the humanist Damião de Gois of the Portuguese court of Manuel I as having musicians from ‘all over Europe’ in his chamber and chapel, making it ‘one of the best in Europe’ (see Chapter 6), would have applied equally to that of the Catholic Monarchs.9 It is not always possible to ascertain the provenance of the singers in the Castilian and Aragonese royal chapels, but a minority can be identified as having come from France, Flanders, Italy, Portugal and even England (Knighton 2001). The presence of these ‘foreign’ musicians in the royal chapels, especially those of the status of Enrique de Paris, Urreda and Hemart, undermines Anglés’s argument that Ferdinand and Isabel deliberately created a ‘national’ school, although it is true that they did not—especially after the 1490s10— actively seek the oltremontani composers in the way that contemporaneous Italian princes, including the Aragonese kings of Naples, did, or as their Francophile Catalano-Aragonese predecessors of around 1400 had done (Gómez Muntané 1979; Atlas 1984). In addition, recent research shows that the Catholic Monarchs, rather than initiating a new trend—and so being responsible for the creation of a ‘national school’ along Anglés’s ideological lines—were following a well-established pattern of music patronage at the Castilian court.
Francisco de Paula Cañas Gálvez’s study of the musicians employed by Isabel’s half-brother Enrique IV suggests that most of the singers employed in his chapel were almost certainly of Castilian origin, with toponymicsindicating cities and townssuch as Segovia,Vilches, Brihuega,Medina del Campo, Valladolid and Leon astheir likely provenance (Cañas Gálvez 2006: 226–27). Other singers, such as the ubiquitous Cristóbal de Morales, who served Enrique IV, Prince Alfonso and the Catholic Monarchs, as well as the Duke of Medina Sidonia, were decidedly Castilian, although it should be emphasized that the data on Enrique IV’s chapel is far from complete. Both Enrique IV and his father, Juan II, also employed at least some non-Spanish musicians too. Juan II of Castile had employed a French singer, Guillemin Menasir, as ‘thenor’ of the royal chapel (Cañas Gálvez 2000: 383–84), while the French musician Jean Curiel, was appointed chapel master to Isabel’s brother, Alfonso, declared King of Castile by one faction of the nobility in June 1465, but who lived only a fewyears, dying in July 1468 (Cañas Gálvez 2006: 228, 274). The presence of these French musicians in high profile positions in the Castilian royal chapel over the course of the fifteenth century shows that their contribution was considered important, but that they were present in relatively small numbers—as in the case in the chapels of Ferdinand and Isabel and the cathedrals. Given this well-established mix of Spanish and non-Spanish, it is not surprising that the polyphonic idiom cultivated in the early years of Ferdinand and Isabel’s reign was also a combination of the largely unwritten autochthonous tradition—with its roots in the semi-improvised techniques of contrapunto (see Chapters 12 and 13)—and elements of the northern written tradition. Thisidiom is well represented in the works of Juan de Urreda, chapel master of the Aragonese royal chapel,whose polyphonic setting of the canción Nunca fue pena mayortravelledwell beyond the Pyrenees andwas drawn on by Pierre de La Rue as the cantus firmus of a polyphonic Mass (Stevenson 1960: 158–63; Meconi 2003: 192–94). Music by northern composers, both sacred and secular, circulated widely in the Spanish kingdoms in the fifteenth century, as is clear from the number of French songbooks owned by Isabel (Knighton 2008a). David Fallows has discussed the vestiges of French-texted chansons in some of the earlier songs included in the Colombina and Palace Songbooks, and has shown conclusively that a section of the Colombina book (now to be found in F-Pn 4379) originally contained songs by northern composers(Fallows 1992a and Fallows1992b). The international polyphonic repertory continued to circulate in the Spanish kingdoms, asisreflected in the contents of the Segovia manuscript, now believed to have been copied by 1499 (see Chapter 11). There can be little doubt that the incorporation of northern elements was boosted by the presence of Philip the Fair’s Flemish choir in 1502–3 and 1506–8; in his Masses, Peñalosa was to use three of the ‘top hits’ of that repertory, including the L’homme armé melody, Hayne van Ghizeghem’s De tous biens plaine and Josquin’s Adieu mes amours as cantus firmi. Thus, I would suggest, this process of musical hybridization was longstanding and not dissimilar to the cultural mix of local and mainstream elements found in much of the architecture and art of the period (Knighton 1987).
In the 1490s, if not rather earlier, a shift in this pattern of musical hybridity seems to have occurred, with sacred polyphony tending towards the incorporation of more northern techniques, to the point thatsome of Peñalosa’s music is very similar in style to Josquin’s idiom, while polyphonic song went in a decidedly different direction, away from the international Franco-Netherlandish chanson, asreflected in Urreda’s Nunca fue pena mayor—in favour of a new idiom in both text and music. With its roots in oral tradition, the ‘new’ song suddenly appears in written form in the earliest surviving songbooks dating from the latter part of the fifteenth century, by which time the popularity of the villancico had been gathering pace in court circles over several decades, and, as Jane Whetnall shows, was injecting new vitality into the courtly love lyric (see Chapter 2). The shift in favour of the villancico did not happen in isolation, but seems to have been part of a more general European trend towards greater diversity in song forms and styles (Strohm 1993: 50–84).11 The unprecedented flourishing of popular song forms in simple, largely homophonic, settings did not occur only in Spanish court circles, but also at Italian courts, where the frottola—in many respects similar to the villancico— also experienced a new wave of popularity which was consolidated there through Petrucci’s frottola publications from 1504 (Prizer 1980).12 As Giuseppe Fiorentino points out, printing speeded up the shift from orality to written musical culture (Chapter 13), although only a few Castilian-texted songs from this period found their way into Petrucci’s prints. Many of the composers of villancicos were singers in the royal chapel or held cathedral posts, and as Giuseppe Fiorentino and Pilar Ramos discussin their essaysin this volume, the application of the rules of two-, three- or even four-voice contrapunto to plainchant or song melodies was not substantially different, and often resulted in simple, repeated chord sequences(see Chapters12 and 13). It isthusimportant to think in terms of a multilingual, multi-genre song repertory in the Spanish kingdoms at the time of the Catholic Monarchs, with polyphonic settings of the court poets who cultivated the autochthonous genres of the Castiliantexted canción, villancico and romance developing in parallelto song traditions elsewhere in Europe.
Ferdinand and Isabel appear to have been content to expand on existing traditions, and these tended to be reinforced by the geographical location of the Spanish kingdoms which did not fall comfortably on the route south followed by north European clergy (and so musicians) and pilgrims, drawn in theirthousandsto Rome. In thissense, musical culture at their court inevitably flourished at one remove from the network of oltremontani so highly valued in the papal chapel and the north Italian courts. Rome was, nevertheless, an important hub for musical developments, and many Spanish musicians also travelled to the city and successfully found employment in the papal chapel. As Richard Sherr shows, musicians from the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were present in sufficient numbers there to form a ‘Spanish Nation’ from at least the time of the Valencian pope Alexander VI (r. 1492–1503) (see Chapter 10). Curiously, it is in the context of the papal chapel, to which singers from all over Europe were drawn (in part for the advantages in securing benefices in their home regions, a process that Sherr describes as ‘exquisitely corrupt’) that distinctions were indeed made between three different ‘nations’: the French, Spanish and Italian. In 1518, Paris de Grassis, the papal master of ceremonies, described the different styles of singing the Lamentations in the papal chapel, with the French singing in a ‘learned’ way, the Spanish singing in a ‘lamenting’ manner and the Italians ‘sweetly and well’ (see Chapter 10). Sherr raises the issue as to exactly what de Grassis might have meant with his characterizations of three different singing styles (at least in the performance of the Latin-texted Lamentations): could singers from different European regions really be distinguished in this way in the early sixteenth century, or were other political and religious stereotypes also being brought into play even then? In this period—well before the Council of Trent and its long-lasting impact on church music—it was not only singing styles that differed throughout Catholic Europe, but also liturgical traditions, including local ritual, texts and chant melodies.
The Aragonese and Castilian royal chapels were granted papal license from 1474 onwards to celebrate the Toledan rite in their chapels, although it is not known to what extent they did so as the liturgical books copied for and used by their chapels have not survived (Knighton 2001: 113).13 As Mercedes Castillo-Ferreira discusses in her essay, liturgy and royal power were often closely intertwined, notably through the creation of new liturgies for the feasts celebrating their predecessors’ as well as their own victories in the ageold campaigns of the Reconquest (see Chapter 8). Bernadette Nelson reveals similar concerns and patterns of patronage among members of the Portuguese monarchy (see Chapter 6). As the Reconquest gathered momentum in the 1480s, Ferdinand and Isabel sought to provide the liturgical books, vestments and ornaments needed for the celebration of the liturgy in the newly founded churches in the Kingdom of Granada, and were generous patrons as regards the copying of series of large chant books for different ecclesiastical institutions, such as Badajoz and Cordoba Cathedrals, the Franciscan monastery of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo, and the Jeronymite monastery of Santa Engracia in Saragossa (Morte García 2012; Ruiz Jiménez forthcoming; Knighton forthcoming c). It is less clear to what extent they intervened directly in Cardinal Cisneros’s project to restore the so-called Mozarabic rite in the Mozarabic chapel of Toledo and a few other designated Toledan churches, and to publish the corresponding liturgical books, including the Intonarium toletanum (1515), but it would be consistent with other royal projects and with their close relationships with their royal confessors, who, in the case of Cisneros especially, were also political advisers (Boynton 2015) (see Chapter 8). The monarchs, influenced by royal confessorssuch as Hernando de Talavera and Cisneros, were much concerned with religious and liturgical reform, and standards in the royal chapels were improved so that they might serve as models. The employment of the Sicilian humanist Lucius Marineus Siculus as a chaplain in the Aragonese royal chapel with the responsibility of teaching Latin to the royal chaplains, had an important impact on royal singer-composers such as Peñalosa and Juan Ponce, who discussed Latin motet texts in their correspondence—also written in Latin—with their teacher (Lynn 1937; Jiménez Calvente 2001; Knighton 2002). In general, however, Marineus was scathing about the general standard of Latin he found, complaining that the royal chaplains did not understand the words of the hymns they sang daily (Lynn 1937: 196–97). Queen Isabel was described by Marineus as paying great heed to the celebration of the Divine Office in her chapel to the extent thatshe would correct any errorsshe detected in her chaplains’ pronunciation or placement of a syllable after the service (Knighton 2002: 249–50). Such anecdotal information must be considered within the panegyrical aims of Marineus’s De las cosas memorables de España (1539); royal chroniclers and other commentators consistently represented Ferdinand and Isabel as model Christian monarchs, above all else devout and filled with religious zeal. This view was both confirmed and promulgated still further by the successful Reconquest of Granada in 1492 and the expulsion of the Jews later in the same year; two years later, the title of ‘Catholic Monarchs’ was bestowed on them by Alexander VI (Kamen 2005: 37). Church reform was promulgated throughout their kingdoms with the dissemination of printed synod acts, the press also serving to produce liturgical books for almost every see of their realms during their reigns from the last decades of the fifteenth century (see Chapter 8). It is interesting to consider the extent to which this emphasis on liturgical understanding and ceremony in the royal chapels and the religious trends at court promulgated by the monarchs’ spiritual advisers might have influenced the composition of sacred music there. Undoubtedly, as in other chapels and churches throughout Europe, plainchant continued to be the musical mainstay of liturgical celebration in the royal chapels of Ferdinand and Isabel. The chant sung there must have been to some extent customized through the creation of new liturgies and the use of the Toledan rite. A clear example isthat of Urreda’s setting(s) of the Toledan melody (more hispano) for the hymn Pange lingua; indeed, Eva Esteve has suggested that this hymn can be inextricably linkedwiththeprojectionofroyalpower(Esteve[Roldán]2010).Solemnification of the liturgy through the use of added voice parts—and the chroniclers often refer to ‘músicas acordadas’—occurred both through composed polyphony and the semi-improvised techniques of contrapunto (Knighton 2011a; Fiorentino 2013a, 2013b, 2014, 2015a, 2015b). Cathedral ceremonials or consuetas from the time of the Catholic Monarchs show that contrapunto, or the related technique of fabordón, existed alongside chant and polyphony as a way of solemnifying and adorning the celebration of the liturgy. A more detailed study remains to be undertaken, but it is clear that both semi-improvised and written polyphony co-existed even while another shift can be observed during their reign: a general increase in the categories of feast and liturgical genre that called for written polyphonic settings, notably in those texts in verse form that belonged to the Office—the Magnificat, hymns, and even psalms—performed in alternatim in a number of ways that continued to include contrapunto. The reconstruction of the polyphonic repertory of the chapels is hampered by the dearth of polyphonic sources from the fifteenth century; even those manuscripts of sacred polyphony that do survive—notably E-TZ 2/3—almost certainly date from after the death of Ferdinand, and, as Emilio Ros-Fábregas discusses in his essay, the most recent research suggests that quite possibly none of the manuscripts listed by Anglés in his pioneering La música en la corte de los Reyes Católicos, was directly compiled for their royal chapels or court, although they contain a high percentage of works attributed to royal singer-composers (see Chapter 11). The Isabelline inventories, together with many others from cathedrals, demonstrate that a very large number of polyphonic books, manuscript and printed, have been lost over the centuries; the devastating fires in Philip II’s royal chapel in Madrid (1734) and the Alcázar in Segovia (1862) were alone responsible for the loss of several hundred sources (Ruiz García 2003; Knighton 2008a). This historical loss of polyphonic books has almost certainly resulted in some element of distortion with regard to the genres and styles of polyphony sung in the royal chapels, particularly before the generation of Peñalosa (Kreitner 2004b). Analysis of the works attributed to the two main composers in the royal chapels—Anchieta and Peñalosa— would suggest that developments there broadly mirrored the process of polyphonization occurring in the rest of Europe, but quite oftenwith a time lag of anything from a few years to a generation (Kreitner 2012, 2014a). The spread of polyphony to awiderrange of liturgical and devotional genres is reflected in the liturgically organized Tarazona manuscript (E-TZ 2/3) (see Chapters 7 and 11). An entire hymn cycle (which has been associated with Seville Cathedral (Ruiz Jiménez 2005)), a substantial cycle of three- and fourvoice settings of the Magnificat, the settings required for aspersion and for the response at the start and end of Mass, and the Lamentations of Jeremiah sung during the Tridue of Holy Week, all including works attributed to composers of the royal chapels, reflects the widening range of composed polyphony sung in the liturgy, presumably both in the royal chapels and elsewhere. Polyphonic settings in E-TZ 2/3 of the responsories for the Office of the Dead and of the Requiem Mass are among the earliest in Europe, although it now seems clear that the composer of the Mass, Pedro de Escobar, cannot be identified with the Pedro do Porto (del Puerto) who was a member of the Castilian royal chapel in the 1490s (Villaneueva Serrano 2011a). Ruiz Jiménez has suggested that the Requiem may be more closely connected to Seville Cathedral, where Escobar served between 1507 and 1514 (Ruiz Jiménez 2010), although nothing is now known about his career outside of these dates. The Spanish theorist Ramos de Pareja claimed to have composed a polyphonic Requiem in the latter part of the fifteenth century, but this has been lost, as have the three-voice settings of the responsories sung in Valladolid Cathedral following Isabel’s death in 1504 (Knighton 2011c; Robinson 2013). The musical idiom of Escobar’s Requiem is rather different to settings by Franco-Netherlandish composers of the same period: the relevant chant melodies (peculiar to the Spanish kingdoms, although at times similar to the Roman tradition) are solemnified by the sustained chordal writing that hasitsrootsin the contrapunto tradition (Knighton forthcoming b). Beyond the liturgy, the extant devotional motets attributed to composers of the royal chapel display a notable consistency in choice of text and musical idiom and are also rather different to the works of their northern counterparts. The texts, mostly found in Books of Hours from within and outside of Spain, focus to a very large extent on the Crucifixion, whether in the contemplation of and identification with the suffering of Christ on the Cross or that of his Mother, the Virgin Mary, whether at the foot of the Cross (the Stabat mater theme) or with the dead body of Christ in her arms (the piedad), which was a particular devotion of Isabel(Ishikawa 2004, 2008;Yarza Luaces 2005;Knighton 2008b). These texts invite the participation of the listener or listeners (both first person singular and plural are used in the motet texts) in accordance with contemporary spiritual trends, such as the Flemish Devotio Moderna, that placed the passio Christi compassion Maria at the heart of devotional practice. The royal chapel composers employed musical rhetoric—the use of rests in all voices, a kind of declamatory homophony, harmonic inflections, and variety of vocal texture, and sustained exhortations or perorations—to highlight key words or phrases in the texts so as to make them particularly audible and thus conveyed the underlying meaning of the text to great effect. Some of these techniques are also found in motets by northern composers, notably some of the Crucifixion motets included in Petrucci’s Motetti B (‘De passione, de cruce, de sacramento, de Beata Virgine’) of 1503, which Warren Drake has described as a musical Book of Hours (Drake 2002), but not to the same extent nor with quite the same impact. Once again, the Spanish kingdoms were not isolated from wider European spiritual trends and compositional techniques, but certaindevotionalpracticesseemtohavebeencultivatedtheretoagreaterextent— especially, but not exclusively, in royal circles—because they had particular relevance and resonance there. The emphasis on Christ’s Passion and on his Virgin Birth, as well as the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin herself—a theological doctrine adopted early and much supported by the Catholic Monarchs—takes on new meaning in the context of multi-confessional Castile and, indeed, of the establishment of the Inquisition in 1478. These doctrines lay at the heart of Christian Spain and were anathema to both Muslim and Jewish religions (Knighton 2008b). The complexity—and for modern historians—problematic nature of the impact of multi-confessionalism on culture at the time of the Catholic Monarchs and earlier has recently been studied by the art historian Cynthia Robinson (Robinson 2013) and is addressed here as regards musical practices in the Spanish kingdoms in the essay by Eleazar Gutwirth (Chapter 15). He considers how music was at times a defining element between Jewish and Christian religious practices, even if the underlying thinking on music was more closely intertwined according to longstanding scholarly traditions. The age-old presence of diverse and substantial ethnic groups—even after 1492 among the converso communities—inevitably led to a porosity of thinking and cultural hybridization. Members of the royal and noble families valued certain aspects of Arabic culture very highly, as is clear from the decoration of Gothicstyle cathedrals or proto-Renaissance palaces with artesonado ceilings (as in the monastery of San Juan de los Reyes, built by the Catholic Monarchs to celebrate the victory at the Battle of Toro in 1476). Enrique IV was renowned (and criticized) for wearing Moorish dress and adopting certain Moorish customs; Arabic musicians are found in court circles, notably at the Portuguese court of Manuel I (see Chapter 6).14 This raises the question of to what extent—if at all—cross-fertilization between Arabic and Western musical performance styles and repertories occurred; many modern interpretations of the Castilian-texted song repertory from the time of the Catholic Monarchs introduce Arabic instruments such as ouds or nakers, even though most evidence would seem to point in the direction of a high degree of self-containment between Arabic and Western musical traditions. Before 1492, the different ethnic groups were represented in processions on major civic occasions, such as royal entries or Corpus Christi processions in which, as an integral—if not integrated since they were effectively segregated at the back of the procession—part of urban society, they sang and played their own songs and dances. In certain regions, particularly in the south and east of the Peninsula, Arabic instrument-makers and musicians flourished, being hired to play at weddings and teach the vihuela to members of the nobility, as occurred in Saragossa (Chapter 3). Negotiation of cultural identity after the completion of the Granadine campaigns is attested to by the Catholic Monarchs’ confirmation of the appointment of an Arabic organizer of the zambra (both an ensemble and a specific repertory) in Granada (see Chapter 8). Indeed, the distinctive sound of the zambreros would have been heard quite commonly at weddings and other festivities celebrated throughout the city and kingdom of Granada well into the sixteenth century. Moorish-style trumpets and drums were used to accompany courtly and civic entertainments such as the mock battles between Muslims and Christians (‘moros y cristianos’) staged on important occasions (Ruiz 2012). Black musicians were employed in the royal and noble households to perform in the heraldic ensembles of trumpets and drums as a symbol of prestige, and this became a European-wide phenomenon (Lowe & Earle 2005; Gómez Fernández 2016: 254–70) (see Chapter 3). With forays into and trade with the African coast and following Columbus’s discoveries in the Americas, the Iberian Peninsula became a major gateway for slave-musicians, and the employment of non-white musicians by members of the higher echelons of society became increasingly pronounced in the early decades of the sixteenth century as sailings to and from the Indies became more frequent (Chapters 3 and 9). As Javier Marín López discusses in his essay, this was a bi-directional process, with the diffusion of western European musical traditions—from playing plucked string instruments to the singing of plainchant and polyphony—quickly being established as part of colonial socio-political life (Chapter 9). Music was used as a tool among all ethnic groups to establish collective identity and negotiate social status. It is difficult to assess how far and how established these traditions had become by the time of Ferdinand’s death in 1516, but the rapidly increasing emigration of members of the monastic orders and ruling classes needed to convert and contain the indigenous peoples was a major factor in this process. During this early period, the foundations were laid for the complex patterns of cultural and musical influence, exchange and syncretism that emerged later in the sixteenth century, with a vastly increased demand for professional musicians to serve in the newly founded cathedrals and the exportation of musical artefacts from church organs to vihuela strings and music books (Gembero Ustárroz 2011). Cultural activity in the Spanish kingdoms, with the centuries-old presence of different ethnic communities, and the spread of that cultural mix across the Atlantic, must inevitably have included musical elements that differed from the rest of Europe, but it is important to stress the extent to which musical culture in Spain was not isolated from pan-European trends and to nuance questions of a division between centre and periphery (see also Juan Ruiz’s discussion of the question with regard to the central position of cathedrals in urban space in Chapter 7). As I have already mentioned, geographically, the Iberian Peninsula was peripheral to the mainstream north European-Italian routes of trade and pilgrimage that also enabled mobility among musicians. Trade routes between Castile, France and Flanders, as well as between the Aragonese Levant and the Mediterranean, were well established, and diplomatic links between the monarchs and other princes as well asthe papacy (see Chapter 6) were abundant and strongly served by some of the most intelligent and powerful men at court (Torre 1949–66; Torre & Suárez Fernández 1958–63; Fernández de Córdova Miralles 2014). Traffic, both political and cultural, between the peninsula and Aragonese Naples was maintained during peace and war through family connections, while shrewd dynastic alliances—mostly created to contain French power—were forged with Portugal (see Chapter 6), Habsburg Burgundy and Austria, and Tudor England through the marriage of the monarchs’ five children into foreign princely dynasties. This political and diplomatic European network was an important conduit for cultural exchange that brought the Spanish kingdoms into contact with the musical mainstream on several fronts. Successin the ‘crusade’ in Andalusia and North Africa helped to put the monarchs on the political map; the taking of Granada in 1492 was celebrated throughout Europe, and no more so than in Rome, with the publication of eulogies, and the performance of plays and festivities of all kinds, including the running of bulls (Rincón González 1992). However, it was above all the double marriage between the Trastámara and Hapsburg dynasties that would prove to be the most decisive politically—and musically: in 1496, Philip the Fair, son of Maximilian I, married Juana (known as‘la loca’), and Maximilian’s daughter, Margarite of Austria, was wed to Prince Juan, heir to the thrones of both Castile and Aragon. The unforeseen deaths of Juan (1497), the monarchs’ eldest daughter Isabel (1498) and of her young son Miguel (1500)—according to the royal chronicler Andrés Bernáldez the knives that pierced Isabel’s heart—led to Juana and Philip being sworn as heirs to the Castilian and Aragonese thrones in Toledo in 1502 (Knighton 2005a). On this first visit to Spain, Philip, as befitted a Burgundian duke who found himself unexpectedly to be the heir to a royal crown, travelled with a substantial retinue, including the members of his chapel in which Marbriano de Orto, Pierre de La Rue and Alexander Agricola numbered among the singer-composers (Duggan 1976; Knighton 2005a; Ferer 2012). When Philip returned as King of Castile after the death of Isabel in November 1504, La Rue and Agricola travelled south again, and were possibly joined by the most celebrated composer of the age, Josquin des Prez (Fallows 2009: 229–31). Agricola died in the early autumn of 1506, but La Rue remained in Spain in Juana’s service for the best part of two years (Knighton 2014). Reinhard Strohm has suggested that the visits of Philip’s choirseemed to havemade little immediate impact on composers in the royal chapels(Strohm 1993: 605–6), but Kenneth Kreitner’srecent analysis of the Masses and motets composed by members of the royal chapels, as well asthe major cathedrals, hasled him to conclude that Philip’s visits marked a watershed in their approach to composing these genres in the early years of the sixteenth century,specifically in the emergence of the cyclicMass(Kreitner 2012, 2014a) (see Chapter 1). Given the well-established political, diplomatic, trade and cultural links between the Spanish kingdoms and other parts of Europe where the mainstream Franco-Netherlandish musical idiom flourished, the notion of a Flemish coup de foudre needs to be nuanced, but the prolonged sojourns in the Spanish kingdoms of La Rue and his companions cannot have been without impact. Musical culture at the time of the Catholic Monarchs was thus consistently dynamic: unprecedented expansion in the employment of musiciansin a peripatetic court that came into regular contact with other ecclesiastic and civic environments, played a major part in stimulating musical activity in the peninsula,while highly developed political and diplomatic networkswere reinforced across Europe and, after 1492, extended to the New World. Musical developments were not linear, but in a constant state of flux: French chansons were still sung alongside Castilian-texted canciones in the earlier part of the period, while Italian frottole were performed together with the villancico as the reign of the Catholic Monarchs progressed. Polyphonization of specific genres—the secular romance, or liturgical music for the Office, particularly in important occasional genressuch asthe Lamentations or Requiem Mass—is marked during the period, as is the general shift from consumption of music to participation in music-making among those members of society with leisure time at their disposal. Yet even these trends did not evolve in a logical, ever progressing Darwinian fashion, and often flourished concurrently with earlier traditions. The romance provides a good example (see Chapters 2 and 3): polyphonic versions of ballads, composed and performed by musicians employed in the royal chapels, seem to have emerged around the 1460s and ‘70s, the genre thereby taking on an official, image-making role. During the Granadine campaigns of the 1480s and early 1490s, the polyphonic romance seems almost to have become a kind of Staatsmusik in the vernacular, extolling the monarchs— Ferdinand for his skill at arms, Isabel for her prayers—and becoming the vehicle for the communication of the greatness of their deeds and achievements. Yet they do not seem to have entered the wider, more popular imagination once the campaign was concluded as did, for example, the frontier ballads and those with their roots in much earlier chivalric deeds. The texts of the official Granadine romances are not to be found in the poetic anthologies, even the otherwise all-encompassing Cancionero general of 1511, and certainly not among the romances—intended to be performed in the traditional mannerfor voice and vihuela—included in Luis Milán’s El maestro (1536). Traditional romances—Paseávase el rey moro or the tale of Gaiferos, for example—had a much longer shelf-life and were never ousted by the brief period of official appropriation of the genre. This introduction has not aimed to be a review of the musical historiography of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel, but rather to place the different chapters into a broader context, both historically and historiographically.15 The classic studies of Anglés and Stevenson have been highly influential in this field for well over half a century, and their research hasin many waysremained valid and useful, as illustrated by the more recent historical overview of the period to be found in the second volume of the series Historia de la música en España e Hispano América covering the period from the Catholic Monarchs to Philip II (Gómez [Muntané] 2012b). This volume, covering more than a century and focusing on the musical history of the Spanish-speaking world, is perhaps inevitably tied to a linear chronological approach that is essentially inward-looking in its charting of what happened in Spain. This is not to discredit some fine contributions, notably those by Juan Ruiz Jiménez, one of the authors in this collection of essays. General historians have made important recent contributions that consider various aspects of the personnel, spaces and ceremonies of the royal court (Domínguez Casas 1993; Fernández de Córdova Miralles 2002). A companion of the present kind, with the potential for a more discursive consideration of the relevant material and related concepts, offers a more multi-faceted approach that will hopefully throw up new connections both within the Iberian world and looking outwards to its European and transatlantic context.Thusthis collection of essays aimsto provide a synthesis of research and knowledge to date, to draw attention to new research and to open up new directions to follow. It cannot aim to be totally comprehensive: much research remains to be done, for instance into the impact of private devotions on musical developments, on the presence of different ethnic musics and the contribution of unwritten popular traditions in general, or on the rise of domestic music-making and the activities of instrument-makers and music copyists in the larger urban centres of the Spanish kingdoms in this period. One area in particular that hasreceived little attention to date isthat of women and music; numerous general studies on Queen Isabel and her daughters mention music en passant, often in largely anecdotal fashion, but little is known about the broader picture at court and beyond, and this is the focus of Ascensión Mazuela’s contribution to this volume (see Chapter 14). Women, she argues, can be given a greater degree of protagonism in religious contexts, and through a closer consideration of them in the light of change brought about by education and other cultural developments such as printing. Pilar Ramos, too, emphasizes the importance of printing in stimulating the publication and diffusion of the largely practical treatises or handbooks produced by Spanish authors during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, works that show an incipient awareness of the dialectic between tradition and innovation (see Chapter 12). This volume attempts, within what is possible with the current state of research, to map different aspects of musical life and experience at the time of the Catholic Monarchs and to bring them to the attention of allscholars of this period, whether musicologists or those working in other areas of cultural history, in order to begin to understand how the Iberian world related to developments, activity and creativity in the broader Western European music cultural tradition.
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