Carlos A. CuestasProf. Anne StoneMedieval Lyric, Fall 2014November 26, 2014

Considerations in performing the Cantinas de Santa MariaThe astonishing collection of 427 poems set to music in the Cantinas de Santa Maria codices produced and co-authored by king Alfonso X of Castile and Leon play a critical, yet isolated, role in the scholarship surrounding troubadour and trouvere literature of the thirteenth century. The persistent lacunae surrounding this work seems to be permanent since defining the ambiguities around rhythm, tempo, use of instruments, and arabic, sephardic and folk music influences does not seem plausible. Yet, these issues have not deterred a constant production of performances and recordings of this work in modern times. Quite the contrary. The impossibility of reaching a single line of performance has motivated constant reinterpretations of this repertoire, none of them claiming absolute truth, yet making performative choices that play a role in the wide once polarizing discussion of Medieval Performance Practices. This paper will aim at mapping all the considerations a performer has to face when dealing with Medieval music in very general terms, and the Cantinas de Santa Mara specifically, while examining the question of authenticity as well as analyzing some of the arguments developed around the performance of medieval repertoire. Some considerations regarding performance practice should be mentioned. Medieval performance practice has been the grounds of fertile and passionate discussion since the late nineteenth century, as evidenced by the interpretations and writings of Hugo Riemanns and his followers, and its detractors in the late twentieth century lead by David Fallows and Christopher Page.[ missing footnote] The overarching discussion of these two divergent schools is mostly on the grounds of the participation of instruments in performance and how these shape the musical form of the works and its reception, particularly of French polyphony. However, a much larger question surfaces when considering what are the goals of the performance practice movement and how do these apply to a specific repertoire. The question of authenticity is the first one that comes to mind. How authentic can a performance get? Who determines said authenticity? In his article Musicologa e Interpretacin[ missing footnote], Carlos Villanueva problematizes the issue of authenticity by comparing it to the Protected Designation of Origin [of a produce]: a kind of voucher for such consumer that, more than anything, is in search of non-adulterated products, original, and of great quality. The implication here is that performance practice, as a whole, is a modern fabricated brand that caters to an audience modeled after this brand, who make up a new market hungry for novel and original alternatives different from the mainstream of classical music. The performers and audiences need for authenticity of a temporal phenomenon, such as music, is doubtfully achievable. On this issue, Villanueva adds that : The essence of music, the secret of its transmission, precisely consists of its temporal form, which intimately corresponds with the temporality of consciousness: an act of creation in which composer and interpreter both participate. [ Carlos Cuestas, 11/30/14, 11:03 AM] Because performance is an act dependent on temporality, one must then evaluate if a degree of authenticity can be claimed period performances can indeed achieve. Regardless of the degree of accuracy in which a concert can replicate a passed event, the end result of a period performance is not alien to current interpretative and performative traditions. When shifting the perspective from either the performer or scholar to that of the audience, the search for authenticity seems even more elusive. In the hypothetical case in which a given performance manages to be authentic, the fact that the audience the one part neither scholars nor performers can control is not able to culturally relate to such performance would render authenticity irrelevant. In other words, whether or not performers have achieved a true level of authenticity, this cannot be accounted for because the audience would not be able to culturally relate to it, since no audience member grew up in a previous historical period. Therefore, I argue that an audiences reception of a repertoire out of its historical, social, and cultural context and its impossibility to relate to it inherently keeps a performance from reaching the goal of authenticity. If this premise is accepted, then the ultimate goal of performance practice cannot be contingent to achieving an authentic way of performing a repertoire and other positions must be adopted. The CSM are exclusive because these were constructed with the idea of being publicly perfomed and interacted with between the intended audience and performers!!![ Develop and tie over]

The Cantigas de Santa Maria are a collection of poems set to music and individually illuminated commissioned and coauthored by king Alfonso X of Castile and Leon (1221-1284).1 The poems, compiled between 1257-1279 are narratives of Marian miracles that were commonly known, and they also depict everyday life situations which offers a window into the lifestyle of thirteenth century Castilian society. There are four extant manuscripts, three of them with musical notation and one without, but containing blank staves. Two of the manuscripts are housed in the Escorial library: Escorial J.B.2 or Cdice Princeps or de los msicos (E) and Escorial T.I.1 or Cdice Rico (T). The main difference between these two manuscripts is that MS E has the most poems set to music (427 total) and MS T contains the most illuminations per miracle, with over 1200 miniatures with 194 cantigas set to music.2 The third MS is the Banco Rari of the Biblioteca Nazionale of Florence, formerly known as II.I.213 (MS F). This MS is considered to be a continuation of MS T (the rich codex) as it contains 113 different cantigas, mostly taken from the second part of MS E. Unfortunately, the staves in MS F are empty, and the miniatures are in different states of completion.3 The last MS is commonly known as To and is housed in the Biblioteca Nacional (MS 10069). It was once housed in the Cathedral library at Toledo (hence its To denomination) and it contains 100 cantigas. This MS has no illuminations and only the music of the refrain and the first strophe are written in.4 The possible reason behind the existence of the four manuscripts may lie behind the fact that Alfonso Xs court was rather itinerant and that the king might wanted to leave copies of this work in his main posts, like Sevilla and Toledo.

The scholastic nature of Alfonso Xs court has lead scholars to believe that the the Cantigas de Santa Maria were meant to be accessible to the public, and this accessibility could not be other than through performances of some sorts. This information comes from the king himself , as J. E. Keller writes, Alfonso Xs intended legacy and his explicit desire on his last will and testament [as Alfonso X] decreed that the songs of holy Mary be sing on her feast days in that church in which his body would be interred. This turned out to be in the cathedral of Seville, where his Cantigas are even now sung to instrumental accompaniment.5 Kellers argument is rather persuasive in which he sees this corpus as something the Castilian society might have access to in one way or another, and wold have had a threefold experience via visual, verbal, and musical renditions. First, Keller suggests that the visual impact is generated since these could have been on display , given that it was common for churches to have in public view the relics, jewels, saints forensic remains and important belongings to the church. He adds also that the miracles themselves could have been dramatically reenacted in the church, as evidence could be drawn from Rutebeufs Miracle de Thophile (itself a Marian miracle and the third one of the cantigas collection) written ca 1265 in France, or, as Richard Kinkade suggested, that some pieces of thirteenth-century Spanish literature, even some found in the Mester de Clereca, might have been made into a dramatic production.6 The verbal impact, needless to say, comes from the written word, tough it should be said that these poems are narratives of miracles written in verse and set to music. There is an extra layer of verbal impact in that each illumination not only depicts the miracle being narrated, but there is also text vignettes that explain the miniature much like modern-day cartoons. Then there is the musical impact. As a valid reminder, though, Kellers argument is that each cantiga offered a three-part impact to the spectator, and while not in disagreement with him, I will now focus on how the musical aspect of the cantigas may help the modern day performer design a performance around the conventions in which this work might have been performed. In agreement with Keller, it is difficult to believe that there exists no relationship whatsoever between text and melody in such a painstakingly constructed work. Even if contemporary and future music scholars are never able to disclose a relationship, judging by how much king Alfonso X cared about music, poetry, and, over all, structure, it is not a long shot to assume the possibility that, as Keller says, sorrowful miracles were set to plaintive melodies and that martial miracles were set ti tunes more in keeping with warfare and violence.7How exactly plaintive melodies or martial tunes sounded back then, we may never know, but text and melodic relationships in this repertoire should not be be dismissed either.

Aware of the notion that the CSM could have been meant to be publicly performed for and made accessible to the common Castilian folk as well as to the courtly one a more technical view of the melodic and rhythmic content is called for. Since MS E compiles most of the songs, this is the one to be discussed from now on. As previously mentioned, the CSM are outstanding because of the consistency and uniformity of its content around an thematic ordering and authorial considerations as opposed to the anthological and collection character of the contemporary French and Occitan chansonniers. The overarching structure of the MS itself has the Prologue, Cantiga 1 and every ten cantigas (cant. 10, 20, 30, etc) organized as a Cantiga de Loor or song of praise. The illumination, which will be discussed further in the paper, coincides with this grouping of ten, for each of this cantiga is illuminated by a single player, believed to be Alphonso X himself, except for the cantiga 390, which has now been established to be a miscalculation in the part of the clerk, as it was meant to be the illumination of cantiga 400. This sense of structure is also found in the chosen genre for the majority of the poems and its melodic design.

The CSM are for the most part songs composed in virelais, a genre that for its return to the refrain would allow interaction between the congregation or a vocal ensemble, and a soloist, as suggested by Ismael Fernandez de la Cuestas study8. In his work, the author argues that an analysis of the melodic content in terms of intervalic and range of the cantigas could help unveil the compositional process and the intended audience of the piece.9 If one considers de la Cuestas findings plausible, these could influence future performances in terms of programming and interpretation. His ideas will now be examined.In his study, de la Cuesta focuses on two general aspects of the melodic structure: the presence of intervals of a perfect fourth or greater in four different points of the melody, and the range of the refrain vis-a-vis the stanza. The reason behind choosing the perfect fourth as a significant border interval for this study is that the presence of a fourth in the posited significant parts of the melody unveil compositional intentionality and originality, as such intervals are both more demanding for the singer and are least likely to come from folk traditions10 implying that the long held belief that the cantigas were folk melodies of arabic and jewish influence are more obscured than initially thought and it could shed a light as to what the intended audience for this works was. The first significant point of melodic analysis is the opening interval (the distance between the first two notes) and, expectedly, the final two notes. For the former group, intervals of a fourth or greater are only 15 in total (3.5% of the cantigas), two of them being descending fourth intervals (cantigas 348, 383). For the latter, 33 cantigas feature large intervals, 18 of them being descending intervals.

Many of the clues that build historical performances come in the way of iconography. In the CSM this is, by far, not the exception. The richly illuminated manuscripts pay much attention to musical instruments and these accompany the overarching structure of grouping the cantigas in 10s: namely, every 10 cantigas (of loor) there is a miniature of instrumentalists, and every hundred canting that depiction is, most certainly, king Alfonso X. The wealth of instruments depicted in MS E and its organization raises many questions: could these miniatures be used as definite proof of the use of instruments in this repertoire? How literal are the depiction of instruments? Are these even real?How literal are the depictions of instrumental ensembles? Is there a relationship between the poetic text, the musical setting, and the miniatures themselves? After looking into greater detail the content of the iconography in MS E, an attempt would be made to answer this questions, particularly the ones directly concerning the issues of performance. MS E offers 41 miniatures of instruments of diverse families: chordophones (harps, lutes, viols, zithers, guitars), aerophones (flutes, single and double reeds, brass, bagpipes, partitive organ), membranophones (tambouring and drums), and idiophones (cymbals, castanets, carillon). Chordophones and aerophones are the most represented in the illuminations. In her thorough study, Rosario Alvarez has identified about 90 different musical instruments of the families mentioned above, some of them depicted with greater detailed than others, and her ideas are worth exploring since these will raise the issue of how much or how little performers can argument the use of instruments based on illuminations.11After a meticulous study of the miniatures, Alvarez has concluded that these were realized by seven different artists, of varying degrees of accomplishment and, most importantly, artistic expression. This is significant if one ponders about the intention of these rich illuminations: could MS E be taken as an organological treatise from the thirteenth century, in which case artistic expression is constricted by the objective depiction of the instruments, or are these illuminations of a scholastic character meant to be viewed as a testament of the musical diversity and the cultural fortification of the Marian cult that were present in the court of Alfonso X? lvarezs opinion falls on the latter, arguing that the idea of an organological treatise meant to organize the diverse instrumental families and to systematize them, showing through drawings their many features, was alien to that moment. There was no need in this period for such systematization.12 This argument is persuasive if one considers that when illuminations show two instrumentalists playing the same instrument, the instruments themselves have differences in the number of strings, the way these are held and played, which attest for symbolic of music depiction and artistic expression from the illuminators of as opposed to a systematic approach. Even though the organological iconography found in the CSM was only meant to show the instruments used at court instead of it being an instrumental treatise, the illuminations inform us about the practice of accompanying singing and dancing with instruments and could inform a modern performance of these works if the ensembles depicted are taken into consideration. Throughout MS E, and in some instances of MS T, which makes this claim significant, there is a tendency of depicting ensembles made out of bowed and string instruments (MS E cantigas 1, 10, 20, 170; MS T Prologue, cantigas 100, 120). According to Alvarez, this tendency is derived, presumably, form Arab music, from which diverse elements were taken.13 Another ensemble depicted with some consistency groups aerophones with either an idiophone or a membranophone (MS E cantigas 300 and 330). Given the already mentioned consistency prevailing in the CSM, these depictions of ensembles should not be dismissed as capricious from the part of the illuminators, even though these cannot be taken as indisputable proof of period ensembles. Rather, the commonsensical instrumental groupings of these examples should be considered as a plausible evidence for such practices. Unfortunately iconography cannot precisely inform the modern performer on how the music was actually played, what instrumental techniques were used, or how was the voice to be accompanied. The contemporary tendency of focusing in the vocal performance is explicable since all of the thirteenth century musical documentation is centered around singing and tells us nothing about instrumental practices. However, iconography does suggest the constant use of instruments in musical performance. The job of the modern musician then is to fill the gap of instrumental accompaniment to vocal music without getting on the way of the singer, yet without grounds of harmonic discourse, instrumental interludes, and interaction with the voice, which may render it a frustrating task. Instrumentalists then are relegated to doubling the singer, playing drones, and doing some melodic and rhythmic variations to make the music more attractive for the modern audience, sometimes going to the extreme of borrowing middle eastern melodic traits and tropes to account for the suspected oriental influence this repertoire had borrowings that tend to be, at worst, ethnocentric. Instrumental usage is the most contended issue in the history of the performance practice of medieval music and the issue may never be settled. Yet, while it is obvious that for repertoire like the CSM instruments were used, modern performances of these works should do their best to evoke the high regard Alfonso X had for music and convey it to the modern audience.

The issue of rhythm in the alfonsine repertoire is of great complexity and, while seminal to construct a performance, the technicalities of the discussion far exceeds the scope of this paper. However, a brief summary of the issue will be provided. Unlike the contemporary French and Occitan song collections, the CSM do offer explicit mensural notation which has influences of French as well as Arab rhythmic theories. The problem grows bigger by the fact that there were no theory treatises left to us from Alfonso Xs court. In his recent study, Manuel Pedro Ferreira exposes the intricacies of editing the rhythmic aspects of the CSM, as the modern transcriber should be aware of the rhythmic intention of a poem and the impossibility of pinning down a meter that would govern such poem.14 Ad Ismael Fernandez de la Cuesta pointed, In order to discover te exact contour of the rhythmic significance [ . . . ] One must consider the autonomous value, rhythmically speaking, of each verse , which could be subdivided according to the rules of musica mensurata in binary or ternary sounds.15 As Ferreira points out, even though Parisian rhythmic theory could be used to edit and perform some of the poems, there are many instances that this cannot be done, as in the binary rhythms implied by text settings (Cantiga 100 is a good example) and Parisian rhytmic theory does not account for binary rhythms. Going one step forward, Ferreira purposes that [this] repertoire does not have to conform to French-based expectations, for it often mirrors non-Parisian musical traditions. The tradition most conspicuously present is that of Arab-Andalusian music . As stated above, the technical discussion on rhythm is too complex to fully explain in this paper, yet necessary to mention. .

1 There is an ongoing discussion of to what extend did Alfonso X participated in the authorship of the poems. The consistency of the CSM seem to ,make a case for that. See Walter Mettmann, Algunas Observations Sobre la Genesis de las Cantigas in Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X, El Sabio (1221-1284)in Commemoration of Its 700th Anniversary Year 1981 (New York: Madison 1987), pp. 355-366.2 Connie L. Scarborough, Women in Thirteenth-Century Spain as Portrayed in Alfonso Xs Cantigas de Santa Maria (Edwin Mellen Press: Wales, 1993), 3.3 Ibid.4 Ibid.5 John E. Keller The Threefold Impact of the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Visual, Verbal, and Musical in Proceedings of the International Symposium of the CSMp. 11.6 Ibid.7 Ibid p. 158 Ismael Fernandez de la Cuesta Los Elementos Melodicos en las CSM Revista de Musicologa Vol. 7, No. 1 (Jan-Jun 1984), pp.5-449 Ibid.10 Ibid.11 Rosario Avarez Los Instrumentos Musicales en los Cdigos Alfonsinos: Su Tipologa, Su Uso, y Su Origen. Algunos Problemas Iconograficos in Revista de Musicologa, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Jan-April 1987)12 Ibid13 Ibid., p. 8914 Manuel Pedro Ferreira Editing the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Notational Decisions in Revista Portuguesa de Musicologia, Nueva Serie (Jan 1 2014) p. 43.15 Ismael Fernandez de la Cuesta Las Cantigas de Santa Maria: Replanteamiento Musicologico de le Cuestion in Revista de Musicologa, Vol. 10, No 1 (Jan-April 1987) p. 23