A Spanish and Portuguese medieval monophonic song. The words ‘cantiga’, ‘cantica’ and ‘cantar’ were widely used in the Iberian peninsula up to about 1450 to designate a song, as opposed to decir, which was looked upon as a poem; but apart from six secular love songs by Martin Codax and the seven extant songs with music by Dom Dinis, the only surviving music is that of the Cantigas de Santa María of Alfonso el Sabio. This collection of over 400 songs about the Virgin Mary was made between about 1270 and 1290 under the direction of King Alfonso and illuminated with illustrative miniatures, the whole forming one of the great artistic achievements of the Middle Ages. Most of these cantigas are ballad-style accounts of miracles performed by the Blessed Virgin (cantiga de miragres) but every tenth is a hymn in her praise (cantiga de loor). The poems are in Portuguese-Galician (akin to Portuguese), a language chosen not merely because Galicia was part of Alfonso’s kingdom but because it was often considered by Spanish poets up to the 15th century to be suitable for lyric poetry. Strictly, then, the word ‘cantiga’ in Alfonso’s collection should be given a Portuguese pronunciation (stress on the first syllable, hispanicized as cántiga) but the Spanish pronunciation (stress on the second) has become more accepted.
The Alfonsine Cantigas have survived in four manuscripts (see Sources, MS, §III, 6). Three (E-E T.j.1, b.I.2 and Mn 10069) are of the 13th or 14th century and offer the same poems and melodies with a few exceptions and a number of minor variants. The miniatures all differ, however, except for those depicting Alfonso, which concur in presenting him in the role of supervisor of or instructor to clerical and secular scribes in the process of compiling the Cantigas (see fig.1), while minstrels – and possibly singers in T.j.1 – tune up or wait. Despite this evidence, there is disagreement about whether the king limited his part to supervision or whether he wrote some of the words and music himself. On the one hand, the manuscripts state several times that Alfonso ‘made’ certain cantigas, and in some (e.g. nos.1, 347, 400 and 401) he speaks in the first person. Clearly, too, he had a special affection for this Marian collection; and his talents were such that he could turn his hand to composition if he wished. On the other hand, there is a finality about the explanation given in his General estoria: ‘The king writes a book … in the sense that he gathers the material for it … adapts it, shows the manner in which it is to be presented and orders what is to be written’.
Other cantigas have survived without music but they are all secular, variously cantigas de amigo (love songs sung or spoken by a girl), cantigas de escarnio (scurrilous or satirical), cantigas de gesta (narrative or epic) and others. For this and other reasons, scholars have concluded that for the Cantigas de Santa María Alfonso’s team often took well-known secular tunes and fitted them to new, moralized words (contrafacta). There can be no doubt that this technique was adopted partly because it served Alfonso’s intention to bring home the everyday reality of divine grace: cantiga no.279, for instance, tells how the king was miraculously cured of an illness when a volume containing some cantigas was placed on his person. It is nearly as certain that Alfonso was fired by his usual artistic creativeness and that the Cantigas were intended for performance as much in secular circles as in church.
So vivid are many of the texts and especially the miniatures that it seems right to interpret them by the strictly anachronistic criterion of realism as a true-to-life document of medieval times. Using a down-to-earth style in the poems and a ‘comic strip’ technique in the illustrations, the Cantigas (excluding those de loor) recount European legends, local anecdotes, household tales and so on; portraying merchants as they travel to England and France, pilgrims journeying to shrines in and outside Spain, Moors and Christians giving battle, minstrels entertaining their superiors, a Jewish money-lender hoarding his profits, a physician amputating a foot, patients tended in hospital and criminals flogged, hanged, beheaded, stoned, speared or burnt at the stake; a young bride who has made a vow of chastity to the Virgin is raped by her frustrated bridegroom; a woman stricken by the loss of her husband fornicates with her son and later drops their child down the privy; a nun is about to flee with the knight who has seduced her. In every case, the Virgin appears at the crucial moment to dispense mercy and justice in a miraculous but – for the age – a wholly credible way.
Clearly the narrative content was a vital part of the Cantigas’ appeal. Indeed, it has been suggested (see Cummins) that, because the use of poetic techniques such as inter-strophic enjambement made symmetrical musical settings impossible, the Cantigas were not necessarily sung. There is, however, little evidence that 13th-century composers would have felt scruples about such symmetry in fitting contrafacta to given tunes: matching text to music was primarily a matter of matching moods. Of 417 poems in b.I.2, only four were copied without music; though I-Fn B.R.20 has no music, it was clearly planned as a collection of songs with their melodies. In general, then, the manuscripts show that the Cantigas were conceived by Alfonso as songs and performed as songs. The poems vary both in line length (from four to 16 syllables) and in the number of lines per stanza, but they are remarkably alike in that they all have refrains and many (about 360) are metrically in the form of the Zajal. Musically nearly all are virelais in forms such as AB CCAB AB, AB BBAB AB, AA BBAA AA, AB BBCB AB and ABCD EFEF ABCD. By setting the zajal to the musical form of the villancico, Alfonso’s musicians produced a kind of asymmetrical villancico that was to persist up to the 16th century.
There are some grounds for supposing (see Le Gentil, Pope) that the refrain would have been sung in chorus and the stanzas by a solo voice, though there is no clear indication in the manuscripts that this was so; the right-hand group of clerics in the illustration to cantiga no.1 in E-E T.j.1 may be singers, but if so they are a chapel choir and not court minstrels; the only singer in action in the miniatures is the fidula player on the right illustrating cantiga no.120 (Ribera no.12). There is other documentary evidence that minstrels sang to their own accompaniment. The only illustration of the performance of a cantiga by composite groups prefaces T.j.1; it shows six instrumentalists who are playing a bowed fidula, a shawm, three psalteries and presumably a sixth instrument which is hidden, as well as four dancers. In sum, the miniatures seem to provide indispensable evidence that the Cantigas were sung by one or more voices variously accompanied by one, two or a group of instruments and sometimes by dancers. All parts, except drones, would have been in unison or at the octave. Nevertheless, Anglès felt that the miniatures give no clue to the performance of the particular cantigas they illustrate. Even if this subjective impression is valid, the general effect of those illustrations containing instruments is not so much one of stylization as of precise, objective representation (see Guerrero Lovillo). Some are surely even portraits of individual minstrels (Ribera nos.9, 10, 11; 23, 24, 25) rather than types. Most are shown in matter-of-fact style tuning up (Ribera nos.9, 13, 14, 26, 28), or getting a cue or a word of encouragement from the leader (Ribera nos.3, 4, 11, 19, 22, 30, 31) – or a stinging reprimand (no.16), or blowing strenuously into double shawms (no.36) and so on. Once again, then, the miniatures supply indispensable information about the instruments used in performing Alfonso’s cantigas – over 40 different kinds in all (the miniatures were printed by Ribera as follows: cantiga no.10 = Ribera no.1; cantiga no.20 = Ribera no.2 and so on):
bowed: fidulas (preface to b.I.2, cantigas nos.10, 20, 100), rebab or
rebec (no.110)
plucked: citterns or guitars (preface to b.I.2, 10, 150), mandolas (20,
150, Libro de los juegos), lutes (30, 170), fidulas (120, 130, 140),
rebab or rebec (90), psalteries or zithers (40, 50, 70, 80, 290, Libro de
los juegos) and harps (380)
blown: shawms (300, 310, 330, 390, preface to T.j.1) and double shawms
(220, 360), bladder pipes (230, 250), transverse flutes (240), pipes or
recorders (340, 370), trumpets (320), horns or trombas (270), bagpipes (260,
280, 350); portative organ (200); drums and tabors (300, 370), clappers or
castanets (330), cymbals (190), chime bells (180, 400); symphonia or organistrum
(160).
Nine years after Alfonso’s death, a record notes that there were 27 salaried musicians in his son’s employ in the court; of these, 13 were Arabs or Moors (two being women) and one a Jew. These were probably inherited from Alfonso himself. At least two Moorish minstrels appear in the miniatures (Ribera no.12 and Libro de los juegos). Of the Hispanic figures, the psaltery players or harpists are portrayed as specially aristocratic and only the pipe players (Ribera no.34) are in any way rustic. Women play the harp (Ribera no.38) or psaltery or lute (Libro de los juegos).
The melodies are in a variety of modes but the Dorian and Mixolydian predominate. Their quality has been widely praised but caution is needed here because the square notation used in all the manuscripts still presents serious problems of transcription as regards metre, rhythm and melisma. Ribera’s versions have been discredited by Anglès, who totally dismissed the former’s nonetheless tempting argument that the music was partly Islamic. Anglès’s transcriptions are unquestionably the most reliable to date but inevitably open to objections.
Though the Alfonsine notation appears to be comparable to that of other contemporary manuscripts elsewhere in Europe (see Troubadours, trouvères; Sources, MS, §III; Notation, §III, 1), Anglès came to interpret the cantigas differently. Feeling that the melodies lacked distinction when transcribed strictly according to the theory of modal notation, he concluded that monody in the 13th century followed more flexible systems and that the transcriptions were more convincingly made on the basis of a mixed mensural–modal notation in some cases and a mensural notation using both binary and ternary non-modal rhythms in others. A corollary of Anglès’s method is that the plica did not imply any melisma. He suggested that this flexible method might provide the key to the notation of troubadour monody in Europe generally, though admittedly the key eluded him even in the Cantigas, where he detected no fixed rules of musical composition related to poetic metre, syllable count or line length.
Even this conscientious scholar, then, was forced (like Ribera) to resort to subjective musical sensitivity for his ultimate criteria of transcription, shored up by the conviction that the authentic rhythms could be found echoed in modern Spanish folksong. But this notion that the Cantigas express ‘the character and spirit of our popular song’ in an unbroken tradition from the 13th century to the present seems implausible. Almost certainly Alfonso encouraged his team to borrow well-known songs of his day but the evidence suggests that these were drawn from troubadouresque sources on both sides of the Pyrenees and not just from plebeian Spanish folksong. The tunes that have been identified so far are not Spanish in origin at all. Some are trouvère songs by Gautier de Dargies (no.216; see Anglès, iii, 313) and Cadenet (no.380; iii, 545), or anonymous (no.202; iii, 309); no.340 is an alba by Cadenet (iii, 216, 351); others recall rondeaux (nos.97, 49, 152, 244, 316; iii, 276) or a conductus in rondeau form from Notre Dame, Paris (no.290; iii, 215, 337); no.29 (iii, 253) resembles a melody by Johannes de Garlandia, others (iii, 125) recall songs by the troubadour Monge de Montaudo; no.100 is reminiscent of the anonymous Lamento di Tristano.
Alfonso’s court was clearly a haven for French, Islamic and Jewish culture and a natural refuge for troubadours fleeing from Provence in post-Albigensian times; Guiraut Riquier, for instance, stayed there from 1269 to 1279. Nos.61, 91, 106 and 298 are set in Soissons and must owe something to the Miracles de la sainte vierge by Gautier de Coincy. Indeed, more than 100 of the Cantigas refer to France, Italy, England and other countries abroad; some of these recount widespread legends, others honour foreign shrines, others tell of pilgrims journeying through Arles, Orléans, Bordeaux and so on into Spain. In general, the Cantigas bear witness to the wisdom of a king able to rise above national limits in the service of religion and art.
JACK SAGE
MGG2 (M. Gómez)
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