(fl c1240–70). Galician jongleur. Six of the seven songs attributed to him survive with music in the Vindel Manuscript, a single folded leaf probably written in the late 13th century, found in 1913 by the Madrid bookseller Pedro Vindel and since 1977 at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (M979). The texts, in Galician-Portuguese, survive without music in two manuscripts copied in Italy in the 16th century. The songs belong to the poetic genre cantiga de amigo. This kind of cantiga was composed and possibly sung by a man but was supposed to convey the feelings and thoughts of a young woman longing for her absent lover. The poets tended to use an archaic technique known as parallelism, which called for the presentation of the same idea twice in successive stanzas, the second time with a change of word at the line-ends (codas). The stanzas were short and were generally followed by a refrain; the refrain was not meant to be choral, and may have been freely rendered by the singer. Set in Vigo on the west coast of Spain, near the Portuguese border, Codax's songs seem to belong together as a cycle; their structural and rhetorical features lend further support to this view, to which most scholars have subscribed. The music, however, shows no trace of modal ordering. In the Vindel Manuscript the melodies were copied by two different scribes. The quasi-mensural character of the musical notation (use of semibreve, breve and long, and of semibreve-semibreve ligatures), which nonetheless displays some typically Iberian traits, allows us to see at least two styles of rhythmic notation; that corresponding to the first scribe has been described as rhapsodic, with a juxtaposition of rhythmic patterns and melodic formulae (also found elsewhere) resulting in an irregular alternation of shorts and longs. The music is closely tied to the structural features of the poem: the regular strophic accents, the internal strophic contrast marked by the coda, and the opposition between strophe and refrain are enhanced by melodic features. The songs tend to be in AA'B form, use a small compass (typically a major 6th) and move mostly by step; the articulation of the text is syllabic or neumatic, melismas including generally no more than four notes (seven being the maximum). In spite of a distinctive, rhetorically expressive character which sets the music apart from other surviving courtly music of the time, it relates to Gregorian psalmody and shares some formulaic vocabulary with the religious Cantigas de Santa María. Apart from seven cantigas de amor by the Portuguese King Dom Dinis and the Marian cantigas, these are the only Galician-Portuguese lyrics from the Middle Ages to survive with their melodies.
P. Vindel: Las siete canciones de amor: poema musical del siglo XII (Madrid, 1915) [incl. facs. and edn]
S. Tafall Abad: ‘Texto musical de Martin Codax (interpretación y crítica)’, Boletín de la Real Academia gallega, xii (1917), 265–71
J. Ribera: ‘De música y métrica gallegas’, Homenaje ofrecido a Ramón Menéndez Pidal (Madrid, 1925), iii, 7–35
I. Pope: ‘Mediaeval Latin Background of the Thirteenth-Century Galician Lyric’, Speculum, ix (1934), 3–25
C. Ferreira da Cunha: O cancioneiro de Martin Codax (Rio de Janeiro, 1956)
H. Anglés, ed.: La música de las Cantigas de Santa María del Rey Alfonso el Sabio, iii/2 (Barcelona, 1958), 447, 589; appx, 53
G. Tavani: ‘Parallelismo e iterazione: appunti in margine al criterio di pertinenza’, Cultura neolatina, xxxiii (1973), 3–12
B. Spaggiari: ‘Il canzoniere di Martin Codax’, Studi medievali, 3rd ser., xxi (1980), 367–409
I. Fernández de la Cuesta: ‘Les cantigas de amigo de Martín Codax’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, xxv (1982), 179–85
M.P. Ferreira: The Sound of Martin Codax: on the Musical Dimension of the Galician-Portuguese Lyric (Lisbon, 1986) [bilingual edn incl. facs.]
M.P. Ferreira: ‘Martin Codax’, Dicionário da literatura medieval galega e portuguesa, ed. G. Lanciani and G. Tavani (Lisbon, 1993)
MANUEL PEDRO FERREIRA