Endechas

(Sp., Port.: ‘dirge’; sometimes sing., endecha).

A funeral song and, from about 1500, an elegy or lament. With the exception of endechas de canaria (or endechas canarias), the genre followed no consistent poetic or musical form, although endechas of quatrains of six-syllable lines were common in the 16th century. Endechas de canaria were regularly in rhymed tercets and the music was based on that of the canarias (see Canary). The earliest known composition specifically entitled endecha is a refrain-song possibly by Alfonso de Troya, no.187 in the Cancionero Musical de Palacio (compiled c1505–20); others in the collection are called ‘lamentación’, a term which was later often synonymous with endecha. Pisador's Libro de música de vihuela (1552) contains two endechas. Salinas equated the endecha with the nenia in classical Latin. The endecha tradition survives in Judeo-Spanish communities and in the Canary Islands.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

G. de Morphy: Les luthistes espagnols du seizième siècle (Leipzig, 1902/R)

M. Querol Gavaldá: preface to Música barroca española, i: Polifonía profana, MME, xxxviii (1970)

M. Alvar: Endechas judeo-españolas (Madrid, 1972)

M. Frenk Alatorre: Endechas anónimas del siglo XVI (Madrid, 1972)

L. Siemens Hernández: ‘Las endechas canarias del siglo dieciséis y su melodía’, Homenaje a Don Augustín Millares Carbó II (Las Palmas, 1975), 307–10

V. de Lama: Dos endechas canarias indígenas: estado de la cuestión (Castilla, 1993)

JACK SAGE/SUSANA FRIEDMANN