(Sp., diminutive of estribo: ‘stirrup’, ‘support’).
The refrain of certain Spanish ‘fixed forms’ such as the zéjel, estribote, cantiga, canción and villancico; since these lyric forms were usually sung, estribillo also refers to the melody of the refrain (see Estrambote and Villancico). The first datable use of the term occurs in Gonzalo Correas's Gramática griega (Valladolid, 1627), where it appears several times meaning ‘refrains of old songs’ (‘estribillos de cantares viejos’), and once as ‘estribillos de villanzicos’. Lope de Vega also used the root estribo to mean refrain. In the music collection Romances y letras a tres vozes (c1620), the term vuelta (return) occurs more frequently than estribillo to indicate refrain; later cancioneros use both estribo and estribillo. Although the term is believed to be a diminutive of the Spanish estribo, it has also been suggested (see Malkiel) that it may be related to the old Spanish words trebejo (diversion, play), trebejar (to play, to frolic) and their old Galician-Portuguese counterparts trebelho and trebelhar (to leap, to dance). That etymology, if the true one, suggests that a dance pattern repeated at certain intervals while singing could be connected to the origins of vocal refrains. The manuscript E-E X.iii.3 (copied before 1248), describing the ceremonial of the crowning of the kings of Castile, states that in church, after the Alleluia, ‘virgins who knew how to sing came, sang a cantiga and made its trebejos’; two illuminations depict the virgins dancing and playing instruments. The Cancionero de Baena, an anthology of Castilian verse (1445; ed. J.M. Azaceta, Madrid, 1966), contains a Galician-Portuguese poem by Macias (fl 1340–70) in which the term trebello in the last verse of each strophe refers to apparently well-known two-line refrains that follow each strophe; the poet states that he sang the trebellos.
See also Refrain.
J. Amador de los Rios: Historia crítica de la literatura española (Madrid, 1861–5/R1969 with introduction by D. Alonso), iv, 543
T. Navarro: Métrica española (Syracuse, NY, 1956)
Y. Malkiel: ‘Spanish Estribillo “Refrain”: its Proximal and Distal Etymologies’, Florilegium hispanicum: Medieval and Golden Age Studies Presented to Dorothy Clotelle Clarke, ed. J.S. Geary (Madison, WI, 1983), 29–43
For further bibliography see Villancico.
ISABEL POPE/EMILIO ROS-FÁBREGAS