(Sp., diminutive of seguida: ‘continuation’, ‘coda’).
A Spanish dance and song (the dance is properly spelt in the plural, as seguidillas).
Literary antecedents of the seguidilla may be detected as far back as the 15th century or possibly earlier, but it seems not to have existed as a piece of music until the 1590s when, as a provocative street song and dance accompanied by loud strumming of the guitar, its popularity began to surpass even that of the similarly outrageous zarabanda (see Sarabande, §1). Rough indications of this early music are given by J.C. Amat in his Guitarra española (1596). It was described by G. Correas, Cervantes and many others about 1600 as an exciting, salacious kind of plebeian couple-dance. Poets were soon cultivating it as a spicy coda (coplas plus seguida) to longer poems such as the Romance (ballad), verse forms like those in Table 1a predominating. More courtly versions were set by musicians from the 1620s onwards (examples in the Cancionero Musical de Sablonara, nos.8, 26, 67 etc.; see Cancionero). They are homorhythmic in two, three and four parts, in a syncopated triple time more characteristic of other 17th-century pieces than of the modern seguidilla, although the links are close enough to make it conceivable that the latter evolved from the early seguidilla. Passages in the opera Celos aun del aire matan (?1660) by Juan Hidalgo have been said to be based on seguidilla rhythms. By about 1700 the seguidillas used by Sebastián Durón in his zarzuelas are certainly closer to modern Castilian forms in their use of triple time, major tonality, off-beat initial notes and cadential melismas. Seguidillas were regularly sung and danced in the 18th-century Tonadilla as well as in the Sainete and Zarzuela of the 19th and 20th centuries. There is a useful illustration of the mid-18th century seguidilla in Pablo Minguet's El noble arte de danzar (Madrid, 1755) and of early 19th-century types in Sor's Seguidillas. Rhythms inspired in the seguidilla found their way into later music by such composers as Iradier, Pedrell, Albéniz and Glinka. Falla included an artistically heightened example of a seguidilla murciana in his Siete canciones populares españolas (1914) for piano. The famous seguidilla in Bizet's Carmen (Act 1, no.10) has, with some reason, been criticized as untypical, yet the triple time, sprightly rhythms and vocal melismas are not far removed from Spanish seguidillas of the 18th and 19th centuries.
The modern seguidilla is in moderately quick triple time, usually in a major key; the melody ordinarily begins on an off-beat and cadences with melismas comparable with those of other modern Spanish folksongs. It is set to strophes (coplas) of alternating long and short lines, the short lines normally rhyming. Over 20 different verse forms have been detected in Spain and Spanish America but quatrains of approximately 7575 syllables rhyming (sometimes in assonance only) abab or abcb have from the 16th century been regarded as cardinal. (See Spain, §II, 4.)
In performance, a brief introduction, often for guitar, is followed by a ‘false’ entry (salida) for the singer, taking a portion of the text. The main section, freely repeated and varied, consists of a further instrumental passage (falseta or interludio) followed by the vocal section proper (copla) (see Spain, §II, 6). The dance is executed by pairs, at times alternating, at times approaching and withdrawing in two lines. The dancers' arms and bodies move with restrained grace while the footwork responds animatedly to the rhythms of the guitar, castanets or tambourine (see illustration). One of the characteristics of the dance is a technique whereby the dancers ‘freeze’ (bien parado) at the end of each strophe while the instruments introduce the next phrase. There is some evidence (Echevarría Bravo, Capmany) that the Castilian seguidilla, especially the celebrated seguidillas manchegas (from La Mancha in south-east Castile), is the earliest and the most influential type, but among the many notable variants are the murcianas (from Murcia) and the quicker sevillanas (from Seville). The seguidilla gitana (‘gypsy seguidilla’), seguiriya or siguiriya, like the related playera, is more plangent and musically more complex. The siguiriya is generally considered one of the purest forms of cante hondo (see Flamenco) and hence is properly not a dance. The singer (cantaor) extemporizes within strict conventions to the accompaniment of a guitarist who similarly improvises on a set pattern. Its rhythms have been the subject of scholarly disagreement, arising perhaps from changes in the style of performance. Pedrell (at the turn of the century) detected a 3/4 time, Torner (in the 1930s) a combination of 3/8 and 3/4, García Matos (in the 1950s) 2/4 and 3/8, and Molina and Mairena (1963) proposed that shown in ex.1. S. Estébanez Calderón, in his quasi-documentary Escenas andaluzas (Madrid, 1847/R), named ‘seguidillas’ in a description of various Andalusian songs and dances which seemed to bear the stamp of flamenco performance. No earlier reference to the siguiriya gitana has come to light.
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G. Correas: Arte de la lengua española castellana (1625); ed. E. Alarcos García (Madrid, 1954), 445ff
F.A. Barbieri: ‘Danzas y bailes en España en los siglos XVI y XVII’, La ilustración española y americana, xliii–xliv (1887), 330
F. Rodríguez Marín: El Loaysa de ‘El celoso extremeño’ (Seville,1901)
F. Pedrell: Cancionero musical popular español (Valls, 1918–22, 3/1958)
E.M. Torner: ‘La canción tradicional española’, Folklore y costumbres de España, ed. F. Carreras y Candi (Barcelona, 1931–3), ii, 2–166, esp. 137ff
A. Capmany: ‘El baile y la danza’, ibid., 169–418, esp. 253
D.C. Clarke: ‘The Early Seguidilla’, Hispanic Review, xii (1944), 211–22
V.T. Mendoza: ‘México aún canta seguidillas’, Anuario de la Sociedad Folklórica de México, v (1944), 189–202
P. Echevarría Bravo: Cancionero musical popular manchego (Madrid, 1951)
F. Hanssen: ‘La seguidilla’, Anales de la Universidad de Santiago de Chile, cxxv (1909), 697–796; rev. in Estudios, i (1958), 133–246
M. García Matos: ‘Sobre algunos ritmos de nuestro folklore musical’, AnM, xv (1960), 101–31; xvi (1961), 27–54
R. Molina and A.Mairena: Mundo y formas del cante flamenco (Madrid, 1963)
M. Frenk Alatorre: ‘De la seguidilla antigua a la moderna’, Collected Studies in Honour of Américo Castro's Eightieth Year, ed. M.P. Hornik (Oxford,1965), 97–107
C. Magis: La lírica popular contemporánea (Mexico City, 1969), 477–502
D. Dumas: Chants flamencos/Coplas flamencas (Paris, 1973)
B. Jeffery: Introduction to Fernando Sor: Seguidillas for Voice and Guitar or Piano (London,1976)
J. Mercado: La seguidilla gitana: un esayo sociológico y literario (Madrid, 1987)
M. Esses: Dances and Instrumental Diferencias in Spain during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stuyvesant, NY, 1992)
J. Etzion: Preface to El cancionero de La Sablonara (London, 1996)
JACK SAGE/SUSANA FRIEDMANN