Villancicos y Danzas Criollas

De la Iberia Antigua al Nuevo Mundo (1550-1750)

La Capella Reial de Catalunya,

Hespèrion XXI,
Dirección Jordi Savall

INTRODUCTION :

One of the hallmarks of the cultural history of the Iberian peninsula is the absence of any clear-
cut division between the domains of popular culture on the one hand and ―intellectual‖ and
courtly production on the other. Another essential feature is that over time, as a result of
numerous ethnic, linguistic and cultural influences, Iberian culture achieved a degree of cross-
fertilisation that is virtually unknown in the rest of Europe. First of all, it was enriched by the Celtic
and Latin traditions, and later by the contributions of Islamic and Jewish culture.
These cross-cultural exchanges were broadened still further by the maritime and colonial
expansion of the 15th and 16th centuries, thanks to the contact with non-western civilisations in
Africa, Asia and the Americas. Although the building of empire is often extremely violent and
unconducive to cultural interaction, an already hybrid culture such as that of Iberia could hardly
resist its inherent tendency towards artistic exchange. Moreover, European composers were
fascinated to discover the distinctive musical languages of African and Amerindian cultures,
and in particular the sensual atmosphere evoked in their dance rhythms and the sonorous
qualities of their exotic languages.
In Villancicos y Danzas Criollas, Jordi Savall offers an amazing reflection of the resulting musical
cross-fertilisation, proving that this multicultural heritage was generated above all by the fruitful
encounter of three vibrant traditions – the Iberian, the African and the Ameroindian – mutually
influencing one another and driven largely by improvisation, rather than by a purely academic
approach. Mestissage and exchange are recurrent themes throughout this album, which
focuses on Villancicos, or ―carols‖ (both the sacred and the profane varieties) – themselves
examples of the cross-fertilisation of cultures and experiences – since this is a genre of popular
song with an implicit and almost dramatic dialogue between all social and ethnic groups. This
recording marks a magnificent crossroads of traditional 17th century music and dance forms:
Latin and South America, works by Iberian (Spanish and Portuguese) composers based on
Amerindian traditions and musical forms, alongside works by composers from the New World
who owed their musical training to Iberian musicians.

[…]

One of the most distinctive traits of the cultural history of the Iberian Peninsula is the lack of a
clear separation between the territories of popular culture and of courtly, ―highbrow‖ artistic
production. In most European countries the local elites, from the aristocratic troubadours of the
twelfth century to the early Renaissance courts of Italy and the Netherlands, sought to produce
an artistic discourse that would affirm their social distinction in regard to the ―rough‖ cultural
practices of the common people. Iberian artists, on the contrary, always tended to be
remarkably attentive to their own local roots, as if they felt the need to achieve a constant
balance between adopting–an often excelling in–the international trends of each period and at
the same time stressing a cultural identity rooted into the popular traditions of the Peninsula. As a
consequence, one can say that well into the nineteenth century each international style shared
by Spanish and Portuguese artists seems to have acquired immediately in their works a number
of idiomatic Iberian characteristics that can often be traced back to the specificity of popular
culture West of the Pyrenees. It is precisely this local reprocessing of even the most cosmopolitan
artistic movements and its close connection with a permanent interplay between all social levels
of artistic production that gives us such a strong feeling of historical continuity in the overall
evolution of the arts in the Peninsula.
Iberian culture, furthermore, has always been the result of an intense process of interaction
between different components. In the later stages of the Roman Empire, the Christian matrix
had been able to achieve a remarkably balanced integration of the Celtic, Latin and Vizigothic
traditions. Nevertheless, this unified Christian pattern was then exposed for almost eight centuries
to a permanent and fruitful dialogue with the Muslim and Hebrew cultures, due to the arrival of
the Arabs in the Peninsula in 711, leading to the establishment of such influential artistic centres
as Cordoba or Granada, and to the presence of a network of wealthy and highly cultivated
Jewish communities. The rich multiethnic, multilingual and multicultural society thus generated
experienced a degree of cross-cultural exchange virtually unknown elsewhere in Europe, which
not even the political unification of the late fifteenth century under Ferdinand and Isabella was
able to change significantly. In fact, the gradual building of a national state encompassing all of
the Peninsula with the exception of Portugal, the growing centralization of power in the hands of
the Crown, at the expense of the traditional privileges of the various regions, the forced
conversion and violent expulsion of Jews and Muslims and later the establishment of the
powerful apparatus of the Counter-Reformation in Spain and Portugal certainly had a profound
unifying impact. But the vast and complex mosaic of cultural identities that coexisted within the
ancient Hispania could not be artificially homogenized, and this perennial internal diversity and
interaction can be found in practically all aspects of Spanish and Portuguese artistic life of this
period.
The maritime and colonial expansion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries widened the
scope of this cross-cultural interaction even further, through the contact with a number of
different non-Western cultures, first in Africa, then in Asia and in the Americas. The building of a
colonial empire is always an extremely violent process, and the Spanish and Portuguese empires
were certainly no exception to this rule, with their brutal mixture of unbridled greed, religious
intolerance and mass-scale atrocities–hardly a fertile ground for creative artistic exchange of
any sort. And yet, even within such a general framework of aggression, exploitation and
acculturation, a culture already so hybrid at its origin as the Iberian heritage could not escape its
inbred tendency to interact with any other cultural traditions with which it came into contact.
Part of this cross-cultural artistic exchange was of course the result of a conscious effort on the
part of the colonial authorities, both secular and ecclesiastic, to produce a hybrid cultural
message that could in some way legitimate the Iberian domination in the eyes of the peoples of
the conquered territories, and build bridges between the various local cultures and the
Peninsular matrix imposed upon them. The first Jesuit missionaries in Brazil and Paraguay, for
instance, were already known to use, as a catechising tool, traditional Amerindian melodies to
which they adapted Christian doctrinal texts translated into the various local languages, and
Amerindian musicians were often called upon by the sixteenth-century vice-royal authorities of
Peru and Mexico to take part in church and state ceremonies, performing their own traditional
songs and dances, playing their own instruments and wearing their native garb.
This political strategy coexisted, nevertheless, with an enormous amount of sheer mutual curiosity
between the musicians of the various cultures involved in regard to each other’s musical
traditions. The reports of the missionaries and of the colonial administrators constantly mention
and praise the facility with which the African and Amerindian musicians learned the
fundamentals of European music theory, read musical notation, sang chant and polyphony and
could build and play practically all Western instruments, including the most technically
demanding amongst these. If for more than a century the Spanish and Portuguese authorities
were loath to admit that local musicians could also excel as composers and conductors, by the
second half of the seventeenth century the repertoire of the Latin American cathedrals was
already full of works by remarkable native, locally trained polyphonists, some of which even
received enough recognition to ascend to the position of chapel master, a function until then
strictly reserved for musicians hired in the Peninsula itself. If these local artists sought, first of all, to
affirm their identity by excelling in the art of the conquerors, and thus, to some extent, by
winning in the field of the enemy and with his very own weapons, they often produced a
number of works in which the European modal system, formal structures and contrapuntal
techniques were combined with their own melodic and rhythmic patterns, and most likely also
with their traditional performance practice in such aspects as vocal placement, ornamentation
and choice of instrumentation.
For the European composers, on the other hand, the characteristic musical idioms of the African
and Amerindian cultures were obviously fascinating, especially those associated with dance
rhythms that established a sensual atmosphere unknown to the rather puritanical Catholic
tradition of the Iberian Peninsula, then at the peak of the Counter-Reformation. Spanish and
Portuguese composers trained in the most austere polyphonic tradition of cathedral music were
soon gladly experimenting with some of those ―exotic‖ idioms and incorporating them in their
own compositions, especially in the lighter genre of the sacred villancico, in which the
combination of folk and erudite elements within the Peninsular context was already an
established practice. One must not forget, no matter how temptingly ―native sounding‖ these
works can be (or made to be), that they represent an European view of the traditions they try to
incorporate, and that such a view is naturally bound to misread or undervalue its object. Negro
and Native American characters are often portrayed in them as childish and irresponsible,
overindulging into wild partying, dancing, drinking and love-making, called upon to share the
Christian message but clearly unfit for self government, thus legitimising the colonial rule. But
there is no doubt, at the same time, that an authentic fascination with some of these non-
Western musical patterns can be perceived in many of these cross-cultural works by Iberian born
and trained authors. A middle ground of interaction between folk and art music, similar to the
one that had already existed within the Peninsula for centuries, was thus extended to this new,
expanded colonial sphere, incorporating many of the idiomatic features of African and Native
American music, through the combined approach of both the Amerindian and Negro musicians
trained in the Western polyphonic tradition and the European composers attracted by such new
sources of inspiration.
Part of the programme of the present recording consists of Iberian dances of popular origin
that by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries found their way into music manuscripts and
prints, at the hands of academically trained instrumental virtuosos and composers. We must
bear in mind that the highly elaborate versions in which these dances were thus written out are
in themselves but carefully revised examples of an art of virtuosic improvisation that was an
essential part of the Peninsular instrumental repertoire of this period. Not only were those versions
intended to be performed with plentiful and free recourse to the extensive grammar of
diminutions (glosas) and ornaments typified by such theorists as Diego Ortíz, Juan Bermudo or
Tomás de Santa María, but the dance patterns they incorporate, both melodic and rhythmic,
were certainly the object of many similar elaborations that instrumentalists were then expected
to improvise in all kinds of performance contexts.
Some of these dances were built on ostinato bass lines, such as the Folia, the Passamezzo
antico and moderno or the Romanesca. One of the many variants of the latter is the Danza del
hacha, so popular from the Middle Ages on that as late as in 1708 it was still inserted by the
Franciscan organist Antonio Martín y Coll (ca.1660-ca.1734) in one of his keyboard anthologies.
The Perra mora, a dance with a strong Arab flavour in its characteristic rhythmic design in 5/2
time, is given here in the version attributed to Pedro Guerrero and taken from the so-called
Medinaceli Songbook, compiled in the second half of the sixteenth century. Together with the
Pésame d’ello, the Zarabanda and the Chacona, it was mentioned by Miguel de Cervantes in
his novella La ilustre Fregona as one of the secular dances that were so fashionable in his time
that they even managed to ―squeeze through the door cracks into the convents of nuns‖ (―ha
intentado … entrar por los resquicios de las casas religiosas‖).
The improvisation on the Jota given here is not based on any of the versions of this Spanish
song preserved in European sources, bur rather on a setting taken from an early eighteenth-
century manuscript tablature for the five-course guitar found—and most likely originally
copied—in the Mexican province of Guanajuato (Códice Saldívar III). As to the Chacona, and
regardless of whether or not this can be considered the direct origin of the later Baroque
Chaconne, several sixteenth-century literary sources explicitly mention it as having just arrived
from the New World and having an irresistible exotic, sensual appeal. In the above-mentioned
novella, it is again Cervantes who gives us a colourful reference to this dance, in two quatrains
that even fit the metric pattern of its music: ―Let then come in all female and male nymphs that
wish to come in, as the dance of the Chacona is wider than the sea, this mestizo Indian of whom
Fame proclaims that she committed more sacrileges and insults than Aroba ever has.‖ (―Entren,
pues, todas las ninfas / y ninfos que han de entrar, / que el bayle de la Chacona / es mas
ancho que la mar. / Esta Indiana amulatada, de quien la fama pregona / que ha hecho más
sacrilegios / é insultos que hizo Aroba‖). And yet another great Spanish writer, Lope de Vega,
stated in 1618 that the Chacona had ―arrived from the Indies to Seville by mail‖ (―De las Indias à
Sevilla / ha venido por la posta‖). The version performed by Hesperion XXI, A la vida bona, is by
Juan Arañés, and was published in his Libro segundo de tonos y villancicos‖ (Rome, 1624).
Although the only other secular song in the programme, Ay que me río de amor, by Juan
Hidalgo (+ 1685), does not bear, at first sight, such a strong mark of a folk origin, its flowing
rhythmic pattern in triple meter and its catchy refrain (estribillo) clearly place it in the tradition of
the Iberian popular villancico. It is also, however, an excellent example of the courtly tono
humano, with its elegance and its refined craftsmanship, and the ability to combine these two
elements without any apparent contradiction is one of the most typical aspects of Spanish and
Portuguese music of this period, and the one that gives it its most recognizable identity within the
context of European art music. The same can be said, when we begin to discuss the sacred
villancicos, about Serafín que con dulce harmonía, by the great Catalan master Joan Cererols
(1618-1676). By listening to the delicate melodic phrasing and the refined contrapuntal texture
of this piece, clearly the work of a polyphonist as skilled as any other great European composer
of the mid-seventeenth century—and one obviously aware of the most cosmopolitan
developments of Baroque music occurring elsewhere in Europe—it may be hard to believe it is
based on the tune of Marizápalos, a charming but rather bawdy popular song more than two
centuries old, set by a number of Iberian composers of the time and used, namely, by the
seventeenth-century Brazilian poet Gregório de Matos for the setting of some new satirical lyrics
dangerously rubbing on the obscene.
The sacred Villancico (or Chanzoneta, as it was often called in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries) was indeed a particularly appropriate genre for all sorts of cross-cultural
experimentation. A kind of religious song in the vernacular performed within Mass or at the
Office Hour of Matins, it often involved a quasi-theatrical dialogue between characters
representative of all classes and ethnic groups within the Iberian and Latin American society and
tried to portray each of them using all the most obvious common places usually associated with
it in the popular imagination, including its specific linguistic usage of the Castilian or the
Portuguese language. A favourite liturgical context for this were the ceremonies of the Christmas
cycle, including the Matins of Christmas Eve itself, but starting already with the feast of the
Immaculate Conception, on December 8th, and ending only with the Epiphany, on January 6th.
Shepherds and peasants of all Iberian regions would speak in their regional languages or
dialects and talk about their cattle and crops, Gypsies would offer to do palm readings, and by
the same rule Amerindians and Africans would appear in the process of performing their
traditional songs and dances, all with the explicit purpose of going to Bethlehem and adoring
the newborn Christ. Purists such as the Neapolitan music theorist Domenico Pietro Cerone
complained bitterly against this genre, claiming that it transformed the house of God into a
theatre, but the Peninsular ecclesiastic authorities realized it was a powerful tool for motivating
church attendance on the part of the faithful, and by the late sixteenth century it was already a
generalized practice in all the great cathedrals of Spain, Portugal and the New World,
representing a large percentage of the output of the best composers of sacred music of this
period.
Besides Cererols’ Serafín, one of the most lyrical Christmas villancicos of this programme is
Desvelado dueño mío, a gentle cradle-song metaphorically addressed to the infant Jesus in his
crib. Its author was Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco (1644-1728), a Spaniard who came to the New
World in 1667, in the retinue of the new Viceroy of Peru, the Count of Lemos, and who not only
became chapel master of the cathedral of Lima but went on to compose the first opera written
in the Americas, La purpura de la rosa (1701). Un juguetico de fuego also dwells on yet another
metaphor frequently used in connection with the subject of the Nativity: the shining stars above
Bethlehem seen as a display of magnificent fireworks.
When a Villancico involved African characters speaking in an early Creole of Castilian or
Portuguese, sometimes mixed with scattered words in any of the Bantu or Yoruba languages, it
was usually designated as Negro, Negrilla or Guineo, and it tended to incorporate the strong
rhythmic patterns of a percussive nature that were seen as typical of African dances, as well as
antiphonal and responsorial effects between soloists and tutti frequently associated with the
ensemble vocal performances within that same tradition. The earliest notated example of this
subgenre can already be found in the Ensaladas of Mateu Fletxa the Elder (1482-1553), compo
sed in the first half of the sixteenth century but published in 1581 in Prague by his nephew, Mateu
Fletxa the Younger. It is from one of these—La Negrina—that comes the negrilla San Sabeya
gugurumbé, which served as a model for many later examples by sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century Old and New World composers. In a similar vein we can hear two other pieces: A siolo
flasiquiyo (a Creole adaptation of the Spanish words ―Señor Francisco‖), by Juan Gutiérrez de
Padilla (+ 1664), who became chapel master of the Mexican cathedral of Puebla in 1629, and
Antonya, Flasiquiya, Gasipá (or ―Antonia, Francisca, Gaspar‖ in a similar linguistic
transformation), by the Portuguese composer Fr. António da Madre de Deus, who served as
master of the chamber music of King Alphonse VI of Portugal from 1660 to 1668. The latter work
contains a particularly amusing plot, as the characters involved, who have fallen asleep after a
long evening of drinking and dancing, now wake each other up in order to go to Bethlehem on
time to pay homage to Jesus, one of them repeatedly complaining, at regular intervals, of a
terrible headache from having drunk too much.
The same kind of cross-cultural interaction occurred between the Iberian models and the
influence of Amerindian music. Gutiérrez de Padilla’s predecessor as chapel master of the
Puebla cathedral, the Portuguese Gaspar Fernandes (+ 1629), composed several villancicos in a
mixture of Castilian and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec empire, amongst which
Tleycantimo choquiliya, clearly based on a local Indian dance, and another musician
associated with the Puebla school, Juan García de Céspedes (+ 1678), left us a hilarious
Christmas Villancico, Ay que me abraso (literally, ―I am burning‖) written on the characteristic
rhythm of another Mexican dance, the Guaracha, and in which the characters portrayed are
panting and sighing because of the excessive heat generated by their emotions at the sight of
the newborn Christ.
Two further fascinating pieces of Amerindian influence come from the Viceroyalty of Peru. One
of them is a processional Hymn in the Quechua language of Peru, Hancpachap cussicuinin,
most likely written by a native composer and later published by the Franciscan scholar Juan
Pérez Bocanegra at the end of his treatise Ritual formulario, of 1631, thus becoming the first
example of polyphony printed in the Americas. The second one is the closest thing to an
―ethnomusicological‖ record of the Amerindian music of Peru to have reached us from the
colonial period: a traditional Cachua, or Christmas song, collected already at the end of the
eighteenth century by the Bishop of the Peruvian diocese of Trujillo, Baltazar Martínez
Compañon, and here used as the ground for an instrumental improvisation that in some way
matches the improvised Jota discussed above. In both cases, whether the music in question is of
Iberian or Amerindian origin, we are thus once again reminded of the fact that this multicultural
musical heritage developed by the triangular interaction of the Peninsula, Africa and the New
World was generated, first of all, by the actual encounter of all three living traditions, mutually
influencing each other in the context of a performance practice largely dominated by
improvisation rather than by a purely academic approach.
RUI VIEIRA NERY
University of Évora